An Ethanol Bright Spot
Posted by Robert Rapier on January 24, 2009 - 12:12pm
I sometimes have to pause and remind people that I am not anti-ethanol. I think I first made that clear over two years ago with my support for E3 Biofuels' attempt to produce corn ethanol in a more sustainable fashion. They were attempting to create a closed-loop system that minimized fossil fuel inputs into the process, but they ultimately went bankrupt (the move toward sustainability isn't cheap). But politics being what they are, corn ethanol is not going away. So I do appreciate it when efforts are made to push the process toward higher sustainability. I believe corn ethanol can be sustainably produced, but probably not on a massive scale. It will also take a radical shift away from the way most corn ethanol is produced today.
What I want to focus on in this essay is one particularly compelling argument for ethanol as a fuel, and to address some common misconceptions. Ethanol has a high octane rating (103), which means it does not easily pre-ignite. This has the potential to translate into higher fuel efficiencies than can be obtained with gasoline – despite ethanol's BTU deficit versus gasoline.
It is known that ethanol added to gasoline normally causes the fuel efficiency of the blend to drop. A gallon of ethanol contains about 2/3rds of the BTUs (heating value) as a gallon of gasoline, and gasoline/ethanol blends normally show the drop in fuel efficiency one would expect. However, because of ethanol's resistance to preignition, it should be theoretically possible to design an engine with a much higher compression ratio, which could then extract more useful work from the ethanol. Diesel engines are designed with high compression ratios, which is the key to their engine efficiencies of 40-45%, versus 25-30% for a gasoline engine.
Let's take a simple example, to show how ethanol's BTU deficit could be made up with an increase in engine efficiency. Gasoline contains about 115,000 BTUs/gallon. If the engine efficiency is 25%, then 28,750 BTUs/gallon ultimately power the vehicle. The rest are expelled as heat. Ethanol contains about 75,000 BTUs/gallon. One could in theory achieve the same fuel efficiency with ethanol as with gasoline if an engine was designed with an efficiency that resulted in the same 28,750 BTUs/gallon powering the vehicle (assuming same weight, frictional losses, etc.) That means that if the efficiency of the ethanol-powered car was 28,750/75,000 - or 38.33%, then 1 gallon of ethanol could provide the same power to the vehicle as 1 gallon of gasoline could at a 25% efficiency. And of course if the efficiency of the ethanol vehicle could be increased further, it is possible to use 1 gallon of ethanol to travel farther than one could travel on 1 gallon of gasoline - despite the BTU deficit.
This has been true in theory, and some small scale engines have been created. The Saab Biopower, which debuted a couple of years ago, showed that the BTU-deficit could be partially compensated for. The Saab engine was designed with a higher compression ratio, so that on E-85 it showed a 12.5% drop in fuel efficiency instead of the typical 20-30% drop that one typically sees on E-85. The Saab also achieved a reported 20% extra power and 15% extra torque from this engine.
But I was recently made aware (in fact, right here on TOD) that Swedish automaker Scania has been producing ultra-high compression ratio engines designed for ethanol usage, and they reach engine efficiencies as high as 43%:
Scania’s Ethanol Diesel-Engine, Runs On Biodiesel Too
Scania’s compression-ignition (CI) ethanol engine is a modified 9-liter diesel with a few modifications. Scania raised the compression ratio from 18:1 to 28:1, added larger fuel injection nozzles, and altered the injection timing. The fuel system also needs different gaskets and filters, and a larger fuel tank since the engine burns 65% to 70% more ethanol than diesel. The thermal efficiency of the engine is comparable to a diesel, 43% compared to 44%.
That means that if all else was equal (no significant weight penalty from the high-compression engine), a gallon of ethanol could enable a vehicle to travel farther than it could on a gallon of gasoline.
In reality, the comparison is not quite apples and oranges, as these Scania engines are used in heavy, commercial applications. I wrote to the company a couple of months ago and asked them some questions about any possible plans to produce a smaller engine for passenger vehicles, but they never responded.
While this is all true in theory, it won't be achieved with a massive roll-out of E85 capable vehicles. Why not? Because these engines are designed to run on either gasoline or ethanol blends up to E85. Therefore, the compression ratio can't be too high, or the ability to run on gasoline would be lost. The best way to take advantage of the high compression issue would be to develop a fleet of vehicles that can run on pure ethanol, and whose compression ratios are designed specifically for ethanol. That would mean that these vehicles would be incapable of running on gasoline (but could perhaps be made to run on diesel).
Caveats
I will point out for those who are particularly anal retentive that there are many factors that complicate a comparison of thermal efficiencies of engines to fuel efficiency. While one fuel may have fewer BTUs and get better fuel economy, the reverse is true as well: A fuel could contain more BTUs and get worse fuel economy. Fuel economy is a function of the thermal efficiency of an engine, but one must also consider the BTUs in the fuel, the frictional losses throughout the power train, and the size of the vehicle. I compared thermal efficiency to thermal efficiency in this essay as an approximation, but it is a fair approximation.
Conclusions
As I have said numerous times, my primary opposition to corn ethanol is that only a small fraction of the ethanol that is produced can actually be called renewable. We primarily recycle fossil fuel into ethanol, and encourage that practice by paying massive subsidies to do it. This is the norm for corn ethanol, and it is a false solution to our fossil fuel dependence, rife with undesirable consequences. If we could produce corn ethanol with minimal fossil fuel inputs – as the Brazilians and Indians do with sugarcane ethanol - that would address the majority of my ethanol objections.
There are still thorny issues surrounding soil erosion, aquifer depletion, and the food supply, but let's not kid ourselves. Because of the politics of the situation, we are going to continue to produce corn ethanol. But I would like to see major modifications in the way we subsidize so that we encourage more sustainable practices. If we don't, for the next 30 years we will continue to subsidize as we have for the past 30 years – and there won't be much incentive for producers to minimize fossil fuel inputs. That is, until we run short of fossil fuel inputs quicker than we should have because we have been using them to expand the ethanol industry.
But the point of this essay was to address a legitimate urban legend, which is that BTUs tell the whole story. In reality a modified compression ratio has the potential to give the counter-intuitive result that a fuel with fewer BTUs per gallon can actually provide better fuel efficiency than another few with more BTUs per gallon.
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Thanks Robert.
How many BTUs would be needed to 'create a fleet of vehicles that could run on pure ethanol'? ;-)
(Given that current passenger vehicle fleet in USA is over 250 million and average turnover is over 10+ years)
Nate, the question right now is a non-starter, because we shouldn't do it unless we can improve the way we make ethanol. The last thing I want to do is further incentivize the status quo.
What about Volkswagen do Brasil? That won't save the US car industry, but it would be the right company in the right place - right now.
Edit: Robert, I found it interesting to add, that the Scania engine you mentioned in your article is actually in use in a public transport ethanol project in Brasil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioEthanol_for_Sustainable_Transport
AFAIK, ethanol in Brazil is produced via near-slave labor. Not exactly a model for the U.S. to ape.
The positive part of the Brazil/sugar cane story is that some of the plants burn the bagasse for process energy.
This is the future of the Corn ethanol industry. The strong thing about this technology is not only will they get cellulosic ethanol from the cobs; but they will use "fractionation" to separate out the corn oil, and be able to use the lignin from the kernels, and cobs to power the plant (thus, virtually eliminating nat gas.)
Also, the DDGS with corn oil removed are superior for feeding.
In addition, an ash is produced that will be used as a soil amendment (this is being done by Corn Plus, now.)
Yes, it is, but it can be grown without the semi-slave labor conditions without a significant dent on EROEI.
You see, sugarcane doesn't need a lot of tending. It also requires few or none pesticides and chemical fertilizers. In fact, using a tractor to cut down the canes is better for the soil the the way we do things here, which is to burn the field and then use manual labor to cut the canes. The reason we do things with manual labor here is capital costs. Instead of acquiring the expensive equipment (trough expensive financing), a lot of the cane growers hire migrant workers that will work for a pittance, but if they had the capital to buy the machines, or the workforce wasn't so cheap, they could run the same plantation on a similar cost (and EROEI), with tractors and such. In fact, we are seeing a movement in that direction here.
Also, the distillation plants are mostly modern, use very little labor, and they burn the cane itself as fuel for the distillation. The fuel consumption is small.
Sugarcane has it's issues, of course, chief of them being deforestations in large areas, use of productive land that could be use for foodstuff and waste problems at the distillation plants. The smell can be bad, too, having passed by a region full of those plants, I can attest to that. It won't solve the problem, but it can be done in a more humane way, without cheap migrant workers in slave-like conditions, and still be EROEI positive, if you have the right climate and right soils.
Ethanol has high octane rating and so does Methanol. Methanol has only half the BTU of gasoline but it has by experts held as a better fuel than Ethanol. Methanol can be produced from any biomass feedstock as well fom any fossil feedstock.
Methanol is useable on any drivtrain as otto engines, diesel engines as well as direct Methanol fuel cells. If Methanol route were chosen then the scaleing is possible, Whenever the biomass produced Methanol were in shortage then fossil feedstock could be used.
Methanol coul alse be produced from hydrogen combined with athmosferic CO2, definetely a true renewable production route if renewable electricity were awailiable .
The "Racers" are pretty much going to ethanol, now. A Kansas farmer this summer took a '69 Mustang out to the desert, and blew through all the records at 252 mph on E85.
Methanol will never be sold as transportation fuel in the U.S. again. It's just too poisonous. IIRC the oil companies still have about $500 Million in lawsuits pending over the MTBE in Groundwater problems.
I don't understand that. Is it really that much more poisonous than gasoline?
Methanol is metabolized to formaldehyde in the human liver, which is a ghastly way to die.
Gasoline is only acutely toxic if the liquid gets into your lungs.
MTBE isn't acutely toxic, but it is a known carcinogen, and very persistent in groundwater.
Gasoline and Methanol will both kill you. Following is some toxicology of gasoline from ATSDR CDC
Agency for Toxid Substance and Disease Registry:
Toxicological Profile
for Automotive Gasoline CAS# 8006-61-9
2.2.1 Inhalation Exposure
2.2.1.l Death
Several case reports of either accidental or intentional inhalation of gasoline vapors resulting in death
have been published (Ainsworth 1960; Boeckx et al. 1977; Poklis 1976; Wang and Irons 1961).
