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Cellulosic Ethanol Reality Begins to Set In
Posted by Robert Rapier on December 7, 2010 - 11:00am
Delusional Mandates
It is hard to believe that just a few short years ago, Congress mandated a massive increase in usage of cellulosic ethanol. This was remarkable, because no commercial cellulosic ethanol facilities even existed at the time. But people like Vinod Khosla were busy testifying before Congress that the only thing holding the industry back was more funding, and if they would provide the funding we could replace all of our gasoline consumption with cellulosic ethanol.
So Congress mandated in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act that we would use 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2010, 250 million gallons in 2011, and then rapidly expand to 16 billion gallons per year by 2022. At the time, I saw a very appropriate analogy that summed up the situation: “It’s like trying to solve a traffic problem by mandating hovercraft. Except we don’t have hovercraft.”
I tried to bring a dose of reality to the debate in this blog. I have worked on cellulosic ethanol myself. I know first hand the challenges. Biomass has low energy density relative to fossil fuels, and thus a conversion facility must have easy logistical access. In most cases, this means that biomass must be sourced close to the facility. This puts some limits on the size of biomass facilities, so they suffer from the lack of economies of scale. I have harped on this logistical issue for years, and a newly released study from Purdue reiterates the points I have made: “Without solving the logistical issues, commercial production of second-generation biofuels will not take place.”
Further, cellulose generally makes up less than 50% of the composition of biomass, limiting the biomass fraction that can be converted into ethanol. The fraction that is converted ends up as a dilute beer of generally around 4% ethanol and 96% water. This makes the energy requirements of purifying cellulosic ethanol very high. Of course if you listen to Bob Dinneen and the guys at the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), they say the issue is that not enough money is being thrown at the problem. But that’s their answer to anything ethanol-related: We need more money.
Commercialization attempts for cellulosic ethanol date back over 100 years. Germany was the first to commercialize cellulosic ethanol in 1898. Commercialization came to the U.S. in 1910, when Standard Alcohol Company built a cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgetown, South Carolina to process waste wood from a lumber mill. Standard Alcohol later built a second plant in Fullteron, Louisiana. Each plant was designed for 5,000 gallons of ethanol per day from wood waste, and both were in production for several years. Both plants were eventually closed due to lack of economic viability.
Snap Back to Reality
In early 2010, 100 years after the first cellulosic ethanol plant was built in the U.S., the EPA recognized that the cellulosic ethanol mandates could not be met. They subsequently reduced the 100 million gallon mandate for 2010 to 6.5 million gallons. (Actual qualifying production of cellulosic ethanol through October 2010 is zero gallons). MIT Technology Review posed the question What’s Holding Biofuels Back? I responded with the answer in What’s Really Holding Cellulosic Biofuels Back. I have maintained that future mandates would also have to be cut, and the EIA recently indicated that they agree, at least for 2011:
EIA cuts cellulosic producers from 2011 list
The U.S. DOE’s Energy Information Administration has completed its predictions for next year’s cellulosic biofuels production and estimates that actual production levels will be much lower than anticipated. Earlier this year, the U.S. EPA proposed a reduction in the cellulosic biofuels portion of the 2011 renewable fuel standard (RFS) to between 5 and 17.1 million gallons, down drastically from the 250 million gallons initially called for in the 2007 RFS. But according to an Oct. 20 letter sent from EIA Administrator Richard Newell to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, the EPA’s reduced target is still too high. The EIA suggests that a more likely 2011 production total for cellulosic biofuels is approximately 3.94 million gallons. Additionally, the EIA said half of the facilities on the EPA’s list won’t produce biofuels next year.
So the EIA projects that 2011 cellulosic ethanol production will be 3.94 million gallons, less than 2% of the originally mandated amount. They suggest that the EPA, having cut the 2011 estimate from 250 million to the range of 5 to 17.1 million gallons, is still much too optimistic, and that half of the facilities that the EPA expects to produce cellulosic fuel will not. Following the EIA story, the EPA has come back and revised their 2011 numbers down to 6.6 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol.
Better Late Than Never
Back to the EIA report, they were quite frank in their assessment of Range Fuels. If you recall, I was the first to point fingers at the vast disconnect between Range Fuels’ early, hyped up promises and the constantly diminishing expectations of what they would actually deliver:
Broken Promises from Range Fuels
I contrasted the more than $320 million that they have taken in and the promises of a 100 million gallon cellulosic ethanol plant (which they had said would cost $150 million) with this year’s admission that they would only have 4 million gallons of methanol capacity. But you wait, they insisted. They were going to get that plant up on methanol, and then switch over to ethanol and all would be right in the world. But they just needed more money.
Oh, I had my critics. Defenders of Range — including Range themselves — began to come out and insist that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Well, the EIA had something to say about that:
Range Fuels Inc., which was excluded from the EPA’s proposal, is expected by the EIA to provide 1 million gallons of methanol next year. The plant’s Soperton, Ga., capacity is 4 million gallons, however, “we assumed a 25 percent utilization rate due to its repeated inability to meet stated production goals,” Newell wrote.
Repeated inability to meet production goals. Range Fuels is starting to look like the Pets.com of the cellulosic ethanol world. They won’t be alone, but they are the highest profile example of cellulosic hype colliding with cellulosic reality.
Conclusion – Technological Breakthroughs Can Not Be Mandated
Personally, I don’t believe large-scale commercialization of cellulosic ethanol will ever be viable due to the aforementioned fundamental issues with biomass conversion and efficiency, and will ultimately be relegated to the role of a niche fuel provider (as discussed in Biofuel Niches). The heart of the problem here was the idea that technology can be mandated. Imagine that in 2005 Congress put forward a mandate that lung cancer would be cured by 2010, breast cancer by 2012, and by 2020 all cancers would be cured. People would think they were absolutely daft, because more people understand the difficulties involved in coping with cancer. On the other hand the general public doesn’t have a clue of the difficulties in economically turning cellulose into fuel, but they did hear a lot of hypesters in the news saying that it would be easy — as long as you get that Silicon Valley “know how” working on the problem. But the Silicon Valley players learned that Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to the energy business.
It is great to have lofty goals, but when you start to base your energy policy on fairy dust, you are setting yourself up for massive problems down the road. Technology breakthroughs can’t simply be mandated. Sometimes critical breakthroughs happen, and sometimes they don’t. In the case of cellulosic ethanol, commercial viability remains out of sight.
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I've known of one facility that experimented with/used lignite (or lignine, the parts of wood fiber)(instead of cellulose) and logistics was a problem with that. Oh well; maybe there's just a built in capacity limit that we just can't go over.
It's reminiscent of the old story of King Canute and the tide. King Canute sat on his throne on the seashore and commanded the tide not to come in. Of course, the tide came in anyway and King Canute got his feet wet.
The US Congress seems to have a similar approach to nature - they commanded cellulosic ethanol to happen, and of course it didn't happen. It's not the first time something like this has happened.
It does bring up the question of why politicians think they can make the impossible happen just by commanding it to happen. Is there something about political power that makes people think they have Godlike control over what is possible and what is not possible?
Yes indeed, though Knut in his day was actually trying to persuade his advisers that reality was ... er ... reality. Not sure they got the point though.
Nassim Taleb's piece in The Economist (yesterday's Drumbeat) puts the general problem nicely: my emphasis:
http://www.economist.com/node/17509373
From Taleb's piece:
1985, which would be Taleb's 25 year point, sits right in the middle of an interesting technology transitional period. Microprocessors had reached the price point where personal computers were available for businesses and the upper middle class consumer, but had not reached the point where embedded processors became ubiquitous. Today's implementations of some of Taleb's "robust" technologies is highly dependent on cheap powerful microprocessors. Take away the current level of integrated circuit technology and the existing product line of cars and planes are largely unrepairable. As are the production facilities for making them.
The bookcase is an interesting subject for discussion. Going forward from where we are now, is it better to return to complete reliance on paper, or to abandon paper entirely? There's a lot to be said for the idea of getting rid of paper. Yes, you need a relatively high-tech reader at the end of the supply chain. But in exchange you get enormous reductions in space and energy everywhere else between the author and the reader.
Actually, Taleb suggests which way he thinks things will go with this:
Who can raise the $8B or so that a new state-of-the-art fab line costs without debt or stock?
There is a proposal for one in Iowa (POET) which plans to use more than 300,000 tons of corn stalks, cobs and leaves to make 25 million gal. of cellulosic ethanol annually, starting early in 2012:
http://www.iowafarmertoday.com/articles/2010/12/03/top_stories/03cobs.txt
25 M gallons from 300 K tons is 83 gallons per ton.
56 lbs/bu shelled corn produces 90 to 100 gal/ton.
Good luck! And thats before the commercial process has been proven.
Cellulosic ethanol is dead. It is a bad idea. If there is so much poor land with grass/trees on it, that land should be used for cattle grazing.
Animals are the most efficient cost effective way to use grass. Grazing animals do the harvesting work and turn cellulose into meat/milk directly. Trees are bulky and expensive to harvest. Anyone who has cut wood for heating knows it.
Furthermore if cellulose were to have a market price put on it that reflects its use for ethanol, it would likely cause land to be diverted from grain crops to cellulosic feedstock production since costs for the farmer would be much less.
Brazil's success with ethanol is based on a crop that is clearly human food, sugar. Growing crops that have multiple uses is good policy.
In the case of corn, we know it has many uses. If crop failure should occur, corn ethanol plants will be temporarily shut down thus freeing up corn supply for its other uses.
If cellulose is ethanol's feedstock, there is no gain for other uses by shutting down ethanol plants. The land is committed to ethanol. This is not a good idea.
Locally farmers are taking a dim view of harvesting corn stover and such for ethanol. Poet is not offering a very good price and recently was forced to let farmers deliver bales of corn stover/cobs instead of insisting on cobs only which require special expensive havesting equipment costing about $100,000.
The whole idea that farmers are going to fight with corn residue at harvest is nuts, at least here is north Iowa. Farmers are not that desperate anymore for a little extra cash. Corn prices have been good lately, primarily due to wheat crop failures around the world. Wheat is corn's main competitor in its use as feed.
Land prices have been on a tear as farmers with money burning holes in their pockets out bid each other for what land is available.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20101205/BUSINESS01/12050343/-1...
Now big money has discovered farm land too:
http://www.farmersca.com/index.cfm?show=4&id=0702BF51
The wheat disaster in Russia, Ukraine, and Pakistan is well known. But there are also wheat problems in South America. Recently Australia has been receiving excess rain that is damaging wheat to such an extend that it can only be used for animal feed. Australian exports likely will be reduced.
Western Kansas winter wheat is not sprouting and laying in dry dirt waiting for moisture.
Land that produces 150 bushel corn at $5/bushel grosses $750 per acre. An extra $20-50 from corn stover doesn't look like much.
Especially when land has jumped about $1000 per acre just since October around here.
Most farmers are old and have their land paid for long ago at low prices.
A neighbor told me last September that he paid $5000/acre at a recent land auction. I was shocked since I thought good land was going for about $4000. Now I see reports of land going for $6400/acre. The most recent gossip is that someone paid $7000 per acre.
Near zero interest rates on bank savings and the risky stock/bond market make land look attractive. Farmers are not going to fuss with nickel and dime cellulosic ethanol, at least for now.
If there is so much poor land with grass/trees on it, that land should be used for cattle grazing.
Why not leave it as trees? we don't have to use every acre for cattle.
Trees are bulky and expensive to harvest. Anyone who has cut wood for heating knows it.
So is corn, as anyone who has harvested it by hand knows. That is why we use machinery, and there is plenty of machinery for harvesting wood of all different types and sizes.
if cellulose were to have a market price put on it that reflects its use for ethanol, it would likely cause land to be diverted from grain crops to cellulosic feedstock production since costs for the farmer would be much less.
So you are against giving farmers more options to farm their land in a more profitable, and probably sustainable, way?
If crop failure should occur, corn ethanol plants will be temporarily shut down thus freeing up corn supply for its other uses.
Really? And how, then, will the mandated ethanol volumes be met?
Farmers are not that desperate anymore for a little extra cash.
Land prices have been on a tear as farmers with money burning holes in their pockets out bid each other for what land is available.
So you would be OK with giving up the corn growing subsidy, and the ethanol VEETC, and most other farming subsidies then? With all these farmers having so much money in their pockets, there is no evidence that the ethanol scheme has been a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to corn farmers, is there?
Cellulosic ethanol has indeed been a bad idea, but that doesn't mean that corn ethanol was good one either.
If there is so much poor land with grass/trees on it, that land should be used for cattle grazing.
Why not leave it as trees? we don't have to use every acre for cattle.
Sure, instead of thinking everything in nature should be of use to us lets just put some aside for other species. Concidering the above background extinction rate is estimated at something like 5000 species per year it would seem to be a prudent policy.
Animals are the most efficient cost effective way to use grass.
Unfortunately, you can't fill your gas tank with cows.
Unfortunately, you can't fill your gas tank with cows.
No, but you can take the engine out of your car and pull it behind a horse.
During the Depression, Americans called them Hoover Wagons , after then-President Herbert Hoover. (Being in Canada, my grandfather had a Bennett Buggy , named after Prime Minister R.B. Bennett). They were quite popular on the roads of North America.
You could call them "Obama Buggies", or find some new acronym to name it after whoever his successor is.
If the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.
Reality bites. On the bright side, a lot of starving actors got gigs pushing cellulosic on TV. Sadly, we are all off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of oz.
There's no logical reason to use biomass to make ethanol when you could use urban and rural biowaste to produce methanol. Methanol could be used as an alternative fuel for gasoline or it could easily be converted into high octane gasoline through the MTG process. The tiny country of New Zealand use to manufacture 600,000 tonnes per year of gasoline from methanol during the 1980s which it would blend into its regular fossil fuel derived gasoline pool. Carbon neutral gasoline could also be produced from nuclear power plants using the Green Freedom process or by simply utilizing the abundant waste CO2 from biomass synfuel plants.
