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."

Comments

You dont say?

[Aranykai]

Who knew a process by which the ultimate goal is to produce ethanol would be a good starting point to produce ethanol?

Re:You dont say?

[thatotherguy007]

Isss'a mirrracl! *hic*

Re:You dont say?

[niftydude]

Who knew a process by which the ultimate goal is to produce ethanol would be a good starting point to produce ethanol?

True that. I'm far more impressed by the people who realized that you could make dresses from wine making waste.

Re:You dont say?

[jimbolauski]

Just notice that a lot of potential energy is wasted and literally goes down the drain at every household. But it's partly because energy still is too cheap compared to the cost to utilize the energy from waste.

There is very little alcohol that goes down the drain 90% of alcohol it broken down by the liver and only 5% goes down the drain. On top of that there is less then 0.1% alcohol in the urine of an intoxicated person.

Re:You dont say?

[nitehawk214]

Just notice that a lot of potential energy is wasted and literally goes down the drain at every household. But it's partly because energy still is too cheap compared to the cost to utilize the energy from waste.

There is very little alcohol that goes down the drain 90% of alcohol it broken down by the liver and only 5% goes down the drain. On top of that there is less then 0.1% alcohol in the urine of an intoxicated person.

Bear Grylls will reclaim his wasted alcohol.

Grappa

[donscarletti]

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.

Re:Grappa

[nospam007]

"...rather than drinking it, which many people who have tasted it would approve of."

Then you never had a good one.
  Try one of these:

http://www.wine-searcher.com/find/grappa+rossi+d+asiago+muscat+rosa+italy/1/-/-/r

Re:Grappa

[king neckbeard]

but how can I look through my windshield if my car is blind?

Re:Grappa

[tinkerton]

On the other hand the good ones tend to cheat by starting from the whole grape. the rule is 'The wetter the better' . Talking about the pomace here.

Re:Grappa

[Psicopatico]

My uncle has a bunch of vines and he makes wine by himself, and then he makes some grappa.
Granted, it's not a lot of stuff and he makes that for his own pleasure only.

It happened when I was a lot younger I was there while he was distilling some grappa.
He used the "old" direct-flame method, and a few minutes after the grappa started dripping out of the alembic I saw him grabbing the can and throwing the content away.
Noticing my curiosity he promptly explained: "That was pure alchool. You have always to throw the beginning and the end or it may poison who drinks.".

So, by using the same method of distillation, the methanol with a sufficent grade of purity for use in a combustion engine would be somewhat limited in quantity.
I mean yes, grappa can easily get 70%+ alcool in volume, but that's not all methanol.

Not a practical solution to our energy problem

[hessian]

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.

Re:Not a practical solution to our energy problem

[rossdee]

solar sails ???

I think you meant solar cells

Solar sails may work as a slow method of transportation in space (Wind from the Sun) but are not going to work on earth.
(Or even for interstellar probes, even if some think thats a Cazy Eddie idea)

Re:Not a practical solution to our energy problem

[SB2020]

Maybe he was thinking of SkySails. Massive kites attached to cargo ships
Or, yeah, solar cells. Massively increased efficiencies for solar have been promised to be 2 years away for like the last 10 years...

Re:Not a practical solution to our energy problem

[robthebloke]

Or maybe he meant Solar sails?

drop in the bucket

[iggymanz]

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.

Re:drop in the bucket

[Nyder]

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.

Ya? and that means 15 Million less gallons of gas that would be used.

It's a start, combined with other things, would help make a dent in the usage of gas/oil.

I guess you want to wait till gas is $20 a gallon before we start using other fuels? Maybe you do. I don't drive, so I don't buy gas, so really, I don't care much, but it's this attitude that everything has to be big to be effective that is annoying.

Much like no one is going to make a WoW beater, no on is going to come up with a solution that can totally get rid of the use of gas/oil. But we can find a bunch of renewable resources that together can help a lot.

Re:drop in the bucket

[gman003]

And? It's essentially free, other than the cost of the actual process. Free raw materials might make it economically viable *now*.

No single solution is going to solve our problems. Even biofuel in general isn't a complete solution. But do the math for this, plus dozens of other types of biofuels, plus geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, wind, solar, hydrogen fuel cells, and potentially nuclear fission and fusion. See if those can replace coal, oil and natural gas.

Re:drop in the bucket

[kkwst2]

Oh come on.
1) as pointed out above, this is less than a drop in the bucket. I would not call that a dent.
2) It is completely unclear if this would generate any net energy. A case can be made that many of these more inefficient biofuel processes consume more energy than they produce. How does that help.
3) Most importantly, things like this distract from the ONE thing that has a real chance at reducing our dependance on oil, which is nuclear. Solar and wind might help a little, and maybe biofuels can help with energy storage, but what is described here is not a significant part of any real solution.

You can talk about little steps here and there, but it is magical thinking. If we want to get serious about reducing gas usage (I'm not getting into whether this is the right thing, that's a whole separate topic), then nuclear has to be a huge part of the solution.

