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Using Winemaking Waste For Making Fuel
Tator Tot writes "Grape pomace, the mashed up skins and stems left over from making wine and grape juice, could serve as a good starting point for ethanol production, according to a new study (from the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry). Due to growing interest in biofuels, researchers have started looking for cheap and environmentally sustainable ways to produce such fuels, especially ethanol. Biological engineer Jean VanderGheynst at the University of California, Davis, turned to grape pomace, because winemakers in California alone produce over 100,000 tons of the fruit scraps each year, with much of it going to waste."
Who knew a process by which the ultimate goal is to produce ethanol would be a good starting point to produce ethanol?
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
But that might be challenging to collect in an efficient manner.
Folks have been making pomace brandys, like grappa for centuries. This suggestion is just to put it into an engine rather than drinking it, which many people who have tasted it would approve of.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can, fermenting it and making alcohol. Nor am I against flushing all toilet and livestock waste into giant fermentation tanks to capture the methane energy.
However, I don't think this is a "solution" to the problem of energy in the future. It will produce some, but not all of our needs, and there will be significant energy inputs required to make it work.
I am more interested in throwing all of our spare money, time and energy into long-term solutions, like cleaner nuclear reactors, better fuel cells, solar sails and even personal methane harvesters.
Futurist Traditionalism
so the 100,000 tons, times 2000 pounds per ton, divided by 13 (as per article only half the yield of dry corns 26 lbs. per gallon ethanol), gives 15 million gallons of ethanol. the USA uses 380 million gallons of gasoline per day.
I'm not drunk of my ass, what you smell is the car....
Why waste it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomace_brandy
the the statuesque rules . If you can make it work great. but no one else cares.
There is no way to ever produce enough to replace gasoline. Right now 40% of our corn stock is, by federal law, ground up and turned into Ethanol, and it manages to offset about 15% of gasoline. We could turn our entire yearly production of grown food into ethanol production and still fall short. It isn't a sustainable technology, no matter how much waste, byproduct, etc., is produced. There simply isn't enough land to make it. Oil took millions of years to create, and was formed from the organic waste of the entire planet. We'll have depleted that million-plus year stock in just under 100 years.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Very old technology. Tastes like nice jet fuel. See Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Or. for a good example.
The must must be distilled to make grappa, the swill that kept me sane in Sicily.
Waste? Isn't that where the grappa comes from????
That's routine for anything that's a fermentation process. California's biggest cheese factory has a sizable ethanol output. Anheuser-Busch is trying to find some way to turn brewery waste into something useful.
It's a marginal business, You start with huge volumes of soggy biomass and try to extract something useful without using too much energy. Then you're left with a smaller amount of soggy biomass that's even less useful than what came in. That has to go somewhere.
There's a vast amount of agricultural waste available at low, low prices if you can find some way to use it. Straw, bagasse (the leftover part of sugar cane), nut hulls, brewers's mash, corn husks, cobs, and stalks - it's out there in bulk. The hope of cellulostic ethanol conversion was to convert some of the cellulose into fuel. So far, it doesn't pay, and it's hard to even get out more energy than goes in. Work continues.
You can add in regular grape juice pulp to that mix. Just image all the over ripe fruit that your average super market throws out a week and add that in as well. The fundamental problem is we designed our society to run on casually wasting resources. Nature wastes nothing, in effect we waste everything. Traditionally we had one source for waste, the dump. Nature recycles all waste while recycling is blow off largely as a hyppie/tree hugger invention. The two best sources for methane are chicken and pig waste so what do we do? Most of it ends up in our rivers and streams while chicken and hog farmers are living just above minimum wage. Most chicken and hog farms could power dozens and in some cases hundreds of houses. The broken down waste could fertilize fields instead of petroleum. We worry about what gets us through the next 24 hours and ignore out kids and grandkids. If we worried more about the next generations most of our problems would vanish in a single generation. Our current society can't last more than a generation or two, the math simply doesn't work, so most of us will live to see it collapse unless we change. Change isn't a matter of if but when. Forget iPads in a generation or two you'll be worried about food and water. Look at it this way, in the past we kept a year's worth of grain in reserve. We now have three months and we just got hit with a drought. A large percentage of the ground water is polluted already and fracking will pollute a lot of what's left. Project this just ten years into the future and you'll be waiting on the corn harvest to buy a bag of corn chips and you'll be enjoying toilet to tap because hey it's all you can get other than bottled water that costs more than gasoline.
Since they don't provide any useful facts, allow me to insert pseudo facts to fill the gap.
First, the words 'especially ethanol' ring a bit hollow due to the low fuel efficiency and great cost in terms of equipment, raw materials, etc relative to petroleum. Reserve the word 'especially' for biodiesel- a much more promising but still long term project.
Now if we start with 100k tons of grape stuff and push our imaginations to the extreme, let's suppose that will support 100k vehicles. That would be 2% of the vehicles in California (pseudo facts, remember). The land, plant and equipment to process the grape stuff will cost $23M (partly offset by generous federal grants but encumbered with additional costs for environmental studies, protests and court hearings). Assuming that the equipment works and the private enterprise receiving the grant money hasn't absconded with the money or cut corners on costs, we now have one hundred thousand vehicles operating for, say, five years at an annual fuel cost of $__________ . What's the point of doing the math when the numbers are fake?