We should mandate that all gasoline utilized in the US should contain at least 10% gasoline from carbon neutral sources by the year 2020, with the penalty of a heavy sin tax on any gasoline sold in America that doesn't reach this meager percentage, in order to establish a clean synfuel industry in the US. This mandate should be raised to 50% by the year 2030 and up to 90% by the year 2040. But we need to start creating new clean energy synfuel industries and jobs in the US and in the rest of the world-- immediately!
Marcel F. Williams
You cannot mandate the impossible.
But, and celulosic is just one case among many, it is frequently done. You can even expect it to work. Its just that at the end of the day, will come disapointment.
A technique called “biomass fast pyrolysis” rapidly heats organic material to about 950C. This process produces a synthetic fuel precursor feedstock called Syngas (from synthetic gas) in about one second or less. This transformation of biomass to fuel is four to five orders of magnitude faster than through the biological routes, permitting reactor systems that are several thousand times smaller. The higher the temperature of the pyrolysis reaction, the smaller the reactor required to support the reaction. A smaller reactor means lower construction and operational costs.
Molten Salt Oxidation Process (MSOP) is an ecologically safe and sustainable method to convert organic matter including, wood, paper and paper processing sludge, crop waste, hard human waste, sewage, animal manure, packing and processing waste, animal fats and just about any other kinds of organic wastes you can think of into high quality fuel.
The MSOP process takes place in an all-closed reactor within a molten salt bath, in which all materials separate into synthetic gas, H2, and H20. End product of the reactor is either bio-gas or synthetic gas which can further be used to produce electricity, gasoline through gas-synthesis, bio diesel, bio gasoline A-95, LPG, and other energy products.
MSOP is most sustainable when the molten salt is heated using a high temperature (950C) nuclear reactor. A nuclear reactor is only 30% efficient when producing electricity but it is 100% efficient when it produces industrial process heat. A small high temperature nuclear reactor can produce prodigious amounts of process heat.
The MOSP is a universal method allowing utilization of all types of organic waste featuring a single simple common interface. This process is extremely simple and is comprised of a minimal number of stages for preparation of syngas to the fuel formulation process.
The molten salt supports raw materials with high moisture content. This is an important feature when the feedstock is primarily sewage.
If all the animal and human wastes that are currently produced in America were converted to liquid fuels, this synthetic fuel source would provide four times more liquid fuel than is currently consumed in the USA and without any impact on the world’s food supply.
As far as logistics go, in the US, animal waste production is most away centralized within gigantic livestock operations. Waste derived from such operations can be inexpensively transported to centralized fuel processing conversion plants using pipe lines carrying wastes in a water suspension.
In the MOSP process, the optimal operating temperatures ranges of the molten salt are 900-950C. The molten salt heat transfer medium effectively, evenly and rapidly transfers heat onto organic compounds with virtually no heat loss.
Since the process heat for this process ideally comes from nuclear power, it eliminates one of the big downsides of biofuel production; it does not deplete the soil of vital nutrients. The residual char and ash from the process is captured as a soil additive to replenish the soil producing the organic material. This also removes and sequesters additional CO2 from the air thereby mitigating global warming and at the same time makes the land more productive.
Under a cap and trade CO2 payment system, this carbon sequestration capability will afford an additional revenue stream.
The MOSP process is one important payoff in the development a small high temperature nuclear reactor with a process heat output of 950C, such a reactor will be available from India sometime after 2014. This reactor is called the Compact High Temperature Reactor (CHTR) and is being designed and built in India.
By the way, amazingly the CHTR uses only 2 kilograms of U233 (a uranium isotope) derived from thorium to power its operation. India clearly sees the utility and potential in high temperature process heat production. The US, on the other hand, is destroying its stockpile of U233 at a cost of $ .6 billion (and counting).
In the US, the MSOP process can be a leading application of this type of U233 reactor.
Good points ausgang.
The Syngas is like stemcells, in that, Syngas can be morphed into many different fuels.
Methanol can be easily produced from it too.
This is only true for old, low-temperature steam cycles; a high-temperature reactor will be able to take advantage of other cycles. Vaclav Dostal has calculated that a reactor operating at 550°C can hit 42% net electric efficiency using a supercritical CO2 cycle; at 900°C, one would expect efficiency on the order of 53% or so.
950°C is a very high temperature even for molten-salt reactors. Supercritical water oxidation only requires temperatures around 600°C, and may be more feasible in the near term (especially for wet feedstocks).
Yes, this is all fine. But what is the end cost of the product? If MSOP produces fuel utilizing such gloriously high tech and expensive processes (nuclear power to produce fuel???) for our gas tanks at $5+/litre (over $20/gallon), then what is the point of making such an exorbitantly expensive attempt at propping up the private car, of which there are 280 million in the US and Canada? What kind of investments will have to be made to provide that order of magnitude output? How would it be possible for the average citizen to afford running a car, let alone the average of 1.3 per suburban family? To me the problem isn't necessarily confined to fuel, but the machine it is meant for.
No one is saying don't find a way to produce fuel from urban and agricultural waste, but would someone please attach realistic costs to these complex technological "solutions"? Once that's done, then I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the conclusion is we can't afford to prop up private personal transport much beyond the time oil depletion really sets in. Perhaps the solution will be multi-layered and include the displacement of cars with transit in our cities, which already has known costs and benefits, and save ever more scarce petroleum for emergency, farm and highest priority commercial vehicles.
That would still leave small towns out of the loop, and here in British Columbia, a disappointment in what to do with the trillions of dead pine trees covering millions of hectares before they go up in the next set of forest fires. The issue should be to find solutions that are affordable in a world with shrinking economies.
To some extent, why not? Nuclear heat is very, very cheap. As long as the fuel doesn't require expensive inputs (like electrolytic hydrogen), the products can be inexpensive to produce.
Dumping biomass into molten material is quite cheap. Sodium and potassium salts consume materials like chlorine which would otherwise create noxious byproducts. Tin-iron eutectic may be usable also; tin isn't cheap, but it's not consumed in the process. The problem is that we are years away from being able to do this at scale.
Cut, remove and place under cover. I'd suggest cutting them into veneers and processing to preserve them, like the Accoya scheme. Preserved veneers can be used as structural material, and once preserved and wound into rolls they could be shrink-wrapped and warehoused outdoors indefinitely.
Cellulosic Ethanol’s Time May Finally Have Come
The EPA reminds me of various marketing executives that make statements to the effect "the software will do X". Substitute your favorite currently technically infeasible problem for X.
The need for morality begins to sink in....
Dear Friends,
If it pleases you to do so, carefully consider two words, only two, that we have seen and heard since the beginning of Western culture. If ever there was a timeless shibboleth of humanity, it has been eternalized in two words from Socrates, “Know thyself”.
Unfortunately, self-knowledge of the kind Socrates spoke is not voguish or a guarantor of success or easily achieved like accumulating money, gaining position and power, and doing politically convenient and economically expedient things. Educated sychophants, absurdly enriched minions and other vendors of words have been adamantly putting forward anything and everything imaginable that promote the supreme and selfish interests of the wealthy and powerful. Every bias and rationalization under the sun has been employed; every rhetorical device and ideological artifact used to minimize or deny the import in these words from Socrates. These two words tell us where we need to look for knowledge, finally, after we have looked everywhere else and regarded everything else in the Universe. I fear modern cultural determinants, the ones pervading human thought and action as well as leading us to ignore watchwords of the likes of Socrates and to leave knowledge of self to the very last, could turn out to be a distinctly human flaw. Let us agree here and now that this flaw is not necessarily fatal and that there is still time to gain knowledge of self, and respond ably to the human-induced global ecological challenges looming before human species.
Greed rules the world and rules it absolutely in our time; but that is not the way things have to be, I believe. The meaningful re-introduction of moral courage as well as intellectual honesty, personal accountability and the exercise of individual will power could change the human world fast and also save the Earth as a fit place for the children to inhabit.
Perhaps such attitudinal and behavioral changes lead us to restore moral authority as the centering guidepost for human action.
Sincerely,
Steve
PS: As for what to do about the dishonest and duplicitous deployment of the governing principle of "greed is good" by the most foolhardy, arrogant and avaricious among us, I hope others will comment.
Steve, in every species to date evolution has been facilitated by each individual seeking to replicate itself better than any other of its sort. If mankind is like every other animal, then we are truly doomed, for greed by an individual, and more correctly "successful greed" will make that person, and its genetic progeny, the survivors, until mankind destroys itself.
The only hope would be that the evolution of the human brain to enable planning and cooperation might be a more successful meme for humanity. Given our last election, and the history of the past 30 years, I would say that is not the case. But I could be wrong, and that in itself is all that gives me hope.
Craig
But no other species and no other human culture besides (now global) industrial capitalism has made the legitimation of greed and the belief in the possibility, desirability and necessity of endless growth the centerpieces of their ideology.
There are an indefinitely large number of ways of living in the world sustainably.
We have chosen the one way that is not.
And we seem to be sticking to it to the utter end.
But not here please. Perhaps Drumbeat.
I leave your comment because I happen to agree with you, but lets keep these threads on the topic/details of the keypost. Thanks.
Very nicely put. I hope you don't mind if I use parts of this in classes on sustainability, morality and philosophy.
I used the biblical quote "Physician, heal thyself" (Luke 4:23) on the closing slide of my first-ever public presentation on climate change and peak oil last Sunday.
"This suggests that physicians, while often being able to help the sick, cannot always do so and, when sick themselves, are no better placed than anyone else." (wikipedia)
Dear dohboi, Hugh Campbell and Nate Hagens,
Your insights are most helpful. Thank you for all of them.
Nate, I will be on the look-out for a Drumbeat thread that appears appropriate and comment there. If you please, would you work with Gail Tverberg, Jason C. Bradford, Rune Likvern, Rembrandt, my TOD/FB friend Fred Magyar, memmel, Professor Emeritus Gary L. Peters and other editors of TOD to feature a discussion on human population dynamics. You have likely noted already that there has been more and more attention paid lately to the global ecological challenges posed to humankind by the human overpopulation of the Earth, but no one is commenting on scientific research regarding what could be causing this population explosion, eg, human population dynamics. Please consider that we have before us both the need to acknowledge what appears to be the “mother” of human-driven global challenges: the human overpopulation of Earth, and the very last of the last taboos regarding the human species: human population dynamics. Perhaps there is the problem, human overpopulation, and also at least one possible cause, which is to be found in the science of human population dynamics. If we know that the human population is exploding worldwide in a soon to become patently unsustainable way, but deny scientific evidence of why the population explosion is occurring, how on Earth are people to make meaningful behavioral changes required for sustainability?
Sincerely,
Steve
Thank you Robert, I've come to appreciate greatly both your practicality in explaining biofuels issues as well as your insights, which continue to hold as time goes on.
I am most especially mindful of the scope of failures that abound from Range Fuels to the absence of timely performance across the entire array of DOE-funded advanced fuel projects over the past four years. An incredible amount of scarce public resources were dedicated to advanced biofuels without the kind of R & D and ROI due diligence that would be expected of other types of competing opportunities for using public money. Couple that with Congressionally-turbo-charged expansions in corn ethanol production, and we now have a publicly-funded alternative fuels superstructure that cannot sustain itself without very expensive life-support.
I'm standing tall behind you in saluting Mr Rapier for his presentations. They are easy to follow for a layman like myself , but I feel like a 'local' expert just after finished reading.
The good thing with trying and failing with alternative silly fuels at this stage ... there is still "a lot" of oil left for the bumpy post-po-downslope. Hopefully one early bump resets our common IQ level to 100, sharp.
Without failure there will be no success.
Name any scientific endeavor that worked the first time.
The issue here is unreasonable expectations set by politicians who are trying to throw money at a problem that should have been researched 4 decades ago by a responsible society.
We are not a responsible society. We are greed machines with no foresight into the problem of energy.
The question is what volumes of liquid fuels can be produced and what is the cost.
Making some portion of biofuels from cellulose is actually a good idea in principle, especially knowing that oil thing is chocking at its present problem of increasing production > 86 or so million bbl/day.
Well, they actually started researching this over a century ago, and have taken several more stabs at it since then. Each time the result is the same - too expensive.
What is different this time is that the enzyme folks promised they could do it cheaper than by the normal chemistry pathways. So I don;t lay the blame only at the politicians for setting expectations - the various cellulosic companies claimed they could do it - given enough money.
I do blame the politicians for a system where those who promised/hyped the most, regardless of the reality, got the most funding.
Meanwhile, other possible means of biomass to liquids have been starved of funding, because the gov thought it had picked its winner...
For the fermentation approach, the difference now is that you can use all the tools of genetic engineering to optimize organisms that produce enzymes to break carbohydrates into sugars and organisms that ferment 5-carbon sugars into ethanol.
Even without genetic engineering, the craft beer breweries have succeeded in increasing the ethanol concentrations.
But no one has been able to, commercially, make ethanol from cellulose using these enzymes. It takes energy (and money) to make the enzymes, and all efforts to date have simply not been commercially viable.
The maximum ethanol concentration has not changed much - give it enough time, and you can get it up to 15%, as many wines are. But for maximum throughput in the distillery, lower concentrations are better - more ethanol/kg of feedstock per day. You are trading off production efficiency for distillation efficiency, but you are still dealing with something that is 85 to 95% water - it is always going to be energy intensive.
Is it possible to engineer the organisms to convert sugars to an immiscible hydrocarbon which can be separated mechanically -- centrifugally, like butterfat from milk, for example?