Inhalation of ≥5,000 ppm gasoline vapor (20,000 ppm for 5 minutes) has been shown to be lethal
(Ainsworth 1960; Wang and Irons 1961). It has been postulated that the cause of death following
inhalation of high concentrations of gasoline vapors is either central nervous system depression due to
asphyxia leading to respiratory failure, or cardiac sensitization to circulating catecholamines leading to
a fatal arrhythmia (Poklis 1976). . . .
Oral Exposure
2.2.2.1 Death
Accidental or intentional ingestion of large quantities of gasoline can cause death in humans
(Camevale et al. 1983). The lethal ingested dose of gasoline has been estimated to be 12 ounces
(350 g, or 5 g/kg for a 70-kg individual) (Anonymous 1989). The cause of death following ingestion
of gasoline is either severe chemical pneumonitis resulting from the aspiration of gasoline that leads to
asphyxiation, central nervous system depression leading to respiratory failure, or cardiac sensitization
to circulating catecholamines resulting in the occurrence of fatal arrhythmias (EPA 1987a).
The acute oral LD50 in rats for gasoline has been reported to be 14,063 mg/kg (Beck et al. 1983;
Vemot et al. 1990). No treatment-related deaths were reported in a 4-week study in rats administered
up to 2,000 mg/kg/day by gavage (Halder et al. 1985), but a few treatment-related deaths were seen in
another study in which rats were administered 500 mg/kg/day API PS-6 by gavage (Borriston Labs
1985). The basis for this discrepancy between studies is not known. No information is available on
death in experimental animals following chronic oral exposure to gasoline.
This statement about the toxicity of methanol is just an old bromide, or semi-wishful thinking for ethanol boosters (mono-alchoholists). Most creatures can take their methanol as straight as they can take their ethanol. Even the average human contains a few parts per million of methanol.
MTBE is made from methanol, doesn't biodegrade well, and tastes bad in your drinking water. Conflating MTBE issues with methanol is like saying that wood is generally a bad idea because wood smoke can give you lung cancer. :-)
It is not a "bromide" of any age that, in humans, methanol is metabolized to formaldehyde, while ethanol is metabolized to far less toxic acetaldehyde.
The treatment for methanol ingestion is IV ethanol, since the liver preferentially metabolizes the ethanol, while the methanol circulates around until it is passed intact through the kidneys.
MTBE, being an ether, is very unreactive compared to alcohols, so it's quite persistent, ergo a problem in the groundwater.
I think part of the diesel's efficiency has to do with the lack of a throttle plate, as well as the higher compression ratio. On the intake stroke, the piston in a gasoline engine has to work against a partial vacuum that develops behind the throttle plate.
The efficiency of an IC engine is directly related to the compression ratio (CR). Actually, as I recall from my IC engines class back 40 years ago, the efficiency was actually related to the expansion ratio, which is usually the same as the mechanical compression ratio (i.e., that which happens at wide open throttle). Since gasoline has a problem with detonation or pre-ignition, lower mechanical compression ratios have been traditionally used compared with diesel designs.
There are other engine designs which have been tried, such as the Miller Cycle in the Mazda Millennium S about 10 years ago. That design used a mechanical supercharger, as I recall. Turbo chargers also produce a similar result, as they run lower mechanical CR's but "recycle" some of the energy from the expansion of the exhaust gases to increase the effective compression ratio and also increase the effective displacement of the engine. Some designs have just used a turbine attached to the output to directly capture some of the waste energy from the exhaust. Then, there's the variable valve timing and knock sensor options, which can make it possible to use higher mechanical CR's while running lower octane gasoline.
With gasoline (or alcohol) as a fuel, achieving the best efficiency is accomplished by running the motor at wide open throttle. This fact has led to ever better transmissions, such as the continuously variable designs or the 6 speed automatics, which make it possible to keep the engine running at nearly full throttle under most situations. The smallest engine usually gives the best MPG, since it will be fun nearly flat out all the time. In my view, the Toyota Prius design functions like a CVT with energy storage.
E. Swanson
E. Swanson,
You hit the nail on the head, it is "effective compression ratio" that matters. This can be accomplished by all manner of tricks, from extremely advancing the timing and lean burn designs to the use of turbocharging/supercharging.
Much good work was done on this in the 1970's in relation to using propane as a motor fuel. As we know propane and compressed natural gas suffer from a BTU penelty compared to gasoline, but in an engine designed to use it, the power output and fuel mileage can be roughly equal. High performance engine builders in the 1970's such as Ak Miller and Gale Banks even used propane fueled engines for racing and high performance boats.
What the designers of those days lacked were the computer controlled fuel injection systems we have now. The way to preserve fuel flexibility so that gasoline and E85 can be used in the same engine with roughly comparable efficiency is through the use of advanced variable vane turbochargers and advanced fuel and spark control. As Robert points out, we cannot raise the mechanical (as opposed to "effective) compression ratio beyond a certain point or we lose the fuel flexibility.
As an aside, I was just watching the start of the Daytona 24 Hours sportscar race on TV. Efficiency of the engines in these cars can be fantastic, sometimes almost 200 horsepower per liter with turbocharging. The efficiency in the case of racing is used for performance and speed, not fuel efficiency (although there is a fuel consumption limit). This has been true on the highway as well, in which fuel conversion efficiency of modern engines is much better than a few years ago but we have used it to gain horsepower, speed and weight of the vehicle, not for fuel efficiency.
RC
BMW has a production spark ignition engines with no throttle. They use variable intake valve timing instead of a throttle valve to regulate the intake charge. It's claimed to improve EU combined cycle economy by 10%; the improvement in city cycle is even higher since that's where all the part-throttle operation occurs.
http://www.autozine.org/technical_school/engine/petrol2.htm
The problem with getting compression ratios as high as diesel is that you are going to need a rather large engine. Building a small engine that gets 40+ mpg in a compact car is difficult. As commented earlier, ethanol is still not sustainable either, and probably never will be. Even without the fossil fuel inputs, industrial ethanol production requires phosphate rock to grow plants; phosphate rock could likely peak before oil, so no matter how much we want a green future, we better learn how to do it without industrial agriculture.
"building a small engine that gets 40+ mpg in a compact car is difficult"
Really? So why is it that I own one then.
40+ US mpg all day every day. On gasoline no less. I hear the diesel version is even better.
Its a Toyota Aygo by the way.
The claimed milage is much higher, but I drive with a lead foot.
Andy
Yes. I have a Peugeot 107 - essentially the same car as the Aygo - and my long term average consumption is 57 miles per UK gallon, so about 47 US mpg. It would count as tiny in the US, though.
You have misinterpreted what I was trying to say. I meant that building a small ETHANOL or DIESEL engine with the high compression ratios mentioned by the article is difficult. Sorry for the mixup. It is possible to build miniature diesel engines, but you don't get to keep the high compression ratios that you have for larger ones.
The small diesel engines available in the Aygo does have a high compression ratio and achieves superb fuel economy.
And its a 1 litre engine if my memory is correct.
Small diesels are routinely built using compacted graphite iron engine blocks. High strength and quite small. Its not a technological challenge to build small automotive diesels with high compression ratios.
Really its not. We've been doing it for years in Europe.
The only reason compression ratios has been falling in diesel engines is due to emsission regs, and customer noise vibration and harshness (NVH) perception. What has allowed the reduction in compression ratios (whilst retaining fuel economy) is higher pressure and more advanced injector technology.
If manufacturers wanted to they could easily build an unthrottled 20 to 1 CR spark ignition engine with port ethanol injection. They won't, simply because nowhere sells 190 proof ethanol as a fuel. E85 doesn't have the same octane as straight ethanol.
Andy
The issues that you mention are precisely what I meant by "difficult". Vibration becomes a factor in high compression engines. In addition, the fuel economy mainly comes from the engine being smaller, not because of the high compression ratio. A small gasoline engine gets pretty good gas mileage, but trying to get BETTER gas mileage out of the small engine by tweaking the engine design to give a significantly higher compression ratio like the article mentions is not easy.
The point of this article is not that you can build a high compression ratio engine using ethanol, but that you can take a gasoline engine, tweak it a bit to use ethanol, and see the same efficiency as the gasoline engine. And because the article is addressing sustainability, the engine would need to be extremely fuel efficient (i.e., small) if it were to be practical. I don't think we have the technology to do this right now. I am just trying to compare apples to apples.
The Saab Biopower turns the variable turbocharger up when ethanol is present in the fuel. This creates a ton of power but uses more fuel.
The trick is to marry this with Displacement on Demand.
A four cylinder would get more compression, but two fewer cylinders when running e85 (in normal driving.) During WOT situations the other two cylinders would kick in.
I predict we'll see this in a car within 2 years. Maybe, sooner.
"You have misinterpreted what I was trying to say. I meant that building a small ETHANOL or DIESEL engine with the high compression ratios mentioned by the article is difficult. Sorry for the mixup. It is possible to build miniature diesel engines, but you don't get to keep the high compression ratios that you have for larger ones."
That is sheer and utter nonsense. VW was building small diesels back in the '70's that got 40-50mpg and lasted 350000-450000 miles if properly maintained. So was Nissan. I have one of each, they are great little engines. And there are a multitude of tiny diesel engines that model airplane freaks fly.
But for that matter, you don't even want that high of CR to run ethanol -- people have been converting VW TDI engines to run on pure ethanol by adding an extra head gasket to *LOWER* the CR down to about 18:1. That's about as high as you want for straight ethanol. Even 16:1 would work just fine. And a lot of old, big diesel engines are exactly in that range -- 16:1 to 18:1. I've owned a couple of big crawler dozers with diesels with 16:1 CR.
plus 1 !
also former VW Lupo ~ 80mpg; now discontinued because they figured USA wouldn't want to buy )it as it's so much lighter than a ( now vanishing ) Humm-(bugg-er.
A good farmer can get 90 - 100 bu/acre of corn on decent land w/o fertilizers.
In fact, many farmers passed on the high-priced fertilizers This year. That's why the wholesale prices of fertilizers dropped by up to 60% in the last several months.
The seeds are just getting better, and better.
Better seeds will not lead to the kind of sustainability needed for ethanol production. This was a popular idea in the 60s when the US began a war on hunger, but we are finding out that in places like Africa, the better seeds do not produce like they do in the US because of a shortage of fertile soil. Once we over farm the land we have to produce ethanol in earnest, soils will deteriorate rapidly and so will the future supply of ethanol. Even fertilizer will not fix the soil; it is a matter of having humus rich top soil and adequate supplies of water.
