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Consumer Ethanol Appliance Promised By Year's End
Newscloud brings us news of a startup called E-Fuel promising to ship a home-brew ethanol plant, the size of a washer-dryer, for under $10,000 by the end of this year. We've had plenty of discussions about $1/gal. fuel — these guys want to let you make it at home. The company says it plans to develop a NAFTA-enabled distribution network for inedible sugar from Mexico at 1/8th the cost of trade-protected sugar, to use as raw material for making ethanol. A renewable energy expert from UC Berkeley is quoted: "There's a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It's entirely possible that they've done it, but skepticism is a virtue."
Have you ever stopped to think that the transportation systems constructed to deal with a hypothetical "ethanol infrastructure" will be powered by the same fuel that they are carrying? Even if we have to transport Ethanol by fossil-fuel-based means in the short-term, we'll still be a good bit better off than we currently are.
Similarly, any sort of ship, truck, or train carrying Ethanol is likely going to be prone to the same sort of corrosion you mention. Solutions are being developed, and there are several alternatives to deal with the problem. We won't be able to start pumping Ethanol through our oil pipelines tomorrow, although we can build new pipelines and retrofit existing ones to cope with the new challenges. (Plastic pipes come to mind!)
Although the "ingredients" to produce "renewable" Ethanol are biologically sourced, they are not necessarily derived from food-based agricultural products.
Corn-based Ethanol, which the US agricultural lobby has been pushing, is laughably inefficient, and almost certainly will never reach the break-even point. This will also inevitably bring up the ugly monster of corn subsidies...
Other crops are a bit better. Algae can produce up to 500-2000 times as much usable ethanol per square acre than Corn, although the infrastructure demands are also a good bit higher.
Similarly, cellulose-based plant matter can be used to produce Ethanol. Cellulose is found in stalks, stems, grasses, wood, and cannot be digested by humans. One proposal suggests reprocessing household/commerical waste into ethanol as an alternative to other recycling methods, as cellulose-based matter composes up to 40% of landfill waste by volume. However, the jury's still out on whether or not this method can be done economically.
<troll>Also, I've noticed that conservatives are using that "stupid stupid stupid" line quite a bit these days. Is that part of the handbook?</troll>
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Ethanol can be derived from a multitude of sources, most of which are not used for human consumption, and many of which would not result in destruction of sensitive ecosystems. For example, if we invested in cellulose-sourced ethanol production we could make huge amounts of ethanol fuel without using much more land at all. Humans only eat a small fraction of the mass of a corn stalk--the rest gets cut down, ploughed under, burned, etc...there is more there than required to maintain soil fertility.
On the biodiesel side, there are waste products ranging from plant-based industrial lubricants to french fry grease that could be recycled into fuel, that now are just thrown away.
Aren't the "Reuse and Recycle" R's still important anymore? Ethanol is taken from food sources and results in local, regional and, as it increases in popularity, global increases in food prices as well as predictable food shortages. The current demand for food commodities to be used in biofuels at this point is absolutely miniscule and has no substantial impact on food prices whatsoever. The current problem is 99 percent due to hoarding by large nations like China and India. Most producers of southeast asia are under export bans right now--they are behaving like they always have, employing knee-jerk, ham-fisted centrally-planned measures in reaction to global markets. It temporarily patches over a short term crisis but it magnifies the long term/global problem. Besides the inefficiencies of transporting the raw materials, the finished product CANNOT be piped due to the inherent water in the ethanol rusting/corroding the pipes. So, the only means of transportation is truck, train or barge -- fossil fuel transportation systems. Except that you are wrong--ethanol-blended petrol is already transported bia pipeline, and there are proposals to construct ethanol pipelines alone strategic routes. Also, a sizeable chunk of crude used in the US is delivered via ocean-going tankers that consume several gallons to the mile in fossil fuel. Local distribution of gasoline is already via truck too in most cases.
Then there is the matter of all these studies assuming that for some reason the equipment involved in the manufacture and distribution of biofuels would never run on biofuels themselves. Would it not make sense to employ delivery trucks that ran on biodiesel to deliver the biodiesel?
I really don't see wha tthe big deal is. An energy source is an energy source, whether or not it is edible or comes from a plant or is dug out of the ground or from splitting atoms. Seems to me that biofuel is much more benign than some of the alternatives, so why not explore all options? Ultimately, though the source of energy is an important consideration, what is most important is EFFICIENCY. I don't think ethanol is quite there yet (biodiesel is closer), but I see no reason why we shouldn't pursue the technology further. Any means of safely and efficiently extracting energy for useful work is good.