M,
You have the right idea. Avoid an organic product that dissolves in water like ethanol. Humans just perfected ethanol production genetics/evolution first.
Butanol (4 carbons) is not miscible in water. make that and it separates with centrifugation -- indeed!
Butanol research could go build out pilot plants that make a valuable feedstock -- butanol -- which is an important industrial chemical with much higher value than ethanol. Anyone can make ethanol.
Problem is boosting the yield of butanol.
Hopefully good genetic/engineering approaches can make a critter than makes 5-10% butanol.
You basically salvage some synthesis intermediates in the lipid chemistry pathway. Two acetyl groups make a butyl group. A couple of reductions and you have butanol.
The solubility of butanol in water appears to be 7.7 to 9 g/100ml depending on the isomer. However, it can be separated by heterogeneous azeotropic distillation.
Yes, you develop a continuous process to gently lift the butanol off the aqueous phase. much cheaper to do than ethanol distillation.
It certainly has promise and venture capital behind it.
Thus the money spent on the enzymes may feed broken down sugars into a butanol-producing bug, which means that this research is not in vain at all.
Other research efforts are taking the valine amino acid pathway to make isobutanol.
Before I was referring to n-butanol (straight chain).
Yes, you develop a continuous process to gently lift the butanol off the aqueous phase. much cheaper to do than ethanol distillation.
I was a butanol engineer for seven years; R&D, process, production, and management. It isn't that simple, because they are partially miscible (as someone indicated, about 8%). Also, the boiling point of water is lower than butanol. So you have to boil the butanol out of the aqueous phase. This means a huge energy expenditure until phasing occurs, and toxicity is much to high for microbes to reach phasing concentrations.
What types and quantities of transportation fuels do you expect that the United States will be using in 2030, and how do you expect them to be produced?
I expect that we will still be using mostly hydrocarbons, but in lower volumes than today. I expect some to be satisfied with with gasification; a combination of coal, natural gas, and biomass converted to syngas and then reacted by Fischer-Tropsch to synthetic hydrocarbons. I haven't given up on the idea that mixed alcohols could play an important role either, and we can certainly produce methanol cheaply as long as we have natural gas. That is produced, subsidy-free, for a cheaper per BTU cost than subsidized corn ethanol is produce today.
Did you use nylon membranes to separate/enrich it first from the dilute water phase? You can turn 0.5% butanol into 10% at 60 C. Then you skim off the heavy butanol upper layer.
There is a inverse temperature dependence to the membrane method.
In any case, people will try and it is better than beating our collective heads on ethanol which has very few favorables for mixing into the existing fuel stream.
Butanol has many more favorables behind it.
The biology is lacking I admit.
Did you use nylon membranes to separate/enrich it first from the dilute water phase? You can turn 0.5% butanol into 10% at 60 C. Then you skim off the heavy butanol upper layer.
You can't do it cost-effectively, I can guarantee you. We looked at many different schemes (I was with Celanese), as have the other major players. Once the butanol gets down into the 3% range, there isn't much you can do to get it out in a cost-effective manner. At 4% butanol, it starts to become mildly cost-effective, but you really need to get above the phasing concentration before the economics look pretty good.
My guess is that the benchmark set (I hear) is to get the bugs (bacteria) to make ~10% so that the process of extraction is more favorable.
You need to control metabolic flux and increase tolerance to the butanol, which is what people did with fermenting strains of yeast for 1000s of years.
Membranes can enrich butanol, but I am unsure of their stability and throughput and so forth.
Indeed the problems are real and any effort to bring these systems up to billions of gallons per year is nutty, but I am not a politician so I guess my head is somewhat screwed on straight.
The research angles to exploit are the genetic engineering/selection of bugs to produce ~10% butanol where some of the feestocks are even cellulose based.
Hopefully you are not too mad at me for blowing up, but the word on the beat is how much funding they are going to cut away from science. I am just worn thin by this kind of talk over the last 3 years.
maybe the goal of funding crap science was to destroy the entire research sector, but maligning scientists in the public's eye. probably the goal. and probably it was achieved.
better get my farming gear ready when they come after my job ;-)
My guess is that the benchmark set (I hear) is to get the bugs (bacteria) to make ~10% so that the process of extraction is more favorable.
When they talk about 10% titers, they are talking about iso-butanol, which has a much smaller market. The toxicity of n-butanol to the bugs is very high.
Penicillin is toxic as well. But bugs became resistant via mutations.
the trick is to find mutations that make bugs tolerant to butanol in way that they do not metabolize the butanol to reduce the cytotoxicity.
People are working on it.
There are thermophilic bugs and other candidates as well. Time will tell.
No doubt these efforts are challenging. That is why incrementally funded projects was the right way to go.
Energy science should be funded like NIH (National inst of Health) via the DOE at larger levels to work on these challenges.
Large scale production of an unproven process is indeed foolhardy and shame on those the tricked our leaders into paying the bill.
Might it be possible to use an ionic liquid or osmotic membrane as a permeable membrane (for either water or butanol, but not both) to facilitate the separation without necessarily killing the host bacteria?
If a continuous-bath model could be achieved, the scalability of the process would seem much simpler.
Just because such would be desirable doesn't mean it would be possible, of course.
The general problem there is that butanol is relatively larger than water, so you are either talking about removing a lot of water from the butanol, or trying to extract a very small amount of butanol from water in which there are lots of microbes and trash floating around. These membranes are hard to keep clean. Even in the industrial butanol processes, a working membrane process would be worth a lot, but nobody uses them.
Problem with butanol is that the natural processes that produce it only make concentrations of about 1.8%, IIRC. Thus, a lot of water must be processed to get a little butanol.
And who is proposing to get butanol by a natural process?
Not me.
Do you think that yeast produce ethanol by a natural process (as they exist in nature)?
The answer is no. Corn did not make recognizable ears 10 million years ago either. The organisms are being evolved in labs as we speak to increase the yield of butanol (whether iso-butanol or n-butanol).
in any case, that is merely a matter of time.
The advantages are hard to misunderstand.
[1] butanol is not corrosive to existing steel pipelines and tanks.
[2] cheap to remove from aqueous layers
[3] it is a very high quality chemical used in automotive and paints industries
here is an example of a company using biowaste materials/cellulose heavy to make butanol.
Not using enzymes, but rather using syngases and catalysts.
Do not underestimate cellulous feedstocks and synfuels.
Blurb on Cobalt:
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2008/10/31/butano...
Since Butanol is a high quality product and oil is so expensive, they can bootstrap their costs by selling an expensive commodity.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080123153142.htm
I see smart movement on butanol.
As an example, witness the oil industry interest:
"The butanol bandwagon is growing. In 2006, chemical maker DuPont and the British oil company BP announced a collaboration with British Sugar to introduce butanol made from sugar beets as a gasoline-blending additive in the United Kingdom."
Butanol has not had as much hype as cellulosic ethanol, but it has not had much success either. The BP - DuPont venture is yet to result in commercial production.
Doing it the biological route, the low yield is a real problem. Once the concentration gets to 7-8%, the butanol will phase out and rise to the surface, but the bacteria that make it only produce 3-4% at best. Unlike ethanol, you can't distill it - i has a higher boiling point than water, so you would have to remove all the water first!
Doing it the thermochemical route is a different story, and the better way to go, IMO.
Even then, to make an affordable fuel, you have to produce so much that you flood the industrial butanol market and bring the price down to that of a fuel!
Butanol has many positives, except that it is expensive to make!
You could use separation technology to boast the concentration prior to phase separation.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TGK-4SX9FXW-1...
Another interesting issue. Congress has not designated butanol a biofuel yet? That is kind of crazy imho. Currently butanol is $3.7 a gallon almost the price of my gasoline these days ;-)
I think butanol is not designated as a biofuel as it is not made by biological means, and hasn't been since the '20's. Same for methanol, which is currently selling for $1.30/gal.
look for the price of both to go up as natural gas does - it can't get much lower.
Time is not the only problem. At 0.2-0.5 kg of straw per litre the mash is barely pumpable. That is the limiting factor.
Making some portion of biofuels from cellulose is actually a good idea in principle,
It is not a good idea. Soil to remain fertile needs to have biomass returned to it. Using corn stover for ethanol instead of plowing it under is a dangerously bad idea. A short term fix. Fertile soil is an incredible resource that is ignored at our peril.
When cattle or buffalo graze grasslands they return their manure to the soil. Burning those grasses for ethanol puts the carbon in the air not the soil. Have we learned nothing?
Taken at face value, you are implying we should end all of industry.
Which is a nice idea but there are too many people on the planet to do that right now.
Almost any process is bad for the soils. how about conventional farming? how about meat production with corn? how about burning the amazon to grow sugar cane?
Well I see you have made and either/or argument Oct. However life is never either/or. Can't one hold the position that we don't do any worse damage to the soils than we have already done.
Using either/or argument I would have to assume your position is that since we have already damaged the soils we should go ahead and do more damage to them in order to totally deplete them until we can feed no one? However I doubt that is your position.
I don't think growing sugar cane for ethanol is at all smart. In fact they make use of the cane cellulose directly by burning it to heat the process. IMO smarter than trying to make ethanol from it. But still an incredibly bad process.
Me personally. I ride my bike. I care about the planet, but I have learned very few other humans do care.
I pump every piece of junk mail and newspaper and cardboard into my compost bin to amend my little tiny gardens, but at the end of the day, I would rather see some cellulose used to make biofuels (not ethanol but butanol) rather than using CORN syrup from Grade A farmland!
the real shame is that we throw away cellulose all the time in giant waste dumps.
that is my point I guess. I totally respect that the soils are being ruined, but alas cellulose is pretty cheap at least.
This may wind up being a big advantage; any scheme which takes a feedstock which pays tipping fees instead of costing money will have an immediate leg-up. I am wondering if Gen IV nuclear plants can provide cheap process heat (off-peak) to let our MSW stream and sewage sludge be sterilized, stabilized and substantially converted to light gases using supercritical water oxidation.
See http://www.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint archive/Files/40_2_ANAHEIM_04-95_0304.pdf
Thanks RR. You've been both prescient and ahead of the curve on the issues surrounding biomass-as-fuel in general and ethanol in specific. I was looking up your old debates with Khosla/Wang etc last night and found one of the first posts I put up on TOD - a guest post from two cellulosic researchers who basically said the same things as you - that it will be highly highly unlikely to develop a cost effective scalable cellulose to liquid fuel method.
Whither Cellulosic Ethanol?
It's interesting to see how much ink is spilled (or pixels) on certain issues and the same arguments and beliefs are there years later..
Khosla's prior writing was Khosla Responds: "Imagining the Future of Gasoline: Reality or Blue-sky Dreaming?"
Wait! You mean the laws of physics overide the laws of congress! but how can this be?! Heh..
Pah! Made me schnarf my coffee!
This is why I read TOD every day. Thanks, WN, for saying it like it is!
-sTv
p.s. Could somebody get this to Shimkus?
The physics of oil depletion in the Earth's crust has been over-ridden by Congress, the KSA, and Oil executives for decades as well.
Now is there someplace in between oil depletion and actual solutions/alternatives. Time and time again -- people say "No" There is absolutely nothing to be done.
This is not true at the end of the day. This is BAU trying to retain control of a depleting oil problem, which it cannot win.
The Laws of Physics are dragging the entire global economy to its knees.
And some of you think it is funny. How odd?
Oct, you've been on here for a few weeks.
Many of us have been on here for years, and have been deeply involved in trying to understand and mitigate against the worst effects of our multiple predicaments for many more years or decades.
Occasional dark or gallows humor is not necessarily an indication that the joker is being flippant about the situation or unmindful of the vast horror of the consequences.
I see. ;-)
"The physics of oil depletion in the Earth's crust has been over-ridden by Congress, the KSA, and Oil executives for decades as well."
Don't forget most economists!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20024668-54.html?tag=topStories2 sorry about the repost - but it does fit in with the post
Apparently, a remedial course in thermodynamics will be required? Whooos gonna teach the NREL folks? ~:)
....or the people diligently wasting their time (and energy) over at the Colorado School of Mines? big sigh.
If that's the only thing Congress will give research money for, it's that or starve.
Excellent post. Alice Friedemann made all the very same arguments as Robert, in her April 2007 posting on the Culture Change web site: http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1...
It would be a lot simpler if we phased out liquid fuels, for cars anyway. The choice should be between batteries and compressed methane. The batteries would be charged by low carbon electricity. The methane would come from a blend of NG, coal seam gas, biomethane and synthetic. Perhaps the synthetic can be made with an assist from nuclear or renewable hydrogen.
EVs and NGVs may seem clunky and expensive compared to today's cars running on petrol/ethanol blends. They may have less range or power and there could be less luggage space. However we can keep the days of happy motoring going a lot longer than if we rely on liquid fuels alone. It will seem kind of silly to mandate just 10% ethanol when the other 90% comes from oil costing $150 a barrel.
How about a Chevy Volt where natural gas powers the fossil-fuel engine. A nice series hybrid powered by two less-expensive domestic fuel sources.
I'm sure we'll see the GN series hybrid from someone eventually.
These guys are working on it, but I wouldn't bet too much on this car making it to market soon;
http://www.ngvglobal.com/us-groups-to-coordinate-promotion-of-natural-ga...
The problem is you then have a vehicle with two expensive and complex fuel storage systems, instead of one complex and one simple - diminishing marginal returns on your cost, unless it is for a high usage vehicle like a taxi. Even then, the Volt is the wrong vehicle, and you are better off with a Prius.
That said, I would like to see the NGV group buy a Volt and convert it...
Less efficient, perhaps, but the work would be easier with a Civic -- just take the GX engine and the Hybrid drivetrain. I don't know the internals on Honda's very well, but I would not be surprised if the engines bolted-up, considering the range of hybrids and engines they build.