We have engineered a disaster by depending on oil, and I don't think that we can just engineer our way out of it without really feeling the hurt.
A LOT of that African soil desperately needs a little lime (something we'll never be in short supply of.) Also, seeds ARE being engineered to perform better in acidic, and arid soils. Today, they are probably too expensive for a small African subsistence farmer; but they'll get cheaper as time goes by.
You've got to understand that NO ONE expects to get all of our transportation fuels from grain crops. It might be possible, but it would be nuts. We started with corn because we had a lot of experience growing, and distilling it. We are rapidly moving on to forestry waste, ag waste (especially, corn cobs,) Municipal Solid waste, and we'll probably do some tree farming along the way.
I'm sure we will, also, augment this with HEVS, PHEVS, EVs in the immediate future. And, who knows what we will come up with in the next twenty, or thirty years.
Ethanol, however, is the Only technology available on a Wide Scale, "Right Now." If we really are at Peak Oil, today, it will be ethanol that helps keep us afloat during the transition. We're powering the equivalent of, probably, 35, or 40 Million cars with it worldwide, as we speak.
Not.
When I read stuff like this, I have to wonder if the poster has ever traveled outside of North America. I have highlighted that the US has the lowest average fuel economy among first world nations; the European Union and Japan have fuel economy standards about twice as high as the United States. The fact is that 40+mpg is fairly commonplace outside of North America though admittedly, cars that achieve those figures are far more likely to fall into the class of sub-compacts.
Alan from the islands
Yes, I have been outside the country and am fully aware of small cars that get tremendous mpg compared to the US because they generally have smaller engines, but to make a car with the same efficiency using ethanol is not a trivial task if you are just going to increase the compression ratio.
While it may not be trivial I believe it can and will be done.
Just as example of the situation in a non US market
In Japan's car market, bigger isn't better
According to that article a full 35% of the cars sold in Japan in July, 2006 were minicars, engine size smaller than 660cc.!
In my search for sales figures by engine size I also came across this from 2004
Talking diesel is a foreign language: the diesel engine is still the number one choice for European car buyers.(Europe Report)
That UK diesel market share figure rose to 43.6% last year. More than half of new passenger cars registered in the European Union are powered by the diesel engine, according to a recent Economic Report by ACEA (European Automobile Manufacturers Association). Diesel powered cars accounted for 53.3% of total new car registrations in the EU in 2007.
Point being, small displacement engines are commonplace outside the US with a significant number being diesels so there is a significant base of manufacturers that build small displacement, high compression motors.
Some major manufacturers are busy tweaking their ICEs to increase efficiency with a couple already available (Ford's "Ecoboost" and Volkswagen's "Tsi"). If GM can bring their HCCI motors to market that would be a significant step towards higher efficiency ICE.
My bet is that the future of personal transport will be electric motors with ICEs being used as range extenders/APUs.
Alan from the islands
The use of ethanol in high compression engines needs to be compared to the fuels already used in those engines and not compared to gasoline. Diesel fuel has more btus than ethanol and even more than gasoline.
A significant part of ethanol's net energy is consumed by extracting that last molecule of H2O from the mixture in order to mix it with gasoline. Instead of trying to sell E85 we ought to be pushing 170 proof which is 15% water in engine designed for this purpose.
What folks really care about is miles per dollar.
Better yet is Enginner Poet's suggestion of using 180 proof ethanol as a peak octane booster.
The engine runs on gasoline, but has a very high compression ration. When the driver approaches wide open throttle a second set of injectors start to inject a small amount of ethanol (in addition to the gasoline)
This results in a very high octane mixture that will withstand very high compression ratios at wide open throttle, but only consume gasoline at part load.
Given we spend so much of our time driving around on part load, it makes a lot of sense. The higher compression ratio ensures that even at part load the gasoline is being consumed at much higher efficiency.
It also means we'd need much less ethanol, and we wouldn't need to waste so much energy making it anahydrous.
Andy
A dual fuel system using water injection can also provide a similar result. Water injection was used for turbocharged aircraft engines as far back as WW II. The best water fraction was about 10% of the gasoline and provided enough boost in the effective octane rating that much higher real compression ratios was possible without destroying the engine. I have an old water injection device manufactured by a speed equipment company which was left over from the 1980's. There was a special fluid with it, which I suspect was methanol, but I'm not sure, as it's still sitting in the box in the attic.
E. Swanson
Not true. If so, everyone would be riding bikes, the most energy efficient device know to man (better than walking and better (slightly) than a full double decker bus. I have a graphic somewhere)
I think you meant miles per dollar/per unit time. And even that may be subject to change in the future.
Complex problem! Thanks for opening the door with your analysis, RR.
Agree that EtOH should be compared to diesel, not gasoline.
How much improvement in a gasoline engine can be had by stoking the octane rating with extra tricresylphosphate or other boosters?
If we're going to hypothesize a whole new fleet that's custom-made for a new fuel, then diesel hybrids might win the overall competition.
The whole point of E10 is that we can do it now, with out a huge buildout. Even so, its corrosive potential can harm engines like those in snowmobiles and some boats. Using EtOH/water mixes would make the corrosion problem worse.
Actually, all of the technology is in place Right Now.
A combination of Saab's variable ratio turbocharger (as in the biopower,) and Displacement on Demand, as in the tahoe, and Silverado will do the trick.
This looks like a good place to insert This.
New Efficiency Study shows corn ethanol to reduce CO2 Emissions relative to gasoline by from 48% to 59%.
Edit: Uh, it said GHGs, which registered in my little pea-brain as CO2. I guess that's still good.
I agree that piston engines are here to stay but disagree that high fraction ethanol is the right fuel. If I recall piston engines cost about $35 per kilowatt to manufacture and run for 1000 hours before needing maintenance. For proton exchange membrane fuel cells the figures I think are $500 and 100 hours. Of course their fuel conversion efficiency is much higher but there are problems using CO2 producing fuels like methanol.
I buy methanol to make biodiesel from dirt track racers. They use methanol in supercharged big block V8s and say the slow burn rate suits that style of driving. I always thought the spiral vision trick in Photoshop was a gimmick until I inhaled methanol fumes. For methanol blends (eg M85) to replace petrol cars would need supercharging and the pumps would need vapour containment. On the other hand we are supposed to be healthier now ethanol has replaced lead tetrabutyl as an octane enhancer.
Despite the hype over V2G and PHEVs I doubt they will be affordable in an era of double digit unemployment. The future will be less driving for most but for others it will be in cheap multifuel cars that run on gas (methane or propane) and/or petrol like E10 where the ethanol is cellulosic.
Boof writes,
Emphasis mine. Of course, the persons who say this know of at least three, or anyway, at least one published measurement of efficiency exceeding 9.45 kWh of direct-current electrity per kg H2 in a fuel cell that is light enough to power an electric car. Of course they won't be slow to post these references.
9.45 kWh/kgH2 is 30 percent. Lots of piston engines beat it at the driveshaft and come pretty close at the drive wheels' contact patch.
--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)
Nitrous oxide (NO2) is one of the nastier greenhouse gasses, with 300 times the potency of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. That's no laughing matter.
The higher the compression ratio and combustion temperature, the higher the rate of nitrous oxide production in internal combustion engines of all fuel types.
The nitrogen comes from the air, not the fuel.
I ain't knocking ethanol (pun intended), but the basic problem here is the inherent thermodynamic inefficiency of otto cycle and diesel cycle engines. 25% fuel efficient? On a good day, maybe. On the test bench, maybe. But even 25% is absurd. Pardon my french, but isn't that pissing away three fourths of every gallon?
Talking ethanol fuel for conventional Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) is putting the hay before the horse. Fix the damned engines before fixing the damned fuel.
If 1 penny of every dollar wasted on that 75% wastage was put into SINCERE research and development of more efficient engines we would already be driving them... and the efficiency would be up there around 75%, where it belongs.
P.S.
Getting the same miles from one third the fuel pretty well handles air pollution and global warming in the same swoop, too.
Hot flames in air must, I guess, produce some N2O (which is the real formula for nitrous oxide, structurally NNO) but they also produce nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). I believe the latter two are in a fairly quick equilibrium but am ignorant about their relation, in flame chemistry, with N2O. Can you shed some light.
--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)
I believe it was Edward Teller who was concerned that nuclear bomb tests could trigger a nitrogen fire in the atmosphere.
I wonder if NOx standards could be relaxed for sparsely populated areas. For example burning tar rich gas in farm tractors. If the farmer gets sick no biggie. An analogy is that few seem worried about particulate pollution from tourist steam trains.
Guys, please!
Nitric oxide is NO. It reacts on contact with air to form nitrogen dioxide, NO2. It's the reddish-brown and exceedingly nasty nitrogen dioxide that darkens our urban skylines, persists as a GHG, and destroys ozone, to boot.
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is stable, sweet-smelling, and a powerful oxidizer used in drag racing. It also made my childhood trips to the dentist tolerable.
But nitrous oxide is NOT produced by combustion in air. (You can make it by thermally decomposing ammonium nitrate, if you must, but I'd recommend Whip-Its.)
Hi Nelsone,
I am not a chemist, as I apologized elsewhere, but I am working with an ICE engineer who assures me (as does the Wikipedia entry on 'Nitrous Oxide N2O') that one of the sources of nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas is the combination of atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen that takes place within the combustion chambers of internal combustion engines at the elevated temperatures which occur at high compression ratios.
Are these two sources mistaken?
Hi GRL,
I'm sorry but as a non-chemist I can't be of much help on your question. (Thank you, by the way, for catching my transposition error on the formula.)
My interest in N2O was based solely on it being a limiting factor on just how high one can practically go with high compression engines before the solution (increased compression/temperature/pressure) becomes the problem.
Now, I'm off to read your paper, How Fire Can Be Domesticated. It may take me a while because the hard science stuff is not the easiest thing for my 'left brain' to deal with... but I shall do it.
Will get back with you soon.
Triciclo Pompéo - ethanol powered three-wheeler made for Brazil
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/03/25/triciclo-pompeo-ethanol-powered-...
It appears my previous comment has gotten lost on the way to this thread...
Ford & MIT are working on direct ethanol injection at high loads to prevent knock in conventional spark-ignited gasoline engines. They claim 15 - 30% better fuel economy.
the MIT spin-off:
http://www.ethanolboost.com/
brief article on the engine in development:
http://www.pickuptrucks.com/html/news/ford/ethanol-boost/ford-ethanol-bo...