Ennywhey it looks like a boondoggle to me. Only the Governor's friend who gets the grant money will be happy with the results.
...omphaloskepsis often...
No shit guys. It's called Grappa, and the Italians have been doing it for centuries:
My wife says it tastes like jet fuel, but it's an acquired taste. :-P
Did someone think they've discovered something new?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Actually you do care even if you don't drive ... unless you are a farmer.
If you are not a farmer/rancher just how do you think food gets to the city and suburbs? Or manufactured goods? Trains *may* get things to a regional distribution center but from there to local stores it is pretty much heavy trucks which use diesel. Petroleum costs are reflected in the price of food and manufactured goods.
FWIW, the Pickens Plan is interesting in that these heavy trucks could be converted to natural gas. Their routes and fueling is somewhat centralized so the necessary infrastructure would be easier to implement compared to autos. Supposedly these trucks are currently responsible for 15% of our petroleum consumption.
When my high school physics teacher said science was an enabler, I never expected this.
I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can ...
Is it really waste? Isn't this stuff used as fertilizer or animal feed?
We may need to offset the ethanol benefits with the need to turn to big chemical and big agriculture for more fertilizer and feed.
It's the perfect combination of drinking and driving!
Even if you are only getting half the alcohol as corn this is a waste product so it's not taking anything away from the food supply. This would offset 50,000 tons of corn just for California alone. Remember grapes are commonly grown all along both the east and west coasts from California to Washington state and from Florida to coastal Maine. The total supply has to be several times that. We're talking several hundred thousand tons that would offset easily a 100,000 tons of corn. The scary thing is I just did the math and 14 million tons of corn are used for ethanol. Recycling waste is important but it won't offset 1% of the corn used now. This isn't because corn is superior, it's a poor source of ethanol, but the massive corn subsidies mean the only practical source for ethanol is corn. Sorghum is a better sugar crop, it grows on poor soil and uses little water. Replace all the corn being grown for ethanol with sorghum and you use less water and less fertilizer and probably get twice the ethanol. Sadly there's no massive sorghum lobby. Other waste sources are maple sugar production, honey production and apple pulp and peels as well as other fruit waste. We can probably replace 10% of the corn from other sources then if we switch to better sources like Sorghum we could double the ethanol output without reducing the food supply. When they say biofuels are no replacement they ignore the fact that the northern states can grow sugar beets as well as some types of sorghum. Increase flowering plants and raise more bees and the honey can be used for biofuels. With some creativity and effort we could replace half the petroleum with either ethanol or methane based bio-gas. Increase efficiency by a 100% which is possible and we no longer need fossil fuels. This ignores electric cars running off wind and solar. We can fix the mess we just need the will.
Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce. I don't understand why environmentalists would back corn being used for making fuel. There is nothing as destructive to the environment as depriving plants and animals of habitat (place and space to live). All those corn fields take up huge areas of land. I once saw a documentary about wolves establishing them selves in the area around Chernobyl. The wolves were thriving despite the high radiation levels. Without humans taking up land for agriculture an entire ecosystem established quickly, overcoming a nuclear disaster. And it makes sense, for the first time all those little animals in the ecosystem had the space and place to live. Where ever we plant corn, pretty much, nothing else can live. Nuclear energy and electric cars are the future. Nuclear energy production takes up very little space, and is by far, less destructive of the environment. Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce.
I wonder if putting ethanol gas in a Still would let me boil off the good stuff at the right time. Might be a quikker way to likker than a run of cornmeal and sugar.
Popcorn Sutton will show you how to do it.
We call it "grappa", half nation runs on it.
I approve!
Who modded this down? Seriously, I'm taking notes.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
ummm that's Grappa, aka Palinka, aka Bagasse, etc.
It's the most commonly known manner of producing hard-alcohol in Europe.
It has already been done with a product called Vin Diesel. Sort of ;)
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Grape skins are valuable in human food products. We should not allow food produts to be used to power vehicles but insist that the fields used to grow food stay dedicated to produce food and no other tasks. Food prices are already a disaster. The last thing our nation needs is to convert food crops to fuel and then have the corporations shipping that fuel offshore.
Enough said.
Italian for gasoline!
.... and they call it Grappa.
Popcorn Sutton had too much pride to try and re-nature denatured ethanol, and routinely badmouthed those who did so. He made his moonshine the old-fashioned way, from corn.
...I don't know... Grappa ...something I would prefer.
Highly flamable but oh so much better tasting!
In South Africa there is already a company that turns the "press cake" waste that stays behind after making grape seed oil into logs that act as firewood: http://www.envirolog.co.za/about.html
It combines many of the benefits of both good firewood and charcoal. I guess it helps that we have a culture that loves to cook things on fires.
They all say Americans are the worlds best businessmen. But they are nothing compared to the French who have convinced the whole world that their spoiled milk and rotten grape juice is gourmet food.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wine Waste+Process=Ethenol or Wine Waste+Pigs=Bacon
The per litre/kilo outcome is probably similar
My vote Bacon
You can't get all of the gasoline out through distillation, Everclear is probably cheaper than buying the gas and distilling out the ethanol anyways.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
And it's nice when I can get it in the liquor store.
Here in Spain, a country with a millenary wine tradition, we distille this grapes waste and turn it into a neuronal devastating alcohol beverage: Zurracapote. Parental Advisory: Do not drink Zurracapote if you are over 24 years old. Liver damage risk.