We'd have all sorts of CNG conversions if the EPA hadn't made it stupidly complex and expensive to get a kit certified.
Very clearly stated presentation. Even a politician should be able to understand it. Perhaps everyone should send this to their representatives?
From a farmers perspective, I understand that cellulosic ethanol presents a different kind of problem.
The switch grass or whatever combination of native grasses and forbes the farmer chooses to grow for the cellulose crop (and a rich mixture seems to give the highest yeild) will need to dry in the field to prevent rotting in transit, being to heavy to transport, and having to be dried artificially, thus reducing EROEI.
But letting these highly volatile grasses get as dry as possible in the field means that they are going to be increasingly prone to grass fires--there goes your whole crop up in smoke, and probably your barn, home and family, too.
Is this a reasonable concern?
Is this a reasonable concern?
Absolutely. The logistical challenges to cellulosic ethanol are immense.
I disagree. The problem of drying cut grasses, in the field, was solved centuries ago. You cut it, and leave it in windrows in the field for three days or so, and then collect it (usually by baling, but also forage choppers for making silage).
The baled hay can then be stored indefinitely.
So that part is not new, the challenge is still turning it into ethanol - it the distillery wants to buy cellulose, farmers will get it there (for a price, of course)
Thank you for pointing out the discovery of hay and straw, sickle bar mowers, swathers, haybines, siderakes, and balers of all sizes (40-80 lb rectangles, 300 lb round, and really big (1000 lb?) rectangles).
I wondered about that, too. But isn't switch grass more volatile than grain grasses/hay. If not, why aren't they talking more about using hay as the feed stock for ethanol plants?
Growing and Harvesting Switchgrass for Ethanol Production in Tennessee - PDF It appears to be like making hay.
Have you not been to a farm?
Farmers cut grasses as feed for their livestock every single year. They invented the complex process thousands of years ago ;-)
I have just had to suffer a biofuels presentation by Accenture. The usual names were mentioned. These people do no good at all and are lightweight on technology. Monsanto are coming to the rescue with year on year increases in corn yields - good luck. Try looking at the 1st and 2nd Law of thermodynamics.
Robert,
Your comments could not have been better placed. Pimentel and Patzek are of this opinion as you well know. Trying to distill 4% ethanol does not make much sense however you look at it. The problems with biomass logistics go even further as the bulky material cannot be stored outside for any length of time and will spoil. How the hell can a large processing unit secure enough biomass under cover to run year round. That is the burning question.
I cannot imagine what the removal of this biomass, if it ever occurs, will do to the soil structure. They will be mining the soil of its nutrients.
If they have a true "cellulosic" process, then the biomass can be wood, and woody stalks, like willow and poplar. This sort of biomass can easily be stored outside for long periods. Also, when dealing with wood as an energy crop, you can harvest it any time you want, though some times are more convenient than others.
That is part of the allure of cellulosic, that IF it can be made to work, you can use woody crops, which have many advantages.
However, even baled corn/wheat straw can be stored outside, under tarpaulins, for quite some time. Not elegant, but it is done all the time by farmers
I wish I could agree with you but I cannot. I have willow on my farm and it rots pretty well in our damp climate. Storing it outside is challenging unless it is covered. Fungi attacks willow and softwoods in no time.
Straw and grasses are even more difficult. The tarpaulin option needs a little clarification as I have done this as well. Firstly you have to lift the bale off the ground by using a pallet or similar. Then there is the cost of the the tarpaulin and the placement. It must then be secured, and by the way it has to withstand all the weather thrown at it. All that this does is add cost, a lot of cost.
The rules of logistics are simple. Handle as little as possible. Every move is a cost.
To give an appreciation of the 300 kt biomass POET plant consider this.
1 cubic metre of straw is about 250-300 kg depending on how it was baled and straw type. 300 kt would be around 1 million cubic metres. That is a stack 1000 m long 100 m wide and 10 m high. Say you managed 40 cubic metres to the truck load. That is 25000 trucks per year or 500 per week or 3 per hour. No mean feat by any means. The only happy people will be the truck drivers, and there are not enough of them.
Then look at the plant. Not all biomass is the same. A good rule is about 0.2 kg of ethanol per kg of straw (Badger 2002). That would make about 60kta of ethanol or about 75000 cubic metres, quite a bit short of the 25 million gallons claimed by POET. A miniscule amount compared with US gasoline demand.
The thermodynamci efficiency, without taking into account the use of HP steam or acid and caustic production, is of the order of 20%. That is the reality. The EROEI is awful, quite apart from the logistics issue which will also consume energy in the gathering, baling and transportation.
Do not bet on this technology beacuse it will not deliver and neither will algae.
I wouldn't be surprised if the cheapest and most efficient use of such biomass is to take the separated cobs (stored in corn cribs unless used immediately) and use them in gasogenes right on the machinery to run the equipment. A gallon of diesel saved on the spot replaces a much larger quantity of biomass that never has to be taken anywhere.
I am indeed not betting on cellulosic ethanol, or algae. But I don't think biomass storage/transport is the stumbling block. If there is a viable use for biomass, there will be ways and means to transport and store it. .
IIRC maple sap starts out with the same percentage of 4-5% and is distilled down to maple syrup. Therefore, ethanol should be equitably priced at about $18/qt, or $72/gal.
That ought to put things in perspective.
As with RR, I was part of project development teams putting together capex and O&M estimates for biomass generation projects. Regardless of the process, the limitation is a 4-hour turnaround for fiber (wood) delivery from harvesting areas. Figure out the average speed for a logging truck and that usually equates to a 100 km (60 mi) radius from the plant. This in turn, limits the sustainable harvesting levels.
The only scaling is right-sized plants working within a fiber tenure plan very similar to saw mills.
The obvious root problem is trying to supplant gasoline with ethanol. The fuel of value to concentrate on is diesel, not gasoline. There will be some methanol and DME developments coming out of this neck of the woods soon.
Hi BC,
Now to run vehicles on maple syrup would truly be a tragedy, though it would smell nice! And it would turn Quebec into the Saudi Arabia of our renewable fuel - the mind boggles!
Seriously though, wood as a biofuel feedstock is, in my opinion, a much better option than farmed crops - be interested to hear more about what you have been up to.
I have been trying to contact you, but your email in your profile does not seem to be working - can you send one to me? (email in my profile)
thx,
Paul
The question arises if it is better to burn wood directly (or as wood pellets) instead for space heating instead of a liquid biofuel.
I thought the same thing myself, but the utility of a liquid fuel is hard to beat in terms of energy density and portability.
How do you quantify this utility?
You quantify it by running the numbers, which I have done before.
We had a discussion about wood pellets coal etc on RR;'s site last week, including how much you can grow per acre per year. Turns out there is more money in pellets than corn!;
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/boards/renewables/coals-two-year-hig...
A dry kg of wood has about 20Mj energy content.
The current best commercial energy return for a wood to liquid process, gasification and Fischer Tropsch, would give you 10MJ liquid fuel, but at quite some cost. You would also receive about 1MJ as electricity from the process heat.
Wood to methanol will give slightly better energy yield, up to 60%, but no one is doing this.
To make pellets, you use about 10% of the energy, so 18MJ, and then get 90% of that from the pellet stove/furnace/boiler, so 16MJ of heat.
We can also use the woodchips for electricity, by gasifier-then ICE (25% eff) and you will get 5MJ electricity PLUS 10MJ of waste heat from the engine (5MJ exhaust, 5MJ coolant) which you can use directly.
The 5MJ of electricity can be used to run a heat pump, and with CoP of 3:1, you will turn the 5Mj into 20MJ of heat, for a total of 30MJ.
The real question is the $$. Turning wood to liquid fuel is very expensive, and needs large scale plants - which means transporting the wood a long way. You can densify it first by pelleting, or torrefaction, which incurs more energy loss but saves on transport.
Wood to liquid yields 10MJ fuel, or 0.08gal, worth about 16c, and 1MJ elec (0.28kWh) worth about 2.8c, for a total of 18.8c
Wood pellets sell wholesale for $160/ton, and that is 8% moisture, so they are $174/ton, but you have used 10% of the energy to make them, so $157/ton, or 15.7c/kg - a better return. For the ton of pellets (8% moisture) you get 18.4GJ of energy, and 90% of that, from your furnace is 16.6GJ (16.3MMBTU), so you are paying near enough to $10/GJ - close to a residential NG rate.
Doing gasification-electricity route yields 5MJ electricity, worth 14c, plus 10MJ of heat, which we'll value at using what we get with pellets, $10/GJ=1c/MJ. So, the total is 14c+10c=24c/kg, or $240/ton.
Just for reference, the current futures market for 2x4 lumber is about $270per thousand board feet, or about $207per ton. But you need good straight wood for lumber, and some of the wood (20%) as energy to mill and kiln dry it. A ton of wood in the field yield 2/3 a ton of lumber, using the remainder as energy
So, a (dry)ton of wood, is worth;
$139 as lumber
$140 as electricity only
$174 as wood pellets
$188 as liquid fuel plus some energy
$240 as electricity and heat
What is wood being used for today?
The lumber industry is barely profitable, and is shrinking.
There are some stand alone wood to electricity plants, but they are only marginally profitable, and same for the cost of getting wood to co-fire with coal, unless subsidised.
The world pellet market has doubled in volume, twice, in the last decade, to ten million tons/yr. It is the fastest growing and most profitable wood products market. The equipment is simple, and any sawmill can be adapted to make them. It is even profitable to ship them from Vancouver through the Panama Canal to Europe!
There are a couple of demo wood to liquids (FT) plants in Europe, and one being built in Edmonton, Canada. They are VERY capital intensive, and seem to need to be paid to take wood (wood waste)
Doing electricity plus heat, needs a use for the heat. One of the largest consumers of wood pellets, Sweden, makes extensive use of CHP plants with district heating systems, and is building more of them.
I am working on a project to do wood CHP at a local commercial greenhouse - you can see the difference in value for an electricity project when there is a beneficial use for the heat!
The capital cost for wood to liquids is a big hurdle, as is the scale problem and even if there is a (new) cellulosic ethanol process, I doubt its economics will be much better.
Wood to electricity can be done at any scale, from as low as 10kW, and thus at any place. If you can do it anywhere, you can take it to a place that needs a lot of heat.
Does that answer the question?
Yes, I understand.
The only utility biological processes have is to make specific products.
Burning wood or ag waste is probably worth the investment when tree farming is done properly, especially with co-generation. electricity could be used to power cars and homes and industrial processes and is also a useful product (like a liquid fuel). Obviously as we have discussed the battery problem and cost are limiting factors with electric cars.
So a liquids from biomass is a means to power cars in a traditional ICE mode -- with obvious cost issues as well.
Whether electric or liquids from biomass, these are unavoidable competition to high oil prices in the future.
Great analysis. More people should do reality checks like that.
Thanks EP. Keep in mind though I am actively evaluating small examples of both a pellet project and a gasifier/ICE/ CHP project right now - when you are actually going to invest your time and/or money into something, you do indeed do a reality check.
When you are just pursuing an academic discussion there is not much consequence to being off the mark!
+10 for the maple sap to maple syrup analogy.
Well, goats or dogs in a treadmill turning a small generator ? Any calculations on efficiency ?
Easy to predict the real possibilities for upscaling this proven technology (museum-warranty !). All I need is money. It can easily be decentralised, so no need for transportation of the cellulose and the waste.
Why not benchmark the growth in cellulosic ethanol or other biofuel products over the last 3 decades?
To benchmark against some politician's unreasonable goals is not terribly useful. It is rather a pandering political piece on its face.
Benchmark cellulosic biofuel products against the cost to produce them or the volumes produced per ton of input material.
Show efficiency gains on the process over time.
Of course, you can say phrases like "Fairy dust" (which is rather demeaning imho to a lot of forthright people) but what is research really. In reality science is is a process of hard work and failures leading to a result down the road. No one knows the answers because these are not simple solved problems -- like cracking oil -- lol.
One should continue to determine ways to extract useful sugars and byproducts from biomaterials. Feedstocks (like oil) are waning last I checked. If this civilization is to survive it should not squander its resources simply drilling ever more holes to find ever more dilute oil supplies.
Better hope for a non-one-sided article with substance on the actual progress being made in a challenging area.
Oct,
The reason why he hasn't, and the industry itself hasn't, is that there hasn't been any commercial production! There are many research/pilot plants out there, but there are none in full, large scale cellulosic production. This is not like, say solar pv, or battery energy density, where there has been a clear improvement in cost and efficiency of commercially produced stuff for decades - how can you benchmark something that is not being produced?
An outfit like Range fuels has spent over $320m, and is yet to produce a barrel of ethanol -what is the efficiency of their process?
Some of the others have produced stuff, but not at commercial scale. All their claims to date of producing for $X per gallon have not been met, so why, now, should we believe any of them? The only thing to believe is when they actually start producing volumes, and what price they have to sell that for to be worthwhile investing in more production. And, since no one is near that point, we can conclude that their process is not cost efficient at present, and unlikely to be in the near future.
The cellulosics have hyped themselves so much, and sucked up so much money, both public and private, that they have no credibility anymore. No question it is a challenging area - a good step, at this point, would be for the cellulosic developers to admit that, rather than keep promising what they haven't been able to deliver.
As the physicist Richard Feynman famously said "in introducing a new technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, because Nature cannot be fooled"
See I agree with your statements, but the tone of this article is rather much like the Tea Party Rhetoric being currently hurled at all of science.
I agree that too much money was spent on ethanol. I totally agree. But we scientists are trying everyday to work on these issues in earnest.
Shout at the funding agency not scientists. That is my feeling.
***
If you look at sugar, then there is 4 kcal/gram or 16 kJ/gram.
lipid/hydrocarbon is more energy dense but only by a factor of 2.