E10 seems to be a waste of time. It has 97% of the energy content of pure gasoline, so where you burned 100 gals of pure gas, theoretically you would burn 103 gals of E10, which contains 103 x 0.9 = 92.7 gals gas, so for every 10 gals of ethanol used, you save 7 gals of gas, PROVIDED YOUR ENGINE EFFICIENCY STAYS THE SAME.
But as Robert points out above, ethanol needs a higher compression ratio than gasoline.
Real-world figures for E10 that I have seen suggest 10 - 15% worse mpg. Let's say 11%.
So where you burned 100 gals of pure gas, in actual practice you end up burning 111 gals of E10, which contains 111 x 0.9 = 99.9 say 100 gals of gas, i.e. THERE IS NO SAVING OF GAS WHATSOEVER.
E10 just doesn't make sense.
RR's thesis that ethanol is just recycling fossil fuel with subsidies is false. That is just the fallacious EROEI idea using different words.
Fossil fuel inputs into corn production on my farm are a small fraction of total costs. Compared to the energy content of corn, the fossil fuel energy used is a minor item. The fossil fuels used to make ethanol are also a relatively minor cost compared to the cost of corn. The ethanol plants that are failing are blaming high corn prices not high natural gas prices. Some are failing due to stupidity in hedging against high corn prices.
In any case, the anti ethanol studies are wrong mostly because the logic is wrong but also because they do not understand the way corn is grown today. Herbicides and pesticides have been greatly reduced due to bio tech seed which stacks genetic traits. Tillage is a minor part of corn production anymore. And dry down is easier and faster than in the past. I do not dry corn in the fall because current genetics gets the moisture low enough that the corn will keep until warm weather in the spring when fans using local wind turbine energy can dry the corn the rest of the way.
The subsidies that are given to ethanol are in the form of a tax credit to blenders which are generally oil companies. This is nothing more than a buy off of the liquid fuel distribution monopoly. If the blenders credit were discontinued, oil companies would not distribute much ethanol. Ethanol producers would have to set up a parallel distribution system and buy gas from oil companies to blend with ethanol. Of course this would not work for the small portion of total liquid fuel that ethanol is ever likely to be.
If the ethanol subsidies go, ethanol goes and the liquid fuel production and distribution monopolies know it. Farmers and ethanol producers know it. The subsidies given to ethanol to buy off the monopolies are minor compared to oil subsidies in the form of wars for oil security, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the oil depletion allowance (there is no soil depletion allowance) and Royalty Payment in Kind.
The benefits of ethanol are largely outside of energy in/out analysis so popular at TOD. Ethanol is competition for gas. Competition generally produces lower prices. Ethanol helps retain money in the U.S. economy instead of sending it outside the country. It is the drain on the economy for wars which soak up resources and produce nothing and the drain of paying for oil imports that are significant factors in the current recession and financial turmoil. IMO ethanol producing areas of the country are holding up better under the circumstances than areas not producing ethanol, at least for the moment anyway.
In any case, the anti ethanol studies are wrong mostly because the logic is wrong but also because they do not understand the way corn is grown today.
Actually, even the pro-ethanol USDA studies show that the vast majority of the BTU value of ethanol started out as fossil fuel. So this isn't some anti-ethanol conspiracy saying this; this is the guys on your side. You just won't listen, because your livelihood is tied up in this.
It is true that fossil fuels are being used to produce ethanol. I don't see that as being any kind of drawback. Coal and natural gas are more plentiful in the US than oil. And you can't put coal or natural gas in existing ICE vehicles. It would also be possible to power ethanol stills by burning biomass, or by using solar or wind power.
This is true but misleading. We don't have near enough of any combination of the 3 even WITH full scaling of marginally energy positive ethanol to remotely be liquid fuels independent without a drastic reduction in fuel use. And the further issue is affordability. We have spent the cheap natural capital and are now importing via fiat. The remaining stuff will be easily produced and afforded by the rich, but not to the level required for social democracies.
For low energy gain systems, the amount of gross production to equate to one unit of net energy escalates as we approach energy break even. Let ω = EROEI / (EROEI – 1), which is the amount of energy production required to yield 1 unit of net energy (Farrel, Science 2006). Note that ω increases non-linearly with declining EROEI, approaching infinity as EROEI approaches 1. So at EROEI of 1.2, procuring .2 units of 'net energy', we would need to produce globally 430 million barrels a day of ethanol to net out the 86 million of oil produced today. (of the 430 million barrels, you need to set aside 344 million barrels to grow next years ethanol, leaving you with 86 left for rest of society).
No matter how you slice it is unsustainable and a train wreck once it scales. For local specialized uses it's ok - beyond that I really can't believe we are so myopic as a society to see that we cannot replace the oil we import domestically and still have land, water and general affordability
Or, maybe you just need a new slicer. :)
Nate, I've seen estimates as high as 6 Billion Tons of Carbonaceous waste in the U.S. every year. Even if the amount we can easily access is as low as 1 billion tons, that could still, with better engines, replace all of our gasoline usage. Throw in some Electricity/batteries, and the only question is, "what's for lunch?"
Right now, we need to be thinking about how to get more "Bio"Diesel. Down the road we'll probably move some shipping off of trucks, and onto trains (electrified?)
The thing is, we don't have to do it all, Tomorrow. Peak Oil is a "process," not a fait accompli. India, Europe, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, and a whole bunch more countries announcing recently that they're going 10% Ethanol. We'll all go 20% within 5, or 10 years.
The thing is, Most "Localities" have biofuel solutions/feedstocks at hand. There's no reason in the world that biofuels won't scale. It just won't look like "Exxon," or "Shell." And, we won't have 160,000 troops getting shot at to protect the corn cobs.
Ahh, that's silly. Fuel mileage may go down 3% with E10; and, it might not. Depends on a lot of things.
In my two vehicles I didn't notice any difference at all (but, in all honesty, it's very hard for me to track it exactly, in that my wife and son aren't in the least interested in knowing the difference between 26.7% and 26.2%, or whatever.)
But, you can bet your bippy that if a lot of people were losing 10%, let alone more, there would be a ruckus like you have Never heard before.
I think DOE figures something like 1.5%.
You are comparing a high tech engine optimized to burn ethanol with an average gasoline engine, not fair.
The best way to take advantage of the high compression issue would be to develop a high compression diesel engine that uses computer controlled direct injection of any combustible liquid fuel. It would program the rate and timing of fuel injection to provide the optimum cylinder pressure as a function of crankshaft position with any fuel.
This eliminates octane issues and makes energy output per gallon proportional to btu content at a very high efficiency for all fuels. Miles per gallon would be proportional to energy content per gallon.
Hi Bill,
Right on the mark!
I think that's the next big direction in engine design.
Yes, Bill, and Benton, BUT,
What happens when there's not enough Diesel to Go Around?
....high compression diesel engine that uses computer controlled direct injection of any combustible liquid fuel.
Move the the next "combustible liquid fuel"?
Okay, I see what you're saying. I had just woke up from my nap and wasn't reading carefully. Thanks.
Hi KDolliso,
Direct fuel injection can be made to work with any of the liquid fuels used in automobiles.
For the sake of brevity I erred in oversimplification of the fuller data I meant to convey. It's an easy mistake to make in talking about Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) and fuel efficiency, and for a darned good reason.
The big challenge for me is keeping things short enough for practical conversation... without abbreviating them into oblivion. Basic ICE concepts considered one at a time are simple enough, but not when considered together, each one a variable that effects many others, interactively. Then it gets complicated in a hurry.
Diesel ignition versus spark ignition is simple. So is Fuel injection versus carburetion, or the knock characteristics and BTU contents of diesel fuel, gasoline and ethanol.
Computer controlled direct injection bespeaks far more than just a method of getting fuel into the combustion chamber. The term usually implies a change in the SEQUENCE of processes, as well. In direct injection the air in the cylinder is compressed before fuel is injected. Compression ratios can thus be far higher than the spontaneous ignition threshold of the fuel because the fuel is not yet present in the combustion chamber when the piston approaches and hits 'Top Dead Center' (TDC).
These higher compressions ratios also enable greater energy extraction when it is needed most (during the downward power stroke) and reduce the huge heat loss caused by combustion with the piston at TDC (very poor mechanical advantage when the crank, rod and piston are vertically aligned in the "12 O'Clock" position. Energy has to go somewhere, and that alignment causes more to be lost as waste heat.)
One final advantage to direct injection is that, by micro-metering the rate and timing of the injection, the biggest push on the piston can be controlled to occur when the juxtaposition of piston-rod-crank yields the best leverage.
D.Benton,
Thanks for the info. I knew a little bit. Some I didn't. Things are changing too rapidly (yeah, I know, the Germans were doing DI sixty or seventy years, ago. They just never told me about it:)) for a poor, old, beaten-up, layman, retired insurance agent to keep up with.
But, I'm tryin :)
Robert
Please clearly distinguish between efficiency (= energy out/energy in) vs energy content on a volumetric or mass basis. You were discussing energy out / volume in which is very confusing.
Long term, we need to compare net energy out vs the fossil energy in to the make the fuel.
More critical in the next few decades will be liquid fuel out for ANY energy in - to keep the economy afloat while we transition to sustainable renewable fuels or energy carriers.
Please clearly distinguish between efficiency (= energy out/energy in) vs energy content on a volumetric or mass basis.
That was more or less the reason for the caveat; you have to look at both and there is a relationship. What was reported was thermal efficiency, but fuel efficiency is a function of thermal efficiency. But you can't merely compare thermal efficiencies, because gasoline couldn't get the same thermal efficiency as ethanol could due to the preignition problem.
It takes no special engineering to achieve higher thermal efficiencies on E85 than on gasoline it is inherent in the fuel.Everyone makes a big deal about the volumetric energy difference between gasoline and E85, with E85 having about 30%less energy per gallon yet even the Detroit FFV's which are horribly designed to take advantage of E85's high octane get only about 15%-20% less fuel mileage on a per gallon basis. It does not take advanced math to figure out that those engines are getting better thermal efficiency if their actual fuel mileage per gallon is 50%-70% better than it should be based on the fuel energy content.
If they got exactly the same thermal efficiency as on gasoline their fuel mileage would be down by 30% not 15%-20%.