Re:drop in the bucket

[Freddybear]

It won't stay free if it's an economically viable source of energy. Just like restaurants which used to pay to dispose of used fry oil now charge for it.

Re:drop in the bucket

[Gertlex]

This is too small of a fix to be worthwhile, most likely. 15 million gallons... per YEAR is 0.01% of 380 million * 365 days.

I have to imagine there are so many alternative things to invest in that would make more than a 0.01% dent.

Re:drop in the bucket

[macbeth66]

I don't drive, so I don't buy gas, so really, I don't care much...

Ah, but you see, you should care. Regardless of how much fuel you, personally, use, fuel contributes to the cost of everything you buy. Those Birkenstocks don't get delivered to your local store by storks. Even if they were, you'd have to feed them. That food has to be harvested... blah, blah, blah... I'm boring myself now, so I'm gonna go for a little drive.

Re:drop in the bucket

[grcumb]

Thank you for doing the math and confirming it.

Agreed. When it comes to wine making, scientific correctness should always be our first priority. The moment I saw this headline, I thought, "I hope someone can Bacchus up on this!"

/me ducks and runs....

Re:drop in the bucket

[Neil Boekend]

I look forward to your explanation of how you plan to power your car with nuclear power. I really, really hope you're not going to claim we should put reactors in cars.

That concept is old. Boy am I glad they never put it into production.

Re:drop in the bucket

[Larryish]

There is one gas station here in town that sells pure gasoline, no ethanol or other additives.

The price is typically 10 cents per gallon over the price of ethanol fuel, but I buy it anyway.

For small engines, you don't want anything but the good stuff.

Ethanol isn't sustainable

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable

[wierd_w]

The problem here is that you are only counting food biomass, and extrapolating a definitive conclusion from it that ethanol in general cannot provide 100% fuel requirements.

Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.

Even if cellulosic ethanol cannot be efficiently industrialized, there re other processes to convert carbohydrates into combustible fuels, such as gassification. (Essentially, burning inefficiently in the pesence of water to create carbon monoxide and hydrogen gasses, the combination of which can be catalytically converted into methane, or burned directly as syngas as-is. Some of the stored energy is lost as heat in the reaction, but the same is true of yeast process ethanol, where energy is lost to the mtabolic requirements of the yeast organisms.)

Efficient collection of domestic lawn waste for fuel synthesis kills 2 birds with one stone, as lawn waste is a considerable component of average consumer refuse, which causes many problems for landfills and waste management efforts. Removing it from the waste stream for fuel use is a no brainer, but we simply don't do it.

Discounting this surce of biomass from inclusion in the ethanol calculation is disingenuous.

Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable

[pnot]

There is no way to ever produce enough to replace gasoline.

Who are you arguing with? Neither TFA nor TFS makes that claim. It's a description of a technique for turning a particular class of waste into a useful product, not a turnkey solution to the energy crisis.

Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable

[Darkness404]

Ethanol is bad for engines. While chances are it isn't going to destroy your modern car's engine, good luck getting your chainsaw, mower, etc. or if you store fuel long-term (backup generators, etc.)

Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable

[girlintraining]

Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.

I think you flunked earth sciences. The lawn needs those things; It composts and reduces to fertilizer for the next year. Same with leaves and such. The reason our crop yields are falling and most of our cities are basically slabs of clay with a few inches of top soil over the top is because we're constantly trimming, mowing, and raking away all the nutrients that the plants need to survive and replacing it with pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and all manner of chemicals that are dangerous to us.

I'm not discounting the source: I'm simply pointing out it's already marked for a different use, courtesy mother nature. Ethanol is a supportive technology, like solar, wind, or hydroelectric. But it can't replace the fuels in our vehicles because there's no way to produce enough of it to completely offset oil. In fact, all the alternative energy technologies that are commercially feasible can't do it. It's called energy density, and so far we haven't been able to find a fuel that has both high energy density and a low conversion cost that can match dead dino fuel. Some of them have reached the point where they may be useful for daily commutes in an urban environment, but there is nothing yet created that I can put 80 pounds of it in my car and drive 400 miles, and then stop, wait for 5 minutes to refuel, and then continue. The few technologies that offer decent conversion efficiency and energy density usually have significant drawbacks. Natural gas, for example, has to be compressed to several hundred PSI in order to get a reasonable amount into a car. At those pressures, a hairline fracture in the tank will not only destroy the car, but anyone within a hundred feet of it... I'm not sure I like the idea of riding a bomb to work every day. That's just one example; there are many others, but they all suffer from the same physics problem: Energy density and conversion efficiency.

Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable

[mcrbids]

Ethanol is bad for engines. While chances are it isn't going to destroy your modern car's engine, good luck getting your chainsaw, mower, etc. or if you store fuel long-term (backup generators, etc.)

How does stuff like this get upvoted? No, ethanol is not "bad for engines", any more than gas, or butanol, or diesel is!