If I were to gasify the stuff and make a synthesis gas, then I could make methanol, ethanol, propanol, or even butanol.
Where are these efforts?
I admit to knowing a little about the enzymatic digestion process. It is not efficient to produce large quantities of enzymes and then convert the cellulose to sugar and ferment it to ethanol. No doubt.
Moreover, ethanol is too miscible in water -- leading to corrosive effects in normal steel infrastructure.
Butanol, however, is a better alcohol. That biofuel fits right into any car engine and could flow through existing infrastructure. You can run on pure butanol in fact.
Furthermore, critical to the energy balance. butanol will self-separate from the aqueous fermenation medium, since it is much much less miscible in water. You simply collect it off of the top of the water. Absolutely no distillation costs.
Problem is that Humans evolved the best strains of yeast to make ethanol. We did not make a perfect strain (bacterial or yeast) to produce butanol.
Clearly research aimed at producing butanol will reduce the distillation energy costs and minimize the backend problems of blending fuels through the existing pipelines.
I consider butanol to be a part of the biofuel future. it is a much more versatile molecule and used in many industrial applications. Ethanol is bland by comparison. Ethanol only benefits from the Human tradition of making beer and wine for thousands of years imho.
See I agree with your statements, but the tone of this article is rather much like the Tea Party Rhetoric being currently hurled at all of science.
Excuse me? I can't believe you are talking about the article I wrote. I actually worked on this problem. I don't denigrate the science in the least, just as I don't denigrate people working on a cure for cancer. I denigrate the people who exaggerate where the technology is, and get taxpayer dollars wasted in the process.
Shout at the funding agency not scientists. That is my feeling.
Example please of where I have done this.
If I were to gasify the stuff and make a synthesis gas, then I could make methanol, ethanol, propanol, or even butanol. Where are these efforts?
Well, that is how methanol is made today. Much more difficult to make higher alcohols that way; the commercial process for butanol uses syngas plus propylene. The process for propanol uses syngas plus ethanol. The yield of either from just syngas is very low.
Furthermore, critical to the energy balance. butanol will self-separate from the aqueous fermenation medium, since it is much much less miscible in water. You simply collect it off of the top of the water. Absolutely no distillation costs.
You would think companies like BASF, Dow, Eastman, Celanese, or Shell would have figured this out, since they make hundreds of millions of gallons per year and have for decades. But sometimes the theory you have in your mind runs into some practical realities. In fact, both water and butanol are miscible to some extent, so distillation is always required.
"Fairy dust" set me off actually. I am over it and sorry about my tone.
I would just like to say I personally know very honest folks are working on this and they are not swindlers by any means.
I fear with the wrong policies we throw out the baby with the bath water.
I think we all would rather see corn displaced with cellulose-based production.
Never going to happen politically but at least that is a worthwhile goal for science to chip away at.
At for the politicians that pumped so much money into a loser. Well i expect nothing less from my leaders. lol. They have failed since the oil crises in the 1970s to promote this type of research in a quality incremental sort of way with strong peer review.
One last quibble. Many types of cancers are curable thanks to government funded research. The mandate issue aside. These problems are surmountable with R&D effort. Cancer is a tricky issue though since for any given form of cancer (like Lung) there may be many different sub-types. not all of which are treatable. Thus there is not likely a universal cure to all cancers.
"Fairy dust" set me off actually.
But what do you think I mean by "fairy dust?" I mean that expectations that we would have commercial cellulosic ethanol on a particular time frame is fairy dust.
Many types of cancers are curable thanks to government funded research.
Of course. That isn't the issue. The issue is a mandate and a specific time frame, and basing energy policy on those unreasonable expectations.
My apologies Robert.
It was the "fairy dust." -lol
I read too many angry blogs I presume who are desperately against all science -- climate science --energy science -- the whole ball of wax.
I guess I am in the wrong line of work.
Example: (for PN post)
Iogen, apparently a leader in the field has cumulative production of 400,000 gallons over 5 or 6 years....That is maybe 50 tanker trucks over 5 years.
Perhaps, the push for cellulosic ethanol can be understood as a delaying tactic to prevent the implementation of policies that might stand a better chance of working. The use of ethanol as a liquid fuel conveniently does NOT require changes in how the light vehicle fleet, the rail lines, and the freight ships are powered.
Why change when you are making a good profit now?
The problem with most energy people is that they don't understand farming. Now humus is a very precious material, and it happens to diminish fast in agricultural soils, due to deep ploughing, lack of soil cover, lack of organic ammendments, etc.. After peak oil, farmers will have a heck of a problem to maintain soil fertility. So why in earth would you want to extract even more organic material from the farming system!!!??? Please leave all crop residues on the land. We even need more than that.
Rebel Farmer I'm with you!
Holy s#it, the 1st technical problem we are having is the FOOD; the 2nd problem is the COLD, the 3rd is how to FUEL our way to live, even if we have maybe very small need of fuel to get an average social and individual happyness (1 liter fuel a week in Cuba, 200 liter a minute in Luxembourg).
And there is no (living and healthy) food without a (living and healthy) soil*.
Soils are suffering everywhere in the world, mainly because of really bad practices in the past and also in the present. And because farmers are misinformed and/or not conscious of the major role of soil organisms (also called "benthic" or "macrofauna").
SOIL must be our 1st concern. Protecting soil, saving forests, saving water : that all can really and rapidly pledge food for all, moderate microclimate and country-scale climate in a few generations.
*Ok: there is hydroponics, it could be a very very small solution for a no-soil agriculture, but it needs a modern industry and a modern transportation to get the nutrient solutions' elements into the no-soil farms/houses; let it for the small part of people continuing the (after)life in the cities...
See my post above for a discription of the MSOP process.
One of the most important outputs of the Molten Salt Oxidation Process (MSOP) is biochar. In traditional methods of biomass fast pyrolysis, this char is used to fire the bioreactor and is turned into CO2. When nuclear energy is used, biochar can be saved and reapplied back to the soil.
First off, biochar is charcoal created by pyrolysis of biomass, and differs from charcoal only in the sense that its primary use is not for fuel, but for biosequestration or atmospheric carbon capture and storage. Charcoal is a stable solid rich in carbon content, and thus, can be used to lock carbon in the soil. Biochar is of increasing interest because of concerns about climate change caused by emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHG).
Carbon dioxide capture also ties up large amounts of oxygen and requires energy for injection (as via carbon capture and storage), whereas the biochar process breaks into the carbon dioxide cycle, thus releasing oxygen as did coal formation hundreds of millions of years ago.
If the production of biochar is tied to liquid fuel production, huge amounts of the stuff will be generated as a result of our insatiable desire for liquid fuels.
Biochar can sequester carbon in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years, like coal. Modern biochar is being developed using pyrolysis to heat biomass in the absence of oxygen in kilns and MSOP is an analogous process.
However, to the difference of coal and/or petroleum charcoal, when incorporated to the soil in stable organo-mineral aggregates does not freely accumulate in an oxygen-free and abiotic environment. This allows it to be slowly oxygenated and transformed in physically stable but chemically reactive humus, thereby acquiring interesting chemical properties such as cation exchange capacity and buffering of soil acidification. Both are precious in clay and /or nutrient-pore and/or nutrient depleted soils.
Biochar can be used to hypothetically sequester carbon on centurial or even millennial time scales. In the natural carbon cycle, plant matter decomposes rapidly after the plant dies, which emits CO2; the overall natural cycle is carbon neutral. Instead of allowing the plant matter to decompose, pyrolysis can be used to sequester some of the carbon in a much more stable form. Biochar thus removes circulating CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in virtually permanent soil carbon pools, making it a carbon-negative process.
In places like the Rocky Mountains, where beetles have been killing off vast swathes of pine trees, the utilization of pyrolysis to char the trees instead of letting them decompose into the atmosphere would offset substantial amounts of CO2 emissions. Although some organic matter is necessary for agricultural soil to maintain its productivity, much of the agricultural waste can be turned directly into biochar, bio-oil, and syngas.
Biochar is believed to have long mean residence times in the soil. While the methods by which biochar mineralizes (turns into CO2) are not completely known, evidence from soil samples in the Amazon shows large concentrations of black carbon (biochar) remaining after they were abandoned thousands of years ago.
Lab experiments confirm a decrease in carbon mineralization with increasing temperature, so ultra high temperature charring of plant matter increases the soil residence time and long term soil benefits of high temperature biochar.
Terra preta soils are of pre-Columbian nature and were created by the local farmers and caboclos in Brazil's Amazonian basin between 450 BC and AD 950. It owes its name to its very high charcoal content, and is characterized by the presence of charcoal in high concentrations; organic matter such as plant residues, animal feces, fish and animal bones and other material; and of nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), calcium (Ca), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn).
All of these elements save nitrogen will be found in the ash residuals in the MSOP process. To mitigate nitrogen depletion of the soil, cogeneration of nitrogen based fertilizer via the co-production of ammonia is possible from the gas output of the MSOP process.
Slight correction. The Pine Beetle Kill has been primarily in BC's Interior region affecting lodge pole pine species. Go west of Williams Lake on Hwy. 20 and you will see ground zero of the devastation.
(PDF warning) http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/mountain_pine_beetle/maps/BCMPBv72009Kill.pdf
(PDF warning) http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/mountain_pine_beetle/maps/magnitudeMap2007.pdf
The pine beetle kill is now spreading east to the Colorado Rockies area.
The common geographical area equivalent is the same as England.
I would think any low/no carbon source of 950C heat would be useable. CSP, without the power turbine comes to mind as well. It is probably a lot easier to get permits for highgrade solar heat (parabolic troughs, or heliostats and towers) than for Nuclear (at least in the developed world). So you need not wait for the development of your small nuclear plants to proceed. I guess a lot depends upon whether the pyrolosis, is used as a PR device to make Nuclear palatable, or is a primary economic/ecological driver for the adoption of your solution?
Sounds like some great work you are involved with.
Hi,
I agree that biochar is a very interesting soil ammendment in tropical countries, where termites essentially help to break down woody material very quickly. In moderate climates though, biochar is not necessary, and it is easier to directly apply wood chips. These will break down very gradually into "stable humus", releasing slowly its energy and nutrients to soil life, and eventually to plants and trees. The essential issue with stable humus in moderate climate is the same trick as what biochar is doing in tropical regions: it hosts fungi and bacteria, who both function as stock AND as facilitator of release of nutrients.
I could not agree with you more. Soil organic carbon is rarely considered with these crackpot biomass ideas. Keeping plant residues on the field has to be a priority if farm yields are to be maintained and soil erosion mitigated. There is no such thing as waste biomass.
For those interested try reading Dirt: The erosion of civilisations by David Montogomery. A very interesting perspective.
"The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones" True indeed. It ended because we learned to harness energy. Contemporary industrial civilization exploded when we learned to harness increasingly concentrated forms of energy in greater volume. We are are now faced with harnessing diffuse sources of energy because of a diminished volume of concentrated easily sourced energy.
This might be of interest:
http://www.taurusenergy.eu/PDF-dokument/pressrelease-engelsk-vers.pdf
I have read a Swedish press release that the trials were successful.
http://www.taurusenergy.eu/PDF-dokument/2010-11-16_Pressmeddelande-SEKAB...
The test of a fuel's ability to replace oil or coal or natural gas is the resulting cost per gallon. If the proposed replacement fuel (cellulostic ethanol or methanol) is much more than the cost of a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel, then the proposed biofuel is a failure. Generally those biofuels that have an EROEI of close to 1 are much higher in cost than gas or diesel.
I cannot read the article due to its being written in swedish, but the fact that the article does not have any numbers in it, except one reference to 90% of something or other, leads me to believe that the referenced report does not speak of cost of this fuel, only that it can be produced. Am I wrong?
Here is a Google translation:
essmeddelande 2010-11-16 SEKAB shows that Taurus Energy's yeast works on a large scale - Important milestone for the production of ethanol from cellulosic materials
SEKAB E-Technology and Taurus Energy has successfully completed a three-week evaluation of industrial-scale demonstration of Taurus Energy's yeast. Yeast is specially developed and can, unlike normal yeast in addition sexkolssocker also ferment femkolssocker. Taurus Energy and SEKAB see this as a very important step towards the commercialization of a process for the production of ethanol from cellulosic materials.
Being able to produce ethanol from cellulosic raw materials from forestry and agriculture is a technology that can revolutionize the bioenergy sector, as the raw material is virtually infinite. Being able to produce ethanol from renewable raw materials available in large quantities and do not compete with food production is an important step in the development of breaking the transport sector's oil dependence.
- What we found is that in demo-scale can achieve the same ethanol exchanges in laboratory experiments. From the cellulose raw material, we have managed to rise 90 per cent of the induced femkolssockret, it is a very good result, "said Sune Wännström, research director at SEKAB E-Technology. It also means that we feel safe in order to transfer results from the optimizations on a laboratory scale to large scale. How to convert cellulosic materials to fermentable sugars is a complicated process and to effectively utilize the sugar has long been a challenge. SEKAB and Swedish Taurus Energy can now be combined to produce a process that is verified on an industrial scale trial with very high yields from femkolssocker (xylose), a sugar derived from hemicellulose and as ordinary yeast strains unable to convert to ethanol. This means that the material can be utilized much more efficiently than today's industrial fermentation processes can handle.
SEKAB stands for the process in which a weak acid and enzymes convert cellulose and hemicellulose from different forest and agricultural raw materials to sugars with five and six carbon atoms. Taurus Energy has developed customized yeast strains that can ferment them and that can survive in the harsh environment that the process liquid form.
Cultivating the yeast is in itself a challenge, since cultivation on laboratory scale is much easier to control and did not show any problems that may arise in large-scale cultivation. SEKAB has now successfully demonstrated the Taurus yeast can be grown in large volumes.