In turbocharged applications this improved fuel thermal efficiency can almost totally cancel out the difference in fuel energy. I have a turbocharged import (Subaru WRX) that has been converted to run on E85 for several years now. With no changes other than increased fuel flow to compensate for E85's fuel air requirements here are the results on that car over 2 years of records.
My long term average on gasoline was 24 mpg, my milage on the same setup on E85 was 22 mpg, my current milage on gasoline is about 22 current mileage on E85 is 18 mpg.
Current setup upgraded turbo-
gasoline mileage 22 mpg = 5682 BTU/mi
E85 90,500 Btu /gallon / 18 mpg = 5028 BTU/mile (daily driving with periodic high boost acceleration)
E85 90,500 BTU/gallon/ 19.3 mpg = 4689 BTU/mile (driving mostly off boost as daily commuter)
Old setup stock turbo -
gasoline mileage Gasoline 125,000 Btu/ gallon / 24 = 5208 BTU/mile
My old setup, @ 92% of gasoline mileage or 22 mpg
E85 90,500 BTU/gallon/22 = 4114 BTU/mile
The above was not even on an optimize E85 engine just a simple low budget conversion.
As you can see E85 is an inherently more efficient fuel, it produces more useful work than gasoline does for a given investment in energy.
It is not only the higher octane but the very characteristics of the fuel. It burns about 200 deg F cooler than gasoline (reduces heat loss to the cooling system).
It produces more exhaust gas volume for a given amount of combustion air (results in higher average pressure in the cylinder over the duration of the power stroke).
It also accepts load better than gasoline, many users report that they can pull higher gears under load than they could running gasoline. On cruise control the cars do not down shift as much on small hills, resulting in fewer revs per mile on average due to running in higher gears.
My car will not pull 5th gear on level ground at less than about 45-47 mph on gasoline. On E85 it will pull 5th gear on level ground at about 40 mph.
Larry
It takes no special engineering to achieve higher thermal efficiencies on E85 than on gasoline it is inherent in the fuel.
Not true. If you click on the 3rd link in the essay, it will take you to a DOE page that compares fuel efficiency of E85 versus straight gasoline. While I have seen reported exceptions to the rule, if you run down just the first few cars listed for FFVs here:
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/byfueltype.htm
I see a loss of 32% for the Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger, a loss of 22% for the Impala, a loss of 28% for the Mercedes C300, and a loss of 35% for the Dodge Caravan. It is not inherent in the fuel. It is dependent on just how much the vehicle has been optimized for E85.
Robert- Hotrod showed clearly that his car uses less BTU's per mile running E85 even though he did not modify compression to gain even more thru the added thermal efficiencies it would bring. I cannot speak for the Sebring, Avenger, or Mercedes but the Dodge Caravans do not run at a 35% loss of MPG. The 12-20% range is far more common in actual driving conditions- particularly the earlier model years. I have a fleet of Impala's with 3.5L and their average is 18-22% loss based on MPG (not btu) depending on the driver's driving style and type of miles. I have a personal S10 and it runs in the 12-16.6% differential range- again depending on the type of driving. All of these vehicles are operating with fewer btu's per mile on E85 than when running pure gasoline. DOE's estimates are well defined for gasoline but typically are btu based estimates for E85.
Hotrod, have you ever tried running those Impalas on E20?
I saw a study from Univ of N. Dakota, and Mn State Mankato that achieved higher mpg on E20 than gasoline in the Impalas.
Someone asked if I had tested E20 in our fleet Impala FFV's. Yes- tested E10, E20, E30 at least 9 replicated times each. While weather was a variable I could not control (I did try to keep it in similar wind, temps, and moisture conditions), I did find the MPG and operability to be 31.8 with each fuel. Each of the trials involved running the exact same route with the same stops each over 3 days with the same driver. The KARE 11 TV trial should not even be part of this discussion- how can a 1 tank fill ever be scientific? For one thing it takes the ECU in a GM FFV a minumum of 7 miles to "lock on" the ethanol content of the fill during a fuel change. For another the wind going one way vs another is never the same. Was traffic in this heavily traveled segment of highway equal? Shame on them for poor reporting- at least do a proper news report. Many variables go into MPG- rain for one- sometime plug a scan tool that can read live data into your ECU and watch the % load factor change as you run from dry pavement onto wet. If you want to consider non-sientific here- I did run a series of E0 Premium vs. E20 vs. E27.5 on my 2.0L turbo non-FFV 2004 Saab - similar results at steady 70 mph except at 27.5% alcohol I did drop from 30.8 to 30.5 (this E27.5 tank test involved running 40 miles in rain)-- these however were not replicated trials like I did with the Impala's. (Saab trial was on a 1200 mile vacation interstate only).
Thanks, Outlaw.
31.8 on each . . . isn't that interesting.
BTW, do you remember what the Octane Ratings of the E0, and E20 were on the Saab Test?
Oh, and what DID you have for breakfast that day? :)
The octane on the premium (E0) was 93 r+m/2 (Saab calls for 90 AON min), E20 was 92 octane r+m/2. No I do not recall what I had for breakfast back then- I live and breathe cars and efficiencies- food is just something I eat LOL.
Hotrod showed clearly that his car uses less BTU's per mile running E85 even though he did not modify compression to gain even more thru the added thermal efficiencies it would bring.
I also clearly stated: "While I have seen reported exceptions to the rule..." However, there are plenty of real world tests that back up the DOE stats. Here is one that I linked to last year mentions two road tests:
http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=267612
The point is that it isn't inherent in the fuel, which is what was claimed.
DOE's estimates are well defined for gasoline but typically are btu based estimates for E85.
Could you provide a reference to support that?
Jeez, a TV Crew out to make News! get's an Outrageous Test Result, Who coulda imagined it?
I wonder how many test protocols They could have violated. Betcha nobody Out There has a FF Durango that gets a 39% Differential between E85, and Unleaded.
Of course I notice you fixate on that result (casting aspersions without any evidence, I might add - haven't you complained about such things before?), and ignore the Consumer Reports study. Want to hand wave that one away as well? And of course you know there are more. The point is, once more, it isn't inherent in the fuel that the BTU difference won't cause the corresponding fuel efficiency decrease. It depends on other factors.
YOU are the one that headlined, And gave a link to the goofy KARE 11 article.
And, yes, I've seen reports of people getting 27% less mileage in big old, honking V-8's. BUT, there's a lot of difference between 27%, and 39%.
Tell me; in your gut, wouldn't you have strong reservations about trying to replicate the 39% in a truly controlled, proper road test?
YOU are the one that headlined, And gave a link to the goofy KARE 11 article.
Why is it goofy? Because you disagree with it. But it isn't any goofier than some of the studies you have cited. Further, I mentioned in the first paragraph "Here is one that I linked to last year mentions two road tests" Then, the last paragraph of the article says "Consumer Reports magazine conducted a similar road test and found mileage was 27 percent worse with E85." So again, you fixated on one result, hand waved it away sans evidence, and ignored the second one. As I have said on numerous occasions, there is no objectivity in you when we are talking about ethanol. The studies are either positive, or they were done wrong, don't exist, were conducted by people with agendas, etc.
Okay, let me ask that question again. Would you feel comfortable knowing you had money bet on a responsible testing facility replicating the KARE 11 Test?
Of course not.
Anyhoo, remember how much grief you gave me when I posted This Link showing a theoretical 40% + efficiency for ethanol in a high compression engine?
Did you come to my defense last week when Engineer-Poet called me a "Liar" for claiming that you could get more "Work" out of a gallon of ethanol than a gallon of gasoline?
Face it, Robert; everything I've written on this blog has either come to pass, or is in the passing lane, and moving up fast.
And, really, it's not because I'm smart. It's just so logical that anyone without an agenda that looks closely at it is bound to see it. At least, That's the way I see it.
Anyhoo, remember how much grief you gave me when I posted This Link showing a theoretical 40% + efficiency for ethanol in a high compression engine?
I don't. Could you link to the conversation?
Did you come to my defense last week when Engineer-Poet called me a "Liar" for claiming that you could get more "Work" out of a gallon of ethanol than a gallon of gasoline?
I was in Europe last week, not reading TOD much. I did not see that conversation.
Face it, Robert; everything I've written on this blog has either come to pass, or is in the passing lane, and moving up fast.
I really don't think you want to go there. In fact, not only have you written a lot of stuff that hasn't come to pass, but you had to retract some things when I kept pressing you to provide evidence that you did not have. Something about Patzek if I recall. I also recall you once claiming that the ethanol subsidy was not dependent upon how the ethanol was made - which you later found out was not true.
I don't. Could you link to the conversation?
I have no idea how to go back many months and find a conversation. If you don't remember it I guess I'll just have to give you a pass. I bet some do, though.
Patzek, Patzek, . . . Wasn't he that old anti-ethanol guy that was founder, and director of the Univ. of California Oil Consortium? The Institution that, in its heydey received something like $160,000.00 from Shell, Chevron, etc?
I seem to remember he lost his position and moved to Texas, or something. I guess that's what happens when you end up being wildly wrong about everything you write.
By the way, you didn't answer my question. Do you think there's any chance in Hades that a reputable testing institution would come up with that 39% figure that KARE 11 came up with?
Patzek, Patzek, . . . Wasn't he that old anti-ethanol guy that was founder, and director of the Univ. of California Oil Consortium? The Institution that, in its heydey received something like $160,000.00 from Shell, Chevron, etc?
Yes, that's actually related to what you had to retract. You were casting your aspersions very widely, and you were called on it. You hemmed and hawed, until you finally admitted that you had no actual evidence for your claims. You were merely attempting to smear in order to influence the argument.
Do you think there's any chance in Hades that a reputable testing institution would come up with that 39% figure that KARE 11 came up with?
If I recall correctly, one of the studies that you once posted, in which a number of vehicles were tested - showed some really bad results, and some really good results. As I said at the time, I wouldn't trust the outliers.
I guess that's what happens when you end up being wildly wrong about everything you write.
A couple of links here to jog your memory:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3923#comment-344627
A sampling to show just how low your burden of proof can be when you want it to be:
Another:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3591#comment-300671
So don't start playing games now about how high your standard of proof is. The fact is, had the KARE story been pro-ethanol, you would have freely thrown it out there. As we have seen, you don't need any sort of reference in order to make wild claims.
My conclusion has never changed: You are financially involved in the ethanol industry, which is why you have never demonstrated any objectivity, and a sometimes comical bias.
And, my opinion of you hasn't changed. When you are losing an argument you start waving your arms and resorting to ad homs.