It's true that ethanol can do some minor damage (such as dissolve some carburetor seals) in cars not made to take ethanol, but all cars sold in the USA for the past few decades won't have a problem at all with ethanol. And it's not that ethanol is particularly bad, it's simply that soft rubber gaskets were originally designed with the assumption that ONLY gasoline was going to be used and so didn't bother to check for other types of decomposition. Further, this problem is only seen with long-term use, not occasional use.

I've used ethanol mix fuel many times in my Briggs and Stratton lawn mower as far back as the 90s, never had a problem. Also, ALL gasoline will go bad after a while, (often just a few months) due to evaporation, oxidation, and biological decomposition (Yes, there are bacteria that eat gasoline) among other things. You can use a fuel stabilizer such as Sta-Bil to make your gas last longer.

Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable

[wierd_w]

Naw, didn't fail earth sciences. Just pointing out what is routinely done. (People routinely discarded lawn waste before the widespread use of mulching mowers. I remember the 1980s quite well.)

The issue is indeed what you state; density. You can convert biomass into syngas very easily, just seal the canister and heat it with a solar concetrator. But the resulting syngas has only half the energy density of natural gas.

You can take the syngas, add more energy, and get methane.

You can take the methane, add more energy and processing, and get gasoline.

The problem is that the latter two steps require energy. (Even using solar to provide it using things like concentrators imposes very pernicious restrains.)

Syngas could power electric power plants though with the minimal first stage processing. It would actually be cleaner to burn than gassified coal, due to the absence of radio isotopes, and sulfur compounds. Supply a pipeline, and its golden. (This way you avoid the dangers of liquified petrolium gas storage.)

Collecting city leaflitter, unrecycleable paper and plastic products (diapers, etc.), limb trimmings, and wet municaple garbage, and running it through a gassification plant for power generation frees up other oil commodities. (These are items that end up in landfills. The gassification plant does not produce charcoal. It produces mineral ash, which is a salable product, though it may have problems with heavy metals.)

By generating energy that way for electrical power, you suppliment what you can get from pure solar. If you can get ubiquitous electrical power from the AC mains, then synthetic pretroleum production starts looking viable. (Petroleum for transportation, not power generation, since we already have that.)

The question is if enough syngas can be produced to power a major city's power grid, from that city's waste stream. That I don't know.

It is called Grappa

[Anonymous Coward]

Very old technology. Tastes like nice jet fuel. See Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Or. for a good example.

Routine byproduct

[Animats]

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.

Re:Routine byproduct

[wierd_w]

Not true. You can do it if you don't mind working with potentially toxic gasses.

Syngas, for instance.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas

basically, load the soggy biomass into a crucible furnace, seal it down tight, point a solar concentrator at it, collect the gas. Profit.

Is it really waste? Fertilizer? Animal Feed?

[perpenso]

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.

Re:Is it really waste? Fertilizer? Animal Feed?

[starfishsystems]

I'm glad to see you make this point. Grape pomace with its associated yeast lees is an excellent material for composting, being ideally friable and high in available energy. It accelerates the composting of less suitable materials, and goes a long way in encouraging a healthy compost ecosystem. I'm not sure that it's stable enough to recommend as animal feed in general, but I'm no expert. If it's near to hand and can be consumed within a few days, there could be value in it, though it would ideally be put in an enclosed feeder, since set out in the open it will sour quickly and give rise to impressive quantities of fruit flies.

How about that!

[wiegeabo]

It's the perfect combination of drinking and driving!

Look at it another way

[Grayhand]

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.

We have it here in Italy

[r1348]

We call it "grappa", half nation runs on it.

Re:Nuclear energy and electric cars are the future

[Firethorn]

Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce.

The whole point of something like this is to utilize waste, which means that we aren't giving up food production or having to cultivate more land in order to make the fuel. I'll agree that corn is stupid, but this is using wine waste - IE grape stuff. Most true environmentalists don't back corn at all, they know how stupid it is. However the corn lobby is powerful and has 'Environmentalists' on it's payroll. Ethanol production from corn has gotten a lot more efficient, but it needs to be an OOM or so, and a plant that can achieve that wouldn't be 'corn' anymore. I'm not convinced of ethanol's suitability as a fuel anyways.

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.

To be fair, 'high radiation levels' are relative. There's actually areas of higher natural radiation that have been occupied by humans for centuries. Radiation is a complex and stiff not fully understood science. Wolves give birth to multiple pups anyways, so as long as the birth defect rate is only a little higher, they can still survive just fine. They're also not living directly in the sarcophagus, unlike some birds. In the birds case though, often they'll lay 4-6 eggs only expecting 1 to survive - a deformed chick just means it's tossed out of the nest by competing chicks faster.

And it makes sense, for the first time all those little animals in the ecosystem had the space and place to live.

Hardly the 'first time', I'd think. They used to have it before humans came, before we developed agriculture, etc...

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.

Plenty of wildlife can live around corn. Just ask the farmers about turkeys and deer. But I agree; we need something other than corn. Right now my theory is mostly electric cars backed up by biodiesel produced from algae farms in the desert for remaining liquid fuel needs.