- We are very pleased that we now have confirmed that our yeast strain is robust enough to operate on an industrial scale and that the exchanges are the same as in laboratory scale, "says Lars Welin, CEO of Taurus Energy. This means that the two crucial basic requirements are met.
The trials, which co-financed by the Energy Agency, also shows that the process SEKAB and Taurus Energy has developed in collaboration with researchers from Chalmers and LTH, has to achieve commercially viable ethanol concentrations. When they completed the trials reached an ethanol content in four weight percent, the level required for a profitable industrial process.
- The Taurus is among the world leaders in the fermentation of pentoses from ligno-cellulose materials is confirmed by the results we achieved, "said Professor Lisbeth Olsson, development manager at Taurus. The results in demo-scale is the fruit of many years of research and development work in the lab scale.
Just as I surmised, no mention of price of the product per gallon/liter to compare with any oil derived products. The only statement having any meaning from a financial feasibility perspective is:
"When they completed the trials reached an ethanol content in four weight percent, the level required for a profitable industrial process" which RR refutes as being not commercially viable.
Until this or any other company says "we have built a plant that TODAY can produce xx million gallons of ethanol at or below the price of wholesale gasoline", the claims of any cellulose process are to be doubted. It will not likely ever become a commercially viable product without some major scientific breakthrough in the conversion of the cellulose into carb that organic processes (yeast or bacteria based) can makes into ET-OH.
I remember going to the EIA's one-day conference in the spring of 2007, where they give out copies of their "Annual Energy Outlook" to attendees a a collection of speakers talks about energy issues.
The keynote speaker was Keith Collins, chief economist of the USDA. He talked about Bush's goal of "20 in 10" - reduce U.S. gasoline and diesel consumption by 20% within 10 years. (You can find his presentation here (look for "USDA" etc.):
http://search.vadlo.com/b/q?&sn=158621799&k=2007+Eia+Energy+PPT&rel=2&sr...
This target would require total U.S. biofuel production to increase from USDA's previously-projected 2017 production of 13 billion gallons/yr. to 35 billion gallons/yr. - an insane proposal that even other speakers, on the same day, repeatedly downplayed with suggestions it was unachievable.
The only guy who made any sense that day in Washington DC was Roger Bezdek.
Dick Lawrence
In Australia our new Prime Minister and Environment Minister( A former coal mining union official)are mandating Carbon Capture and Sequestration (so called Clean Coal)but no technology to do this exsists.
That isn't adequate, but wouldn't be hard either.
I'd say that the problem is the opposite: 20% is achievable, but a long, long way from minimal adequacy. In 10 years we should have changes in place which will achieve no less than 50% reduction once the legacy fleet is retired. Nobody in the right place is even talking about this.
Direct ethanol injection allows engine downsizing which can cut gasoline consumption in the LDV fleet by 30% even without other measures.
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Your link supposes that fuel economy will be achieved by downsizing vehicles. Lighter more powerful engines means lighter overall vehicles which translates to fuel economy. But the main obstacle to this is the federal government that has determined by edict that only heavy vehicles are safe to drive.
The myth exists that government is promoting ethanol. The reality is that government is the main obstacle in developing ethanol for light duty vehicles.
The significantly higher octane and higher heat of vaporization of ethanol more than compensates for the lower energy content of ethanol. The higher octane means the ethanol is blended with gasoline that requires less energy input at the refinery to produce so much of the energy difference between straight gasoline and ethanol blends has already been negated before it even reaches automobile fuel tank by allowing refiners to produce a lower octane fuel that is blended with ethanol.
Current generation automobiles would be getting much better fuel economy with ethanol blends if manufacturers were allowed to test, design and market cars that perform best on ethanol. But this is expressly prohibited by federal law. There is no incentive for manufacturers to manufacture vehicles that perform better with ethanol blends if they are prohibited from marketing that advantage to the consumer. In fact a manufacturer may even suffer financial penalties if the car doesn't get its best fuel economy when it has no ethanol in the tank.
You must have read a different link than I did. The article I linked states:
Nothing about vehicle size; it's all about greater thermal efficiency due to higher compression, higher BMEP and lower pumping losses.
It would do fine for fuel economy, and the driver would fill it up right away because the power would be strictly limited without the octane enhancer and the turbocharger couldn't be used.
That could be a selling point. Draining the alcohol tank might be a good way to put the kibosh on crazy teenage driving.
I have been reading the articles that have been coming out of the MIT Sloan Auto Lab for years. The 30% calculation for fuel economy improvement is based on the assumption that a lighter engine would mean a lighter suspension, drive train and overall vehicle weight which would contribute to the total efficiency. Only something like 20% fuel economy gain came from the engine alone assuming the rest of the car remained unchanged.
Nevertheless, the point I was making is the government is thwarting efforts to increase engine efficiency with respect to ethanol. The manufacturer design engines to perform best on the special gasoline formula that the government requires they use for the fuel economy test.
There would be incremental improvements in engines being designed today if the government allowed fuel economy testing using ethanol blends. Instead the government mandates fuel economy testing using a gasoline formula that can't be found in the marketplace. That drives manufacturers away from designing maximum efficiency using the gasoline that people are putting in their tank.
In a similar vein Flex-Fuel engines are a flop because they need to be able to run on straight gasoline. This means they don't really take full advantage of the combustion properties of ethanol. If designed to run only on E85 there would be greater gains in fuel efficiency.
Yes, it does. The weight of the engine contributes little to the safety qualities of the vehicle, so I don't see why you're harping on it.
Would you let each manufacturer pick a fuel blend which makes their figures look best... and then consumers could almost never find the same blend either?
The fact that gasoline composition changes from market to market (evaporative figures) and winter to summer means things are never going to be exactly like the test conditions. All we can expect is that they're close enough to be useful for their intended purpose, and that appears to be the case.
All we can expect is that they're close enough to be useful for their intended purpose, and that appears to be the case.
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That contradicts your previous statement that manufacturers would pick the blend which makes their figures look best. The fact is the type of fuel used for the test does make a difference in fuel economy results and if you are going to claim it doesn't make a difference than what is wrong with letting the manufacturer select the blend of fuel?
First of all the concept of the 2 fuel tanks one containing ethanol and the other E0 is pretty much being abandoned even by the MIT researchers. Turns out that the advantages of direct injection combined with the combustion advantages of ethanol can be had with the ethanol premixed with gasoline. Whether it is Delphi, Ford, Riccardo, MIT or any of the many foreign engine builders designing for the Brazil market they are all now designing with the ethanol premixed with the gasoline.
The fact is almost every car in the US today has ethanol in the tank so the government mandated fuel economy tests should be done using E10 or even E20. Or better yet as you say allow the manufacturer select the blend ratio and then let the consumer buy that blend ratio that their manufacturer recommends from blender pumps when they fill up. When that happens the the manufacturer will have an incentive to design engines that run efficiently on the fuel people put in their tank. The current law is designed to be a disincentive to make engines that run efficiently on ethanol blends.
No it doesn't. The purpose of the EPA figures is to allow consumers to compare vehicles with some degree of reliability. If manufacturers can pick their preferred fuel (perhaps for each model), there is no apples-to-apples comparison possible.
See above.
There's also a good reason not to allow consumers to put whatever they want in the tank: if the pollution controls haven't been tested on whatever mix happens to wind up there, they may not work correctly.
There is good reason to allow consumers to use higher ethanol blends. The motivation not to allow it when testing for fuel economy is to thwart the development of engines that get better fuel economy with higher ethanol blends.
And as far as testing with "some degree of reliability". How can it be reliable if the testing is not done using the fuel that consumers are putting in their tanks?
And absolutely the fuel economy results would be different if the testing was with ethanol blends. The consumer would find out which vehicles get good mileage with ethanol blends and which don't. The consumer could then make an informed choice. And the manufacturer's engineering design would be driven by those choices. The current strategy is to keep the consumer in the dark and compel the automakers to design optimum efficiency using a fuel no one puts in their tank.
Consumers have been given a choice of adding premium or regular gasoline for many decades. Consumers are not so helpless that they can't press a button and pick the fuel that their car was designed to use. And yes if today your car is designed for premium gasoline and you don't use that fuel your car's emissions will go up. Your check engine light will come on and you will fail emission tests. The system to control and enforce emission standards is already been put in place.
Ethanol blended with gasoline isn't going to go away. The federal government can be obstructive and slow progress a bit. There are already several states where consumers have the choice of filling their tank with what they want via blender pumps. As that becomes more widespread the governments head-in-the-sand approach to fuel economy testing will become even more ludicrous.
I don't know why you keep harping on this. Let me be clear: THERE ARE MANY "BOUTIQUE" FUEL REQUIREMENTS IN DIFFERENT US MARKETS. ANY CONSUMER BUYING FUEL IN ONE OF THEM WILL BE GETTING A BLEND UNAVAILABLE ANYWHERE ELSE. THIS IS IN ADDITION TO THE NORMAL WINTER/SUMMER BLEND VARIATIONS. THERE IS NO WAY TO TEST ALL MODELS ON ALL BLENDS, AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FUEL ALCOHOL CONTENT.
Saab has a car with different power ratings for gasoline and E85. Nothing prevents manufacturers from publishing such numbers.
Already answered here, which you apparently failed to read.
If you are not going to bother to read what I write, you're neither interested in holding a conversation nor in learning anything. Goodbye.
I read what you wrote and found it inaccurate and unconvincing. The subject under discussion was the effect on fuel economy of mixing ethanol with gasoline. The ethanol that is added to gasoline is the same all over country. And creating a standardized mix of ethanol and gasoline for purposes of testing fuel economy is not the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE you claim it is. Setting up a protocol for testing fuel economy using ethanol blends would be relatively easy.
The part you just completely ignore is that blending ethanol with gasoline alters the way the fuel burns far more than the minor variation in gasoline components that come from various refineries at various times. You are doing what the EPA is doing which is to ignore the potential of increasing fleet fuel economy by allowing ethanol blended fuel to be used in the fuel economy tests.
Brazil on the other hand does make it possible for consumers to find vehicle designed to perform best on the E20-E25 mix that they use in Brazil. If you buy a car in the US you have no idea if the engine will perform better or worse on ethanol blends. It could be either. You don't know and the EPA is insistent on keeping you ignorant.
As far as testing fuel economy with E85. Yes that is likely to be the what eventually promotes change. Engine designers have made some recent breakthroughs that look like they will allow an engine to run efficiently on E85 and still perform on E0 without the engine destroying itself.
Heretofore, flex fuel engines designers have not been able to take full advantage of the properties of E85 fuel and make an engine that is optimized for E85 fuel. When Flex-fuel engines get equivalent mpg on E85 as E0 then it is going to be tough to keep higher ethanol blends out of the general gasoline pool and tough to ignore the need for testing fuel economy with all ethanol blends.
"The heart of the problem here was the idea that technology can be mandated."
That is not true at all. By your own account, congress was told there were no technical breakthroughs required, all that was needed was money. Congress didn't try to mandate anything. They simply responded to the testimony and gave the financial support they were told was required for success. They did what they should have based on the testimony they received. The mistake they made was not digging deeply enough into the technical issues, but they thought they had received testimony from the technical experts of the field.
The problem is that real science funding agencies exist and they should review the grant applications with quality reviews and make grants based upon the science and prior performance.
Therein lies the problem. Someone let the money go without carefully reviewing in the science, and that person should be fired.
But cellulose will be used to make things and the research should be funded given all the areas in genetic engineering and so forth that have not been exploited yet.
Oct, I'm not sure it is entirely the fault of the person who approved the funding. And, going from what you said upthread, neither is not the fault of the scientists working on these things. Where the real problem lies, IMO, is with the politicians that are influencing the process for their own reason, and the entrepreneurs that have fronted these companies, and are gaming the funding system.
For some of these companies, the idea is to do enough work to land a bunch of gov funding, which gives them huge credibility, and then draw in other investors and cash out, or at least partially so. This is hardly a conducive environment for science and engineering work, and leads to enormous pressure to report any progress as soon as possible, in the best light possible. It is no wonder that so many claims are not met, how could they be?
What is a wonder is that they keep asking for money, and getting it.
The problem is that government decision making is too often done according to the processes of English jurisprudence. Committees having "hearings" and taking "testimony" are examples.
Good decisions do not always result from having advocates and opponents present their loosely circumscribed rehtorical cases to an impartial but uninformed group who vote on the outcome.
On complex technical matters, the process has a 50-50 chance of arriving at the wrong decision.
I really like that post. Lots to think about there.
One possible solution to this is to drag the former advocates back under Congressional subpoena to testify about why their claims were so ridiculously overblown. Putting Vinod Khosla in front of an investigative committee to answer questions about Range Fuels with full C-SPAN coverage would be one way to encourager les autres.
Lotsa folks talkin' about common sense, and the difficulty of distilling a 4% alcohol solution up to something useful.
Well, jeepers, I may not be a scientistical feller, but up here in de nort woods of Wisconsin, we's got a real nice way to distill alcohol that don't use hardly any energy!
It's called AppleJackin! Cause you takes a gallon jug of nice tasty hard cider, which has a fair bit of alcohol in it, but not enough to fend off the bitter cold, say between 8-12% concentration, and you leave it out on a night when the temperatures get below zero, which happens pretty frequently in the months of December, January, and February, and let it freeze.
Then, the next day, ya turns it upsy turvy over a nice Quart mason jar, and you gets yerself between a pint and a quart of rather hard likker, between 34-45% alcohol!
Nice and smooth, too! Very tasty in front of the fire on a cold evening!
Now, a jug and all isn't industrial production, of course. You'd have to factoratize things somewhut. Maybe using large metal blades, arranged in a fan shape, over a pool of dilute solution. The blades are rotated through the mixture and the water freezes on them and is removed.