I don't work, and I've never worked, for any ethanol company, ag business, or any other business in which I could profit from Ethanol. You, however, have worked in the petroleum industry, and, could quite likely still have financial ties, there.
Patzek WAS an oil company consultant/lobbyist, and the money he took from them IS documented.
Name me one thing Patzek has been Right about. Just One.
Then, admit that everything I have posted about the direction of the ethanol industry, and ethanol, itself (including the subject of this post,) HAS been correct.
Or, name, specifically, where I was wrong.
Oh, and you just threw that ridiculous KARE 11 link in there to "spite" Me?
You didn't agree with something I said somewhere so you put up a piece of crap "test" (to be read by thousands of unknowing readers?)
Unbelievable!
I believe you're referring to THIS TEST in which The University of Minnesota performed a Blind Test with 40 Mixed Pairs of cars over a 1 Year time period to determine the fuel economy of E20 compared to E0 in Legacy vehicles.
I stated that the difference was .5%, and you made a big deal out of it really being 1.6% once a couple of outliers were removed (But, without removing one large outlier on the gasoline side.)
I said, okey dokey, 1.6% is fine with me.
Now, you really want to equate the Univ of Mn Test with this silliness from kare 11 that you posted?
Really?
Then, there was THIS TEST by The Univ of N. Dakota, and Mn State at Mankato that you got all het up about.
It ran four cars through the EPA Cycle Test, and found that 3 of the 4 got slightly better mileage on an ethanol blend (E20 on one, and E30 for two of them) than on unleaded 87 octane gasoline.
You kept intimating that the students might have cooked the test. They do go to College in a Farm State, after all.
Is This the test that you want to compare with the TV crew's joyride?
Is your memory truly this bad? Just to remind you, at issue was your constant insinuation that Patzek was suspect because he had oil industry ties. Yet you were happy to embrace this test funded by the American Coalition for Ethanol. Comical. Second, I also pointed out your biases in spinning the results. In fact, the majority of the tests showed a decrease in fuel efficiency on an ethanol blend - something you are remiss in mentioning. Why? Because of course it doesn't support your company line. So you put the positive spin on it, as a good lobbyist might do. Your response is of course very misleading, because one might immediately conclude that E85 generally improves fuel efficiency, when the test found just the opposite.
But I was happy to refresh your memory.
I must say that this thread is getting surreal when I find myself defending ethanol to some, and then having conversations like this with you.
I stated that the difference was .5%, and you made a big deal out of it really being 1.6% once a couple of outliers were removed (But, without removing one large outlier on the gasoline side.)
You are remembering our conversation incorrectly, not surprisingly with the pro-ethanol spin. My concern was that the results were all over the place. One vehicle reported a 66% fuel efficiency improvement on E85.
Now, you really want to equate the Univ of Mn Test with this silliness from kare 11 that you posted?
Let's see how your biases fare. In that test, the one that you endorse, one of the vehicles reportedly got 37% worse gas mileage on E85. The KARE test, however, showed 39% worse mileage and you reject it out of hand. My own conclusion would be that yes, it could in fact be that the KARE team result was legit. I would want to have more information before rejecting it out of hand. You are comfortable rejecting it out of hand (I think reject is putting it mildly) while at the same time endorsing a test that got one very similar result.
When you are losing an argument you start waving your arms and resorting to ad homs.
That is just priceless coming from you.
I don't work, and I've never worked, for any ethanol company, ag business, or any other business in which I could profit from Ethanol. You, however, have worked in the petroleum industry, and, could quite likely still have financial ties, there.
A couple of very important points to note. My identity is no secret. Yours is. Your reasons for that are your own business, but as long as you are anonymous, pardon me if I don't take your word for it when you are so consistently, comically biased in favor of ethanol.
Or, name, specifically, where I was wrong.
I have already done so. Specifically? That's quite a list. Let's start with this one, and see if you can admit it. You previously claimed that any ethanol - regardless of the source - was eligible for the ethanol subsidy. I showed where you were wrong, and you admitted that. Remember? More often what you do, though, is cast aspersions and make unsubstantiated claims.
You didn't agree with something I said somewhere so you put up a piece of crap "test" (to be read by thousands of unknowing readers?)
No. I put it out there because there were two referenced tests in there, but also because I knew it would once again bring out your biases. It did. You have made actual false claims here before, have smeared people, and did so with no evidence at all. Now you want to claim about misleading readers? You are a piece of work.
Robert, kdolliso works in the Ethanol lobby/business. There is no way around that fact.
He can link to "all" the few companies and both reports that have a "sliver of positive gist" to ethanol, and even then he fails to make the case, but mostly it's hot private fumes...
Just look at this ethanol-post of yours, kdolliso has 25% of all replies. :-)
25 percent ! He is "quite" interested .... quite. That is a new world record.
As long as he sees his triggerword :: Ethanol :: all the sudden he is filled with Ethanoleuforia and sees pink-Ethanolephants all over the place. A more strong Ethanol-lobbyist is very hard to come by IMO, but the good part : he is very easy to spot and look straight through at the same time.
Stupid smear campaign you're conducting here. If you don't know, then don't say something is a "fact".... Especially when the person in question denied your allegations.... Why would we believe you?
There are several who post here who have either pet peeves, or a specific interest in some topic or another, be it wind, geological oil finds, passive solar design part 1 thru xx, molten salt reactors, thorium, etc, etc, etc.
I have an interest in ethanol because in my opinion it does offer somewhat of a solution to the crude oil use; the CO2 issue; and the foreign dependence issue, since a lot of it could be produced rapidly in the US. And not only from corn or the fictitious cellulosic kind.
Ethanol can be used in our existing vehicles, without changing (=investing) a whole lot. I think the ethanol subsidies dwarf in comparison to what would be required to power vehicles with hydrogen or solar or wind-and-transmission-and-storage. But probably a way could be found to level the playing field by removing subsidies and taxing the other stuff. It would have one major advantage: not making some people jealous.
Of course oil has been by far the cheapest solution, but if if is indeed in short supply and if it does make us more dependent on less reputable partners, and if CO2 increases are problematic, then ..... what is your solution?
Do you refuse the idea that there exist any ethanol-lobbyists, Willem ?
They do exict- believe me, moreover to me ethanol as an energy source, is more debunked (due to EROEI arithmetics)- than even UFO's and green Marsmen.
Furthermore and most compelling ; if they look like one, articulate like one and smell like one ...... well there you go : Then they are "one", say after me : One Ethanol-Lobbyist. Simple as that.
Do you refuse the idea that there exist any ethanol-lobbyists, Willem ? I don't remember that that was even a question. And what has the question (or its answer) got to do with your senseless smearing someone?
moreover to me ethanol as an energy source, is more debunked Ethanol IS an energy source if it is subjected to oxidation. I don't know how that could even be debunked per basic principles of chemistry.
Robert, the test in question was very likely to be flawed. For example, they apparently drove from Minneapolis, MN to some point in Wisconsin, then replaced the E85 with straight gasoline and drove back to Minneapolis. It's highly likely that the winds were mostly in one direction, although they didn't mention anything about wind. Thus, going to Wisconsin, they likely had a headwind and on the return, the resulting winds might have been from the rear (MOL). Air drag is a function of the relative wind speed and any serious road testing should be done under calm winds or by driving over a closed course where the effects of head or tail winds could cancel out.
While not being a particular fan of ethanol, I do think that proper testing should have been performed. The fact that the other tests indicated better MPG further suggests that the TV crew had no clue about engineering or science. I think their results are useless, but, hey, they got their mugs on everbody's TV, so their message got out, not that of the engineers. Please remember that when your turn before the cameras arrives...
E. Swanson
Robert, the test in question was very likely to be flawed.
No doubt that these guys probably don't know much about scientific testing. But I posted that for two reasons. First, it is equivalent to a number of things Kdolliso has posted that are pro-ethanol. Second, it also mentions the results from Consumer Reports, who should know a thing or two about proper testing.
The Scania engine is compression ignition. It's apples and oranges comparing that to a spark ignition engine. I'm not sure why bumping compression ratio from 18:1 to 28:1 would just equal the thermal efficiency of a diesel. A passenger car diesel weighs a little more than a spark engine. The Mercedes E320 diesel weighs 100 lbs more than the E350. The bigger disadvantage is the expense. Compression engines are just more expensive to build because of the components that go into it.
A (spark ignition) race engine that runs on pure ethanol like the Honda Indy V8 runs about a 14-15:1 compression ratio. A street engine would have to be tuned milder for durability.
Howdy, New guy. I just want to add that my Jeep has been running on e85 since Dec. ( 2007 ) and my Jeep has more power and response and that other post that states Power on hills and cruise control holding on e85 when it wouldn't on gas. The only thing added was a plug and play unit to leave the injectors open for a fraction longer. I only lose 3 mpg. on e85, 17mpg , and use to get 20 mpg using e10 and right now it's -10 with wind chills of -30 and it starts like a charm. It has cold start assist and I believe the pulstar plugs help also. Before the $ 4 gal gas I paid for the unit in fuel savings by May of 2008. With a proper price spread which I'm lucky enough to live somewhere that has a good price for e85, miles per dollar really outweighed mpg. for gas. That was until the price of gas took a dive and out of the goodness of their hearts the oil companies dropped their prices because they realized they pushed to much with their record profits while we were all suffering the decline in the economy. On all this talk of BTU's, if an ICE was primarily a heater the btu thing would work but in an engine the heat is the wasted energy manifesting itself when it should be propelling the vehicle. If anyone really wants to find out the truth about ethanol, I suggest checking out David Blume, on the radio or check out one of his interviews on Youtube or better yet get his DVD " Alcohol Can Be A Gas " for an overview and his book of the same name for an in depth explanation of the dvd the book is 485 pages and is a complete package on ethanol. I hope people don't forget what gas did this last year and all the other times it was used as a weapon against our economy. Best wishes. Later.
DragonWhip, New Guy,
According to your bio page 'Love My Linux'
Well, then, - try a query for 'TOD + Blume'.
The real problem that I see with ethanol has nothing to do with engine efficiency. Remember that nobody really cared about efficiency when we started using the heat engine in the first place. It is the price of the fuel that people care about (as other commenters have noted). If you really want an efficient care, why not just put a liquid oxygen or compressed air tank in the car to mix with the gas or ethanol if you want to make it more efficient. There are car companies looking into this. The reason they don't mix pure oxygen with fuel is because it costs a lot of money, and it is somewhat inconvenient to fill up with two things at once.
