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Scientists Create New Gasoline Substitute Out of Plants
destinyland writes "California scientists have just created a new biofuel using plants that burns just as well as a petroleum-based fuel. 'The discovery, published in the journal Nature, means corn, sugar cane, grasses and other fast-growing plants or trees, like eucalyptus, could be used to make the propellant, replacing oil,' writes the San Francisco Chronicle, and the researchers predict mass marketing of their product within 5 to 10 years. They created their fuel using a fermentation process that was first discovered in 1914, but which was then discontinued in 1965 when petroleum became the dominant source of fuel. The new fuel actually contains more energy per gallon than is currently contained in ethanol, and its potency can even be adjusted for summer or winter driving."
With a planet full of starving people I continue to fail to understand how using food crops for fuel makes any kind of rational sense at all.
If biodiesel was 30% less expensive than gasoline, I would expect to see a market shift within 5 years.
The technology is available now, but diesel cars don't seem to be popular in the US - probably because diesel is 20% more expensive than gasoline in the US. In Europe, where gasoline and diesel fuel prices are much closer to even, diesel cars are far more common.
I know the Volkswagen group specifically allows only a certain percentage for EU warranty coverage and excludes any biodiesel for US spec vehicles
They actually allow B5 - presumably because quite a few states require the stations to serve it.
The majority consensus on VW community forums seems to be that B20 works great in practice, but anything above that is potentially risky. B100 will definitely make a mess (some people have posted pictures of what it makes out of the engine eventually).
Are you serious? Are you trying to make us believe for a moment that US millionaire politicians have nothing to do with the oil industry? Like, the Bushes? And that the oil lobby has not thoroughly permeated and the senate?
Not saying that Gazprom has not corrupted the Russian government, but your government is quite corrupt.
... article mentioned that if we took all the biomass from all of the farmland both producing and fallow and were able to convert it all directly to ethanol that it would STILL only account for 14% of the US energy budget.
(Ignoring for the moment whether the claim is accurate ...)
The idea is not to replace the whole energy needs of the country with biomass fuels. Smelting steel or refining aluminum with it, for instance, would be downright silly. Ditto running power plants: (Even if you wanted to use biomass there'd be no reason to waste part of its energy liquifying it - just burn it directly. But there are lots of cheaper alternatives.)
But there's a small-but-substantial fraction of the load for which liquid fuels is ideal: Vehicles. Liquid fuels provide enormous power-to-weight ratios, which is what you want there. Keeping a vehicle light pays dividends in fuel savings, as does providing energy using easy-to-handle liquid with high energy content.
The base process ferments cellulose into butanol, acetone, and ethanol. Even without this new post-processing hack, butanol is a drop-in replacement for gasoline, ethanol works in otto-cycle engines with a little tweaking and acetone with more tweaking. This new post-process turns the mix into something akin to fuel oil, which is a similar drop-in for diesel cycle engines. So it covers both major types of portable engines.
Even if you can't come up with enough fuel to run the whole economy, or even the whole transportation industry, from locally-grown biomass, there's a LOT of low-value byproducts grown in the process of growing crops. Turning it into high-value portable liquid fuel could make a substantial dent in oil requirements while improving the financial picture both for vehicle users and farmers.
Solar and wind aren't well suited for the enormous energy and energy-density needs of land vehicles (though we're getting closer with modern electric vehicles for limited ranges). But they can make a similar dent in the energy needs of stationary loads.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ok, I'm skeptical too. Let's check it out! I apologise in advance for large numbers.
From this website I've got a figure of just over 4 million sq. kilometers of arable land in the United States. This website gives daily cross-year average sunlight falling on a square meter of ground as about 160 W. That's 640 x 10^12 W-days of power falling on the land, per day. Wikipedia cites that plants have a metabolic conversion efficiency of six per cent. This website cites a biomass-to-energy conversion efficiency of 20 per cent. So, if we assume that only 1 per cent of arable land was actually covered with plant, and then turned into electricity, total daily production would be 77 x10^9 W-days of power. This sounds like a lot; obviously there will be some more production and transport inefficiencies in there.
For comparison, the US consumes 1.39 x10^9 litres of fuel per day. According to Wikipedia, the energy density of petrol is 49.2 x 10^6 J/L, so that's 684 x10^12 J of energy per day... or, expressed in Watt-days (86400 seconds in a day), that's 7.91 x10^9 W-days of energy.
There are a lot of real world factors not being included in these estimates, but the 10-to-1 ratio here indicates to me that the energies involved are of a comparable scale; if we devoted 10 per cent of arable land to agriculture, we could (with highly efficient processes), conceivably put a sizable dent in our energy usage.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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