That's how they make Ice House beer, doncha know!
Now, in the Sweaty Climates, this wouldn't work. Plus, dose lack-a-days would probably just sit around drinkin' all the produce anyways!
But in the Upper Mississippi valley, and along the Great Lakes, it is easy to both grow and transport a shitload of cellulose efficiently, and then use freezing distillation to make the initial solutions a lot more market-worthy.
Not the total solution, perhaps, but quite likely a significant piece of it.
Ya just gots ta use yer common senses!
I like that a lot,KenBobb! Using winter to do the work of distilling seems like an excellent way to reduce the energy required to achieve a usable concentration of alchohol.
I always think the system with the fewest steps or transformations to arrive at your goal is the best solution.
The process is called fractional crystallisation. It has been around for a long time in the chemical industry but is now rarely used on a large scale due to the cost and problems with cooling. One application was the separation of mixed xylenes.
Cellulosic Ethanol Reality or Myth?
Logistics are not the reason cellulosic ethanol is not profitable, production yield is. And, mandating technological breakthroughs are not about making ethanol viable, but about making investments easier.
First, trash delivery can be negotiated with existing refuse companies for around $8.85 / ton within 25 miles of the landfill or material recycling facility, which is very reasonable. The waste cellulose can also be transported by rail for a weighted average of $30.63 per ton, so your analogy needs work. Realistically, cellulosic ethanol (first generation) technology has not been profitable because of its low production yield. (See www.forfuelfreedom.com/ethanol_yield.htm.) This does not include next generation cellulosic ethanol, which some have a profitable yield (greater than 9.5 additional gallons per ton).
Now concerning the mandates, whether ethanol production or carbon tax, are just a means of putting pressure on oil companies and fossil-fuel based energy producers. I agree that this is not an ideal way to ensure funding of technological breakthroughs. This only helps cellulosic ethanol companies that already are in production, not those with prototypes in some stage of development. That is why there are 0 plants in production. What is needed are investments and grants for private small technology companies with the most promising production capabilities essentially having difficulty getting their wares to market.
Logistics are not the reason cellulosic ethanol is not profitable, production yield is.
You can't really separate the two. A higher production yield would broaden the area that could be collected for biomass. A very small yield means you have to have cheap or free biomass and it needs to be readily accessible.
The waste cellulose can also be transported by rail for a weighted average of $30.63 per ton, so your analogy needs work.
Waste cellulose, of course, isn't really just cellulose. There is a reason more companies don't ferment or gasify MSW. Processes want consistent compositions, and MSW can be all over the map. Very difficult to run most processes on MSW. So can you get cheap or even free biomass? Sure. But not the kind that is the best feedstock.
What is needed are investments and grants for private small technology companies with the most promising production capabilities essentially having difficulty getting their wares to market.<.i>
But isn't that the approach that has been taken? They have provided specific R&D funding to a plethora of cellulosic developers, some smaller, some larger, yet nothing much has been achieved? When R&D money is available, there are always rules for how it gets allocated, and companies will game those rules, no matter what.
Public Sector Research is more accountable. Papers need to be published. benchmarks need to be met. This private-sector-hide-the- stuff-in-secret-and-lie-to-politicians nonsense is what is killing the science.
Public & private researchers need to met incremental goals to get further funding. It is the only way in the end.
This will not happen in secret at private companies with small #s of people. The problems are too large. The collaboration between large numbers of people is required. Little R & D units even at major companies are too myopic in my view.
Either follow the NIH funding model or perish into obscurity.
I am afraid the idea was to bury cellulose research as impossible with a bad science funding model in this particular instance of overfunding a losing proposition.
I am not so sure a purely public approach would have solved this problem.
The fundamentals of how to do cellulosic are well known, though we have a bunch of companies trying different "novel" approaches, and there is nothing wrong with that.
A lot of the problems have to do with scaling up and economics - and that is not so easy to solve in the lab.
Still, you had the Khosla's saying their Silicon Valley approach could solve anything, and the politico's bought it, but it just ain't so.
I think we had a gov desperate to be seen to be doing something, so they were happy to fund these companies - to announce that they had given more money NREL, who has been working on this stuff for decades, just doesn't have the same ring to to it.
Most other countries have also thrown money at companies, rather than public institutions, on the cellulosic file.
Public sector research funding is pretty broken -- too many small grants to too many research institutions, and too many principle investigators with too few development and implementation engineering types.
If Oppenheimer and company had been funded by NIH and NSF, we still wouldn't have a bomb.
Now you guys are over-playing what I said.
The current Health care model which is very successful. Is a lot of small labs researching life science issues. They generate 90% (according to an NIH study) of the R & D, allowing the pharma company to cherry pick and develop or co-develop a drug with the public lab. Heck much drug development in the private sector is funded at some level with public money and boy is it expensive.
That model is successful for healthcare. Why didnt pharma go it alone? Because they couldn't do it. They have no interest in the broad survey required to unearth all the myriad pathways and complexities -- the basic knowledge -- needed to make good drugs. You need a massive base of information to go after the right targets.
In any case, the bomb was developed by the public sector (in secret of course via a large-scale collaboration of many very bright people). The University of Chicago was a major site of the project as an example. The other national sites became the national labs and they were filled with university scientists.
"The Manhattan Project, which began as a small research program that year, eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in present day value)"<<--that is a lot of people and facilities. Cellulosic research is not even close to that effort. Not saying it should. But the present efforts are mom&pop operations by comparison.
You need openness and transparency to come up with solutions in complex problems. Without that it is a boondoggle -- hence the results of these feeble attempts at cellulosic ethanol.
How did they create the structure to evaluate the grants? where are the benchmarked figures for their efforts in the literature?
Are we going to wait it out and gain nothing publicly from their failings? that is a waste of public dollars? They need to publish the failings/the negative results, else they are truly bilking the public at large.
See industry works differently. The keep secrets and work in the dark and rarely speak of the negative results which should be otherwise avoided -- via disclosure in the literature.
I hope you see my points. Academia produces most of the underlying technology -- industry applies it. Each is worthless without the other.
Oct, I don't know if its quite accurate to say academia produces the underlying technology.
Newcomen and Watt with the steam engine were not academia, neither was Charles Parsons (Steam Turbine) or Edison, or Ericcson, or Tesla, etc
Academia does not have a monopoly on bright ideas.
I also don;t think the health care model is necessarily appropriate here, because, some of the problems are scale related. Most health care things can be solved at lab scale - you can;t always do that with thermochemical processes.
Not to say academia can't be involved, and there have been many successful collaborations with industry, and I hope there are many more, but I will say the issue has been around for a century and no one, including academia, has cracked the nut.
$22bn for the A bomb sounds very cheap in today's terms for that many people, facilities etc - I suspect the real number is much higher.
Cellulosic has probably used 10% of that $value, and probably 2% of the people etc.
Perhaps the real contribution academia might have made here (and the NREL could have) was to bring everyone else back to earth about the realities of the situation - and I'm sure some tried, and were likely marginalised for it.
And, once we have this cherished breakthrough, then what? We are no longer using food, but still have a process that is quite energy intensive, and a fuel that people still don;t want to use (but will if forced to). It gives more options, but does not solve America's problem of inefficient use of liquid fuels.
The basic knowledge used to develop a large scale plant comes from classical chemistry and physics, which were all deliberated in the great Universities of the world.
Inventors (and there are many great ones) apply these principles of course, but these are not working in pure isolation.
Not all inventions are from universities, but without universities you have a minimalist society. That is all I am trying to say.
The revolution to be had in cellulosic fuels is a micro-sized scale problem, closely related to health science in aspects of genetic engineering, that is, to develop a critter or find one in nature and evolve it in the laboratory to make an enriched content of higher grade alcohols (like butanol or basic isoprenoids as found in natural petroleum products).
That is the ideal forefront and a worthy place to go in my view. I have background in these matters, although this is not my personal crusade in the research world.
None of these areas have been exploited by traditional petro-chem methods nor by BASF, Eastman or any of the other corps, since they have almost no biological/genetic engineering efforts unless they are coupled to university programs.
Oct, agreed about the knowledge base of universities - I guess the issue is that when we have a problem to solve, that has defied previous efforts, it is hard to know which is the best way to go about it.
There are plenty of outfits (corporate and academic) working on the biological/genetic engineering approach, for cellulosic ethanol, mixed alcohols, butanol, and, of course, algae. They have been working to try to get the clostridia bacterium that makes butanol to give higher yields - and they have gotten it from 1% to 3 or 4%, but hit the wall there.
I am a little cautious about creating a bug that aggressively breaks down lignin and cellulose - sounds like the potential for a problem if it is gets into, and survives in, the broader environment.
The goal is to figure out how cellulase enzymes are structured and how they work, which requires basic science -- microlevel research.
The idea is to optimize the production of cellulase enzymes to make massive qualities at cheaper prices than the native extraction methods used today. The effort will not happen very quick though.
My bet is that thermophilic/heat-loving fungi found inside your compost pile contain the best cellulases to exploit. breaking down cellulose in the compost pile occurs at higher temps maybe to weaken the cellulose material thermally as well.
clostridia may not be the most suitable bug to use to develop additional butanol tolerance. It is the problem for research. They tried to optimize that bug because it naturally made a lot of butanol, acetone, and ethanol and was needed during WWII so the industry understood that critter well.
In any case, hopefully some more effort will go into these areas, which are not corn ethanol.
These are my points and these folks are honest hardworkers in these fields from what I see. The areas are not well understood yet. I fully agree the easier route have been explore by big business -- and naturally that should have happened since WWII was long ago.
The reality for all ethanol SHOULD set in because its STILL a waste of time and resources. Corn supply/demand, dedicated pipelines and tankers with NO backhaul, poorer mileage, fuel system and driveability concerns and the worldwide glut of gasoline and ever better vehicle mileage will continue to put price-pressure on this loser "biofuel". All the mandates and subsidies in the world arent going to change that.
Problems that biodiesel in virtually all forms just dosent share.
There are numerous reasons methanol is a better choice than ethanol IMO.
The cover-up of that factoid always interests me.
Oh, I have tried to get the word out:
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2010/05/21/methanol-versus-ethanol-t...
As I wrote, per BTU of energy: "We are paying 20% more for ethanol enabled via highly paid lobbyists, heavy government intervention, taxpayer funds, and protectionist tariffs than we are for methanol that has long been produced subsidy-free."
How well do methanol/ethanol mixes work in the existing fuel streams?
What are the limits on the current ICE configurations?
Can cars be mandated to be able to handle higher and lower blends of alcohols to adapt to a potential liquid fuels problem in the future?
Indeed, we should be replacing expensive hydrocarbon liquids with the best options available, but the cars are limiting as well with their tolerance to the fuels.
It seems car manufacturers have been hesitant to make cars adaptable to alcohols.
Recall that when RR visited the gas-to-liquids refinery in Malaysia he concluded less than half the energy in the gas made it through to the petrol. That suggests we should be running cars on gas not liquid. Retain GTL for jet fuel as planes won't appreciate the weight of high pressure tanks.
Upthread I pointed out we can get methane gas several different ways and send it through the existing pipe network. Even better I now think we could have a gradual phase-in using bi-fuel vehicles. You can fill up on the highway with CNG and if runs low on a minor side road then top up with petrol or diesel. As the number of CNG filling stations increases the need for liquid will reduce.
Where will all the gas come from? Burn less in power stations and get nukes to make the electricity instead. What I'm unsure about with dual fuel CNG/liquid vehicles is whether they have a preferred mix ratio. I've driven petrol/LNG (propane) cars that switch from 100% one fuel or the other but I'm not sure this works with methane. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-fuel_vehicle
Boof, you can do a mix of both fuels at once, if the engine is set up for it.
The real challenge with dual fuel engines, where one of the fuels is petrol, is that they generally have lower performance on fuel X. If the engine is properly tuned for X , or a mixture of petrol and X (most aren't), it can adjust mixture and timing to get the most out of the alt fuel.
Where the alternate fuels really shine though, is that ALL of them can take higher compression ratios than petrol, up to 20:1. This, of course, suggests the duel fuel engine you want is a diesel +X, and this is commonly done for co fuelling NG, where the diesel injection acts as the ignition source.
Then you will squeeze more MJ of work out of the alts in in high comp engine than you will in a low comp petrol engine.
Play the game on petrol's turf, and it wins, play the game on diesel's turf, and everything else wins.
Just use LNG. The bulk is higher, but the weight/energy is much lower and the energy cost of liquefaction is a lot lower than conversion to synthetic kerosene.
As a bonus, liquid methane is an excellent coolant and could probably allow the engines to run at even higher temperatures and pressures, improving efficiency.
How well do methanol/ethanol mixes work in the existing fuel streams?
They are just fine in gasoline, as E85 demonstrates. You don;t want to mix them with diesel fuel, as they lower the cetane number.
What are the limits on the current ICE configurations?
The limit on current engines is the upper compression ratio for gasoline, at 9-12:1 depending on the fuel grade. If you give up gasoline, and go diesel, you can have 20;1 compression, but you have to have separate fuel storage and delivery systems. You can, of course dispense with diesel entirely and just run straight methanol/ethanol/mixed alcohols. You will actually be more efficient than diesel!
Efficiency map for 1.9L VW Jetta diesel engine;
Efficiency map for the same engine now running on straight methanol;
So the methanol engine has higher efficiency over a greater operating range, including the critical lower rpm range - it will be more efficient overall, but especially so in stop start driving. Peak efficiency for typical gasoline engine is around 28%. Gasoline engine tuned for straight methanol is probably low 30's. Full report at;
http://www.methanol.org/pdf/2002-01-2743.pdf
and follow up on partial mixtures here - the more alcohol, the better!
http://www.methanol.org/pdf/ISAF-XV-EPA.pdf
Can cars be mandated to be able to handle higher and lower blends of alcohols to adapt to a potential liquid fuels problem in the future?