Ethanol cannot be produced sustainably, and it cannot compete directly with gasoline without government subsidies unless you live in an environment where you can grow lots of ethanol producing crops like sugar cane nearly year round. Ethanol is expensive relative to gasoline. Personally, I think the only reason ethanol became such a fancy in the US is because the farmers wanted a way to make more money for their crops, so the lobbyists for the farmers convinced the government to spend a lot of money on putting ethanol into gasoline. It is all politics with no practicality.
Finally, if you are going to produce ethanol, why not just find a way to reform it into gasoline? It won't cost that much more, and you could do it for probably a tiny increase in cost per gallon compared to straight ethanol. For that matter, we could also make gasoline from natural gas. It is the bottom line cost/convinience that will dictate the fuel of the future; reforming other fuels into gasoline is probably the best cost/convinience way of doing things. Engine design is just a secondhand consideration after this.
"Ethanol cannot be produced sustainably, and it cannot compete directly with gasoline without government subsidies unless you live in an environment where you can grow lots of ethanol producing crops like sugar cane nearly year round. Ethanol is expensive relative to gasoline. Personally, I think the only reason ethanol became such a fancy in the US is because the farmers wanted a way to make more money for their crops, so the lobbyists for the farmers convinced the government to spend a lot of money on putting ethanol into gasoline. It is all politics with no practicality."
You must be pretty young. Back before anyone started building ethanol plants, the farmers were growing just as much corn, put a lot of it just got put in big piles and was left to rot. we saw this all the time back in the late 50's, 60's, 70's. It's all about gov't subsidies to the farmer for growing grain, has nothing to do with ethanol really. Same with soybeans.
And you are absolutely, totally, dead wrong that ethanol can't be grown sustainably. Take a look at David Blume's book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas" (http://www.permaculture.com) -- he has a very large section on sustainable crops for ethanol. It's actually even better than sustainable -- the fuel can be a freebie. Permaculture is the future.
First, while there was a lot of corn in the 50's, 60's and 70's, the government (Nixon administration) decided to tamper with the market by adding corn subsidies. This led to corn being used for everything imaginable. Corn and other food crops that can be used or ethanol, have a nice benefit in a capitalistic country because if you cannot (or will not) sell the crop for food (either for the grain or the sugar it contains), you can just make ethanol out of it. Non-food crops like switchgrass do not have nearly the value if you cannot make ethanol from them. As a result, we are probably stuck with using corn to produce ethanol in the US.
As for the web site you mention, he seems have this mentality that you can make ethanol from everything with carbohydrates: old candy, doughnuts, grains, etc. While this is technically true, if you do not have left over carbohydrates (e.g., no old candy bars) because you switch from an extremely wasteful consumer driven society to a more ecofriendly one, you cannot get the ethanol you want from these leftovers.
Finally, you are right that in some sense, that ethanol production is sustainable. I could grow some crops on a farm, make ethanol from some of them, and recycle the waste sludge for fertilizer. On a small scale, this would work. Permaculture would also work on a small scale. However, supplying the world with the amount of ethanol or all other alternative energy sources that we would need to replace an oil driven society is an enormous challenge.
Consider this. I worked at a place where they posted stickers all around that said that one acre of soybeans yields 60 gallons of biodiesel. This might sound impressive to some, but if you consider how much you would need to replace all the gasoline, you would need more than all the arable land in the world. Ethanol is touted in the same way.
Scientists are exhageratting the utility of ethanol as a replacement for gasoline. It can replace only a tiny amount of gasoline without driving up the price of food to unbelievable levels. Other forms of alternative energy like wind power to charge batteries also do not take into account several factors that are necessary to completely remove ourselves from an oil addiction. On the surface, it looks good, but when you start digging into their logic, you realize that scientists are way too optimistic. It is just a part of being a scientist; you have to gloss over some inconvenient truths to get funding these days.
Finally, even if you could replace gasoline with ethanol or other alternative energy sources, we would still be in trouble. Oil is used for SOOO much more than just fuel. Plastics, pharmaceuticals, solvents, etc., etc. are major markets for oil, and building new technology to use the ethanol is going to use oil. Nothing is as simple as it seems.
You're right about one thing, Birdy. Soybeans are a lousy biodiesel crop. Just not enough yield per acre. We'll produce a few billion gal/year with them (they're good "rotation" crops for corn farmers, and there is large demand for soy meal,) but most of our biodiesel will have to come from elsewhere.
As for Corn: when we complete the plants under construction we'll be about through with it. All of the companies that have built "cellulosic" Pilot plants are now working on their "demonstration" plants, and a couple are going straight to "Commercial." It works, and it will supply most of the ethanol in the future. Most "Localities" have a cellulosic feedstock, either available, or potentially available. Many people think that the U.S., Brazil, and DR Congo could supply the world. True, or not, it doesn't matter. You can produce cellulosic ethanol virtually anywhre.
It's a BIG World.
"Finally, you are right that in some sense, that ethanol production is sustainable. I could grow some crops on a farm, make ethanol from some of them, and recycle the waste sludge for fertilizer."
Waste sludge? You very clearly know absolutely zilch about making ethanol. The spent mash (what you are calling "waste sludge", I presume) is very high quality livestock feed. It has been used and sold as such for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It is, in fact, much better livestock feed than the corn (if that is your feedstock) was -- and, in fact, feeding too much corn to livestock makes them very sick, can even kill them. Dried distiller's grains, OTOH, is very digestible, and very high protein.
So all the old BS anti-ethanol propaganda is being spread about by brainless know-nothings who haven't the slightest clue about growing food, feeding animals, making ethanol, or what makes the world go 'round. No food is lost in the production of ethanol, even if done with corn, which I certainly don't advocate.
"On a small scale, this would work. Permaculture would also work on a small scale. However, supplying the world with the amount of ethanol or all other alternative energy sources that we would need to replace an oil driven society is an enormous challenge."
Well, actually you could probably replace all the gasoline with ethanol made from cattails grown as the secondary sewage treatment. But it's irrelevant to me, I give a rat's ass about saving the world, especially the "happy-motoring" amerikan world. I'm only interested in what works best for homesteaders, and that happens to be permaculture with ethanol production as an integral part of that whole.
Frankly I think it would be best for Mother Earth if the vast majority of the human infestation disappeared in a massive dieoff along with all their polluting machinery.
But that's another beautiful thing about ethanol -- it ain't poisonous and burning it don't pollute.
You are correct! The EPA fuel mileage estimates show much higher fuel usage on a chassis dynometer in a lab while driving a simulated driving cycle. They are, how ever well known to be nonsense in the real world. Real drivers, on the road in real vehicles, seldom get EPA Estimated fuel mileage.
My comment was to point out that fuel ethanol is an inherently superior fuel that does several things better than gasoline in a spark ignition internal combustion engine. It is those inherent characteristics of the fuel that allow it even in non-optimized engines to outperform the expected performance based on its BTU content per gallon. It is not solely dependent on high compression operation to get higher thermal efficiencies in BTU/mile than gasoline. Its higher tolerance for ignition advance and boost in turbocharged configurations also allow higher efficiencies. In low compression ratio engines, many find they can create artificial compression by running higher ignition advances than would be possible with gasoline. If these same ignition advances were run on gasoline it would destroy the engine but on E85 the fuel likes the artificial compression created by more ignition lead on many engines.
Reasons fuel ethanol is an inherently superior fuel than gasoline.
It has higher fuel octane than conventional gasoline, allowing higher compression ratios to be used. This also allows the engine to smoothly pull under high load without going into detonation. (ie ethanol fuels are more tolerant of engine lugging under load)
Its higher octane allows leaner fuel mixtures to be run without detonation in any engine.
Its higher octane allows use of more ideal ignition advance than gasoline on many engines which cannot use MBT timing on gasoline due to octane limitations.
It has wider flammability limits than gasoline allowing it to ignite at leaner relative mixtures than would be possible with gasoline.
Wider flammability limits allow richer full power mixtures than possible with gasoline resulting in up to 27% more power potential than the same engine could produce on gasoline.
Its cooler burning temperature, reduces heat losses to the cooling system for a given power level. Engines can operate at much higher load and power levels on E85 than they can on gasoline without damage due to over heating and internal damage to components.
Its higher cooling power from evaporation increases the engines volumetric efficiency by producing a cooler fuel air mixture at the moment the intake valve closes.
Its higher latent heat of evaporation reduces negative work necessary for the engine to compress the fuel air mixture during the compression stroke. The compression process is more isothermal with alcohol fuels than with gasoline hydrocarbon fuels.
It burns faster during the fast burn portion of the combustion process, with a longer delay in the slow burn phase of combustion. This reduces negative work during the later portion of the compression cycle. (ignition occurs during the last 20-30 degrees of the compression cycle on most engines). The faster burn near TDC more closely approaches ideal carnot cycle efficiency.
Higher exhaust gas volume per intake air burned results in higher average pressure during the power stroke. (The pressure drop as the piston moves down the cylinder is slower with the exhaust mixture produced by ethanol fuels than with gasoline).
Ethanol's (E85)behavior as a fuel changes driver behavior in the real world. He is able to short shift at lower rpms, due to the fuels willingness to pull under heavy load, reducing revs per mile. The car will pull hills without down shifting in many cases. This also changes the way drivers accelerate. Due to higher load acceptance of the engine, and higher power output on E85, the driver spends less time on the throttle to accelerate that he would on gasoline. In highway passing merging situations drivers can simply tip into the throttle to change speed without needing to down shift to a lower gear. This results in more time in light throttle cruise in the highest possible gear on the highway.
(These some of the reasons EPA estimated fuel mileage numbers suck - real drivers do not use the same throttle application or shifting sequence on E85 that they do with gasoline in the same car.
I do not quibble with the comment that many Detroit cars suck as E85 FFV's and get terrible fuel mileage> This is more a case of "in spite of" the strengths of E85 rather than due to any weakness in E85. The current CAFE standards provide absolutely no motivation for the manufactures to make any attempt to get good fuel mileage on E85, all the car has to do is run without stalling and they get the CAFE credit.
The current FFV's are for the most part object lessons on how NOT to design a FFV. It is instructive that back yard conversions frequently far exceed the Detroit FFV's in both performance and fuel mileage. I got 92% of my gasoline fuel mileage on E85 with my first conversion setup.The only reason my current fuel mileage is down to 85% is that the car is now making much more power (bigger turbo higher boost than I could run on gasoline) and I have trouble keeping my foot out of it since it is so fun to drive. I couldn't run my current setup on gasoline without burning $6 - $8 per gallon high octane racing gasoline, yet it runs just fine on $1.89/gallon pump E85.
Recent tests show that many engines have ideal blends of ethanol and gasoline where they get higher absolute fuel mileage than they can on straight gasoline. Many drivers using blender pumps or splash blending in the tank find their cars run best at fuel ethanol/gasoline mixtures of between 30% - 60% ethanol with no conversions of any kind required to run these higher blends.
Larry
Your description fits the theoretical engineering and your efforts show what might be done. However, there are other factors to consider, such as, emissions. The car makers must build for all markets and most people live in metro areas. The resulting pollution problems have limited what might be allowed on production engines because of mandated limits of emissions.
If you live in an area with low population density, what ever pollution your engines produce wouldn't make much difference, but, in a city, it would could be a big problem. Studies have shown that most of the pollution in metropolitan areas comes from a small fraction of the vehicles. Those vehicles are typically operated with broken emission controls or they have been tampered with. Since we all breath the same air, it's in everybody's interest to drive vehicles which do not pollute. That some fraction of the population feels they have a right to pollute makes it that much harder for the rest of us, since the pollution controls on the clean cars must be set to much lower levels to compensate for the few big polluters. That might include you.
E. Swanson
I think the next generation of cars will have a small battery pack for 5-10 miles all electric range with small engines powering range extenders. A two cylinder turbocharged boxer engine could churn out 20kW from a very small and light unit. With the batteries mounted low in the car, the weight distribution would make the vehicle very stable. The vehicle would have the benefits of electric drive (regen breaking, high torque at low speeds etc) without having to carry the extra weight of the batteries.
"While this is all true in theory, it won't be achieved with a massive roll-out of E85 capable vehicles. Why not? Because these engines are designed to run on either gasoline or ethanol blends up to E85. Therefore, the compression ratio can't be too high, or the ability to run on gasoline would be lost. The best way to take advantage of the high compression issue would be to develop a fleet of vehicles that can run on pure ethanol, and whose compression ratios are designed specifically for ethanol. That would mean that these vehicles would be incapable of running on gasoline (but could perhaps be made to run on diesel)."
Well, duh! The solution is so damned simple -- you just put a turbo on the engine. That raises your effective compression ration to whatever you want it to be, or rather, whatever the crank, rods, and piston top will tolerate. And then you have a computer that automagically senses how much to enrichen the fuel, how much boost, how much spark advance, etc.
You need to read David Blume's book "Alcohol Can Be A Gas" (http://www.permaculture.com), this is all old technology at this point. Any car on the road today can burn E85 with a new computer like the Megasquirt, and can have a turbo added to vastly increase the efficiency. I run straight E85 all the time in my '91 Toyota pickup and get more power than with gasoline simply because my funky old computer just keeps right on enrichening the fuel mixture until the O2 sensor says "whoa" and at the same time keeps right on increasing the spark advance until the knock sensor says "stop" and that's way beyond the point that it does it with gasoline -- so, more power to the drivetrain.
We could convert every vehicle on the road to run on ethanol with very little real cost compared to building whole new cars. And yes, of course, engines can be specifically designed to run extremely efficiently on straight ethanol and with vastly better power and mpg than gasoline -- and they will also last 3 times as long because they will run so much cleaner and cooler. Lubricating oil will last many times longer because it will no longer be contaminated with all that nasty carbon.
Read Blume's book, it's all in there -- this really has been thought through and engineered many, many years ago.
And he also answers the corn/ethanol bullshit too -- nobody in their right mind would use corn to make ethanol if it weren't for all the gov't subsidies that the farmers get to grow it. Before ethanol came around, they just piled it up in huge mounds all over the US and let it rot. There are ever so many really great crops to grow for ethanol that you only plant once, never fertilize, never need herbicides or insecticides or fungicides. Corn with lots of chemical/fossil fuel inputs will only produce 400 gallons of ethanol per acre at best, many crops will give you double that with no inputs, no replanting, and some will give you 1500 gallons per acre with no inputs or replanting.
The whole anti-biofuel scam is just that, a BS scam. There is no food lost in the production of ethanol, even with corn. You have better food coming out than going in, and the fuel is extra.
Ulfheiden (did I spell that correctly?:)
The next logical step is to combine the variable ratio turbocharger with "Displacement on Demand." GM is already running engines with this D on D technology.
What this means is: If a person wants 140 hp, and 35 mpg (just, to pick a data set out of thin air) they can have it with both gasoline, and e85 in the same vehicle.
When running gasoline the computer would activate all cylinders, and tone down the turbo. When running ethanol mixtures the computer would shut down two (or four, if it's a v-8) cylinders, and ramp up the turbo. Of course, in WOT situations the computer would allow the other two (4) cylinders to kick in. This way you would get the best of both worlds. I predict GM will be the first with this.
So, if big diesel engines have higher compression and are easiest to convert/modify/redisign for E85,
would one use case that makes sense be farm tractors? It strikes me that farmers would be willing
to pay some amount for the ability to choose the cheapest fuel at any given time, and have some insurance
against global issues, if they can make a deal with the local ethanol plant they supply corn/biomass to.
Does this make sense for a farmer in the real world?
That's a great question, Fringy
A lot of farmers are running biodiesel mixtures, now. John Deere is a big factor, here. When you depend on a $60,000.00 tractor to feed your family you're not going to do anything that negates the "warrantee."
It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out.
Actually that issue is trivial to solve.
All you need to do, is design a small displacement moderate compression ratio engine with a turbocharger, and configure it so it can run a variable boost pressure depending on the effective octane of the fuel in the tank. Run it as a high boost engine on E85, a low boost engine on straight gasoline, and moderate boost levels on intermediate blends.
Some of us are doing this manually with electronic boost controllers and it works quite well. On a 2 liter engine with a base compression ratio of 8:1 you never need more than about 6 psi boost for sane daily driving. Even then it is only needed during acceleration from stop lights and for passing, and merging maneuvers. Drop the engine displacement to a 1200 cc engine, and run it at 6-8 psi boost on gasoline and 12-16 psi boost on E85 (E85 will tolerate 35-42 psi boost in a 8:1 compression ratio engine). You would have all the performance a soccer mom would need for daily errands, and enough performance for quick safe merging and passing, along with the idle fuel consumption of a motor cycle.
With real time computer engine management it can alter the manifold boost pressure to optimize the engine performance for the fuel blend as you drive, and according to you needs. Give the driver a switch setting of "economy", "daily driving", and "sporty", and you could change the performance of the car just like I do with my conversion. In the winter time I never run over about 5 psi boost, it simply is not usable with cold tires and wet icy streets. I would be fighting to control the car with the power available at higher boost settings. On warm sunny days when I want to get a bit "sporty" I can dial the boost up to 18-25 psi boost on E85 and hang on!!
Larry
RR...havent been able to find any compression ratio increase in the Saab Biopower engine. Looking at the parts list, the only differences between the BioP and not is fuel injectors, regulator, pump, tank, lines, intake valves, spark plugs and Trionic brainbox. The pistons, rods, crank, head...all the same.
I guess my biggest problem with Ethanol and esp. cornE is the amount of high BTU diesel required to cultivate and transport the final product. Even the Saab Biopower is hard pressed to get to mid-20s mpg and honestly petrol turbod Saabs have been getting that and more for decades, so any alternative fuel ideally would/should get much better mileage.
Many of the worlds trains, trucks, tractors, ships and some cars run on diesel and this will continue to be the "heavy-lifting" fuel. With the unrelenting worldwide demand(and higher price) for diesel fuel(and the possibility of renewable jet fuel), as well as cetane and lubricity improvers, 47+Cetane BIODIESEL should be the priority. Ethanol will always run into the price problem of abundant gasoline.
Its really quite amazing how much better the only 40+mpg US Saab diesel(or any diesel FTM) runs on BioD during the warm months as opposed to the crap 40Cetane during the winter.
I have to reply to this post for several reasons.
Firstly as I work for an MTBE producer I can categorically state that at this stage there is no data that conclusively confirms that MTBE is carcinogenic. If it were then at the concentrations in gasoline (up to 15%) it would be banned. The US ban relates to groundwater contamination, particularly in the US West Coast and not due to health effects. At high concentrations MTBE will probably harm humans, if inhaled or ingested, but then so would ethanol, methanol and most other hydrocarbons.
Secondly, there is the rather misleading statement that ethanol in a CI engine can be made more efficient than a conventional diesel engine ( A CI engine is a diesel engine). As thermodynamic efficiency is a function of compression ratio then simply cranking up the compression ratio on a conventional diesel engine will improve overall efficiency. Moreover with a bit of tweaking a diesel fuel could be made to easily outperform ethanol. Ethanol is not ideally suited for CI engines as the autoignition temperature is around 360 deg C which is partly why ethanol has a high RON and MON value (flame speed is also a factor)
The best diesel fuels have low autoignition temperatures , say 220+ deg C, which reduces the delay time between injection and ignition start. The longer the ingnition delay then the more likely the fuel will detonate, giving rise to diesel knock. This happens particularly at low speed.
Any motor fuel containing oxygen in the molecule is at a disadvantage against a pure hydrocarbon, as as long as the engine is able to obtain the oxidant (oxygen) from air.
Ethanol can be used in CI engines and it would be possible to run the air: fuel ratio closer to stoichiometric without incurring unacceptable smoke. This would enable a high BHP per litre of displacement compared to a conventional diesel fuel.
All conventional diesel engines run in lean burn mode out of necessity in order to reduce smoke emissions in the exhaust, and the excess air has the effect of diluting the product gases and reduce combustion temperatures, therefore reducing overall thermal efficiency. Better thermal efficiency could be acheived at stoichiometric ratio.
In general it would be expected that ethanol woould have a lower combustion temperature than a diesel fuel, composed of paraffins, naphthenes and aromatics. Much depends on the design of the combustion chamber; the difference in flame temperatures could be one hundred degrees K.
The higher the combustion temperature then the better overall thermal efficiency. This is why gas turbines are being operated at ever higher temperatures. Remember (t2-t1)/t2 in deg K of course.
Last but not least as the compression ration on the engine is increased then so does the stress. Making a small very high compression diesel it not cheap.
I hope that this is of interest.