Sure, but, as you can see, you are better off to stop building gasoline engines and build new engines optimised for the new fuels - i.e. diesel engines with alternate fuel systems. You could have an alcohol CNG engine base on a diesel block - do away with the expensive common rail system and pollution controls for diesel, and you can afford the two fuel systems.
It seems car manufacturers have been hesitant to make cars adaptable to alcohols
Ford actually pioneered methanol in the late 80's and 90's, and gave it up when oil prices fell in the early 00's. (http://www.methanol.org/pdf/MethanolStoryRobertaNichols.pdf) Many buyers are suspicious of alternate fuels - there are 8 million flex fuel cars on the road today, but most drivers don;t use E85, even when it is available. Most times, they get lesser performance and less miles per $.
It really needs a wholesale embrace of alcohols and alternate fuels. In a country where even the far more efficient diesels haven't caught on, gasoline is cheap, and E85 response has been underwhelming, why would cash strapped carmakers place a bet on some other alternate fuel?
The best thing for them is to keep on doing what they are doing. Gasoline prices u to $5/gal would change that, and then we might see them bring in the fuel efficient diesels from Europe and 100% alcohol vehicles from Brazil. Almost every car maker has alternate fuel vehicles somewhere in the world, but it's just not worth their while trying it in the US market until the US market really cares about reducing oil use.
I read your articles.
It is amazing to me that we are still using so much reformulated gasoline.
My feeling (as an amateur) is the the car energy market will need to fragment to help us through the transition. While I have some distaste for ethanol from corn, is it a short-term stop gap. The goal should be to get methanol or other higher alcohols into the mix since the goal is to have a way to meet dwindling imports.
If too strong of a stance is taken against ethanol in the near term it will malign methanol and any other biofuel. That is the risk. Or maybe it is a goal as well for some.
I do not think a two gas tank car with natural gas and liquid tanks is a very practical solution, however. The only dual fuel I see is electric and liquid. Nor is straight natural gas likely. I take the position that natural gas is somewhat more difficult to deliver to the average Joe making refueling a pain in the butt.
Perhaps methanol and ethanol shouldn't duke it out but rather they should scheme to get policy made to create more cars and infrastructure for refueling out there. A dual publicity campaign would make some sense but I bet they hate each other.
I bet oil interests are so angry at ethanol that such a type of compromise is unlikely to take place and BAU will continue where the consumer/taxpayer ends up eating it in the end and ethanol dominates the fuel sector as the "biofuel".
Oh well. I guess their disagreement makes the electric hybrid or all electric car the only indirect means of getting natural gas into cars. Methanol will be left to Indy cars in the end I guess unless of course a compromise can take place.
In the meantime, the oil industry is out to go after ethanol at all costs, making compromise highly unlikely, as shown in the results of the recent US Senate deliberations on the subsidy for ethanol.
Maybe one solution is a alcohol-powered hybrid with a six speed automatic transmission. The methanol can be made from syngas.
Perhaps methanol and ethanol shouldn't duke it out but rather they should scheme to get policy made to create more cars and infrastructure for refueling out there. A dual publicity campaign would make some sense but I bet they hate each other.
Yes, you don;t have to keep them separate as fuels even, a mix will work fine, as will mixes with higher alcohols. If it means giving up the last few % efficiency of methanol in order to get half the cars running on mixed alcohol, that is well worth it.
But the ethanol industry doesn't want to co-operate with anyone - they have bunker mentality that Big Oil is out to get them. They know methanol can be made from NG for less than ethanol can be made from corn. The ethanol lobby is worried that the more the oil majors move into NG, the greater the danger that they will start on methanol, and ignore corn ethanol. That being the case, why open the door by cooperating with methanol?
It is like having a sports team of superstars, where each player is more interested in maximising their own personal performance, rather than helping the team to win.
But the government is the "coach", and like any coach, should be kicking in the butt anyone who isn't being a team player. Instead, they reward the players that make the coach look best, even if the team is still losing!
NG I think can be a great fuel for fleet vehicles and trucks and trains - I don;t expect it to make much progress in the general market.
I don;t think the oil industry is out to "get" ethanol, they just wnt ethanol to pay it;s own way - nothing wrong with that.
A simpler solution to the issues of ethanol tax credits is to just have a tariff on all imported oil, and call it a day. That promotes domestic oil, and domestic alternatives, without picking winners. Make the tariff equivalent to $1 or $2/gal and way you go.
The real worry for the oil industry is EV's as that cuts the out of the action entirely.
The Xprize winning car, the Edison Very LIght Car, used a 600cc high compression, high EGR, air cooled, turbocharged motorbike engine running on E85. It had a peak power of 40hp and an average power of of 6hp at 60mph cruise, and achieved 100 mpg(gasoline equivalent). It also met all emissions requirements, something the team (of auto racing experts) said would be much harder on gasoline. Now, this was indeed a very light car, but indicates what can be done by making the car and engine very efficient.
A an engine like this, coupled to a battery electric system, in a compact car, could easily out mpg a Prius. The engine+generator+fuel storage are all light and small, and the engine *always* operates at the top of the efficiency map.
I can;t over emphasise how important it is to know the efficiency map and where the engine operates - most engines spend most of their time way below the efficient area. This map is of a Porsche driving Euro city cycle test, shade area is where the engine actually operates:
You can see it never gets close to it's efficient operating point. Now, this is a Porsche and is designed for a different purpose, but all cars have the same pattern - normal driving is not in the efficient area. The Prius does best at this and the Volt *should* do better still.
A diesel electric train will be operating right in that sweet spot - a series hybrid car can do the same.
with the battery system providing the surge capacity, the engine can be very small, and operate very efficiently. You could use half of the Jetta engine (2cyl, 0.95L) running on alcohol and still have plenty of engine power.
A city bus in Britain was turned into a series hybrid, and the engine - a 2L VW turbodiesel! It provided all the average energy needed to run a 12 t city bus. A car can get by with much less than that.
http://www.mira.co.uk/Case_Studies/documents/ProjectChoiceHybridBus.pdf
it is the obsession with "performance" that holds us back - we drive cars that have 5-10x the power we need, so everythign is overbuilt to handle that power, and they never operate efficiently. If we give up the top end performance, and design for the normal operating range, as buses, tucks, trains and planes are, then we will be much more efficient, its that simple.
Leave the race car performance to racecars.
I am firmly in this camp -- performance issues are kind of silly when gasoline will cost $5-10 a gallon.
If the alcohol requirement is boosted for these engines then methanol and ethanol could be blended at certain levels for the optimal performance.
Additional alcohols could be formed into ethers and fed into diesel fuel as well.
Go for it. Too bad we are not dictators.
A tariff on foreign oil should be an easy thing to sell the public.
No kidding. My most stringent power requirements in my car, pulling 3+ tons of vehicle and cargo up a mountain at 65 MPH, required roughly 100 HP. My car has a 134 HP engine, and the options for that year went up to about 300! The 1.4 liter TDI would be sufficient, even for towing.
I think you missed the point of the keypost; the problem isn't using the alcohol, it's getting it. I like the idea of ultra-turbocharging of radically downsized engines using on-demand ethanol or mixed alcohol direct injection, because our existing ethanol supply is more than sufficient to supply the 5% fraction this would require (it could be the azeotropic mixture with water instead of anhydrous and it would work even better).
Downsizing car engines to 500-750cc with no loss of utility would be a great advance; smaller, lighter, cheaper, and 30% more efficient.
If we deem "alcohol" to include methanol, there is no problem getting enough of it to run engines at 30% alcohol, using fancy tricks like the direct injection. Then with the efficiency improvement, the fuel use is down 30%, and with 30% of that being alcohol, we have halved gasoline consumption!
The key post was about the dream of turning valueless cellulosic waste to ethanol, and it will likely remain a dream. Meanwhile, we could be turning it into methanol, or better still , turn the cellulose/woody waste into electricity, and use the NG we save to make methanol. There is no new technology required for any of that, and methanol is produced, today, for less $/BTU than gasoline.
But it does require a "systemic" change, and no one, not even the methanol industry, is championing it.
I suppose such an engine could run E-30 in the main tank as well as 90% EtOH/10% H2O (or mixed alcohols, with or without water) in the direct-injection system, but there's not enough EROI improvement to justify the E-30; it might as well be E-0.
The exception I can see is disposal of things like mold-damaged grains which aren't suitable for direct consumption by humans or livestock, but yeast will happily munch the remaining starches. If that leaves us with more than the 5% octane enhancer needed, by all means mix it with the petroleum stream.
I presume you are talking about thew EROI of corn ethanol, but i don;t see why this is a big deal.
All electricity we use, and we use a lot, except for wind, solar and hydro, has an EROI <1, so what is the big deal when corn ethanol is about 2?
more importantly, the energy in (usually NG) is not liquid, but the energy out is. They could use low rank coal for the distillation - would not change the EROI, but would make it cheaper still.
or they could use the NG to make electricity at the distillery and then use the waste heat for the distillation - your EROI would then be about 8:1
In all of these scenarios, the amount of oil imports displaced is pretty much the same, which is much more important than EROI.
If you view corn ethanol as a glorified NG to liquids process, it has a better EROI than direct GtL by a factor of 4.
And we don;t appear to be running out of NG anytime soon, unlike oil.
Actually, a factor of about 2 (the plant RR reviewed eked out about 45%, and refineries do have substantial losses) but this is a very good point. On the other hand, using CNG or LNG also avoids the GTL losses and eliminates the cost in water, topsoil loss, water eutrophication and N2O emissions. Unless the system gets much better than 1:1, ethanol is inferior as an energy carrier.
Are you trying to be disingenuous here? You are comparing two unlike processes; one converts fuel to work, the other converts one fuel usable in a motor vehicle to another fuel that's somewhat easier to use in a motor vehicle. Corn ethanol isn't about 2, it's about 1.
If we had enough nuclear powerplants that we needed to turn them down at night, I would suggest using low-pressure steam for biofuels processing and eliminate the fuel and carbon issues entirely. The energy return on mining and enriching uranium is a lot higher than 8.
An infernal combustion engine to generate electricity optimised to produce the average power consumption with a reasonable excess to cover more extreme conditions. A relatively small battery bank (compared to regular EVs) to even out that power to allow for acceleration and recovery from braking. Super capacitors to provide surge power when you need the oomph, for example when starting off or overtaking. A balanced combination and each stage optimised to do its job properly rather than one engine trying to be a jack of all trades and failing.
NAOM
EDIT: With a good balance you should still be able to show good performance but stay well within high efficiency in normal driving.
Consider dispensing with batteries and just using graphene ultracapacitors. At upwards of 2 kW/kg of active material and 85.6 Wh/kg before using capacity-expanding tricks (which can boost it to 180 Wh/kg), 50 kg would supply heaps of power and allow plug-in hybrid operation without conventional batteries.
Well, standard supercaps and batteries are available off the shelf. How long would these graphite caps take to get to market? What is their self discharge like, can they keep enough charge to get you home after a weekend at aunt Mabel's. I am beginning to wonder if the EV business today has gone off at a somewhat half cock before technologies are ripe and that we need another 5-10 years to get the technology shaken out such as batteries and capacitors with sufficient storage.
NAOM
No idea on time to market, but graphene has gone from initial discovery to bulk production by peeling graphite blocks with ionic liquids in 6 years. I wouldn't be surprised if the material is largely compatible with conventional carbon capacitor construction techniques and could be close to a drop-in replacement. Developments are moving at breakneck speed. (It's not unlike a war effort in some ways, and given the number of applications and the amount of money to be made, I'n not surprised.)
Conventional 1 F supercaps appear to have self-discharge in the region of 1 μA (about 3 weeks to bleed a 1F cap from 4 volts down to 2), and a plug-in hybrid would have the engine as a backup if it sat off-grid for an extended period and discharged. (If you're on-grid and going to let it sit, drain it to the grid until you need it again, then recharge it.)
Once last point or two.
Is DME dimethylether a persistent pollutant like MBTE?
We wouldn't want to drink the stuff, right? MBTE, for example, taste terrible. Was there a study on the environmental degradation of releases of the material yet?
Because China is rather notorious for not caring about environmental impacts, I would not be shocked that they are moving on DME faster than the US.
Why not make ethanol into diethylether then for the same convenience -- it could then be blended into diesel fuel as well?
DEE breaks down faster in the atmosphere than DME so it would not be as persistent as an air pollutant.
Finally, you say that ethanol is cheaper than methanol by 20%, but did you also consider that after ethanol fermentation, the lignin and other non-digested biomaterial is fed into a synthesis gas type process to produce additional methanol fuel?
Is DME dimethylether a persistent pollutant like MBTE?
To my knowledge, DME is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic. Not sure of how quickly it is metabolized by microbes.
Finally, you say that ethanol is cheaper than methanol by 20%, but did you also consider that after ethanol fermentation, the lignin and other non-digested biomaterial is fed into a synthesis gas type process to produce additional methanol fuel?
I am talking about corn ethanol. The byproducts are already factored into the cost. You are talking about cellulosic ethanol; in that case the delta is much larger than 20%. And the models I have seen feed that lignin back into the process to generate process heat, needed to separate very low concentration ethanol from water. So there isn't anything left to feed to a syngas reactor.
DME is a gas at room temperature and pressure. It is used as a propellant in aerosol cans such as hair spray. It appears to be considered harmless, and it is highly reactive so it doesn't last long in the atmosphere.
Here is the NOAA listing for DME. It has no potential for bio-accumulation and no EPA reporting requirement for spills.