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Ethanol

robinson

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I read that ethanol was the original fuel for automobiles. And that prohibition, and the need for higher octane fuels, led to it being replaced by gasoline.

"There's enough alcohol in one year's yeild of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years."
- Henry Ford

I don't know if any of that is true however.

But what an interesting subject.

Now I hear it takes more oil to make ethanol, than if you just used the oil for fuel. I don't believe that for a second.
 
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robinson said:
Now I hear it takes more oil to make ethanol, than if you just used the oil for fuel. I don't believe that for a second.
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You'd have to cite the specific study, but those I've seen suggesting this, have been sloppy at best and dishonest at worst.
 
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In a related note, I've read that Diesel created his engine so that framers could grow their own fuel.
 
I have never read that about ethanol. Do you have a reference?


"There's enough alcohol in one year's yeild of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years."
- Henry Ford
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Hyperbole?
 
robinson said:
I read that ethanol was the original fuel for automobiles. And that prohibition, and the need for higher octane fuels, led to it being replaced by gasoline.
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I doubt prohibition was the driving force. Octane doesn't get a lot of use outside of car engines (not very useful for jet fuel, lamps, cooking, etc.). Why waste that big component of petroleum when you can put it to use? Plus, it's less corrosive. Car fuel systems have to be specially built to handle ethanol, because lines and seals which can hold octane will corrode under ethanol exposure. Which is why there's those warning signs on E85 fuel pumps: you'll screw up your car royally if you pump that stuff into a non-flex fuel car.
 
robinson said:
Now I hear it takes more oil to make ethanol, than if you just used the oil for fuel. I don't believe that for a second.
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It depends on the feedstock. What you've probably heard is that producing ethanol from corn is, at best, just barely a break-even proposition. In Brazil, they're making it from sugarcane, and powering their own operations entirely from burning the waste (in fact, they produce a slight surplus in the electricity alone).
 
robinson said:
Now I hear it takes more oil to make ethanol, than if you just used the oil for fuel. I don't believe that for a second.
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I've only ever seen this claim for total energy consumption, not for petroleum. Much of the energy is not diesel for transportation or farming, but NG(or coal) for producing N-fertilizer and for distilling the alcohol; some mix between electricity(coal, nuclear, NG, hydro) and diesel for running all the crushers, pumps, drag lines, slurry pipelines, conveyors and other stationary equipment for the mineral fertilizers; all of which could in principle be electrically powered.

Pipelines for ethanol are possible, but it cannot use existing pipelines, at least not without modification. Pipelines are far more efficient than trucks.

Phosphate rock mined for P-fertilizer usually contains quite a bit of uranium(10-200 ppm depending on site). If the uranium price is high enough for it to be economical this is sometimes recovered. A pound of uranium contains the equivalent of ~6000 barrels of oil in thermal energy, ~1% is released in a regular reactor, the rest is stockpiled as "depleted uranium"(from the enrichment) and "spent fuel"(from the reactor).

It's seems a terrible waste to just flush this uranium down the proverbial toilet. If we wanted to reduce land use, greenhouse gas emissions(N2O and CO2) we should use it for electrical power and incourage more electrical transportation.
 
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Dymanic said:
It depends on the feedstock. What you've probably heard is that producing ethanol from corn is, at best, just barely a break-even proposition. In Brazil, they're making it from sugarcane, and powering their own operations entirely from burning the waste (in fact, they produce a slight surplus in the electricity alone).
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All forms of energy aren't equivalent. Gasoline and ethanol are worth more than electrical energy because they are portable, energy dense substances. Solving the problem of storing electrical energy densely, cheaply and reliably(many recharge cycles) would make oil obsolete for transportation pretty quickly as coal and uranium is already much cheaper.
 
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soylent said:
All forms of energy aren't equivalent. Gasoline and ethanol are worth more than electrical energy because they are portable, energy dense substances. Solving the problem of storing electrical energy densely, cheaply and reliably(many recharge cycles) would make oil obsolete for transportation pretty quickly as coal and uranium is already much cheaper.
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I hope you understand what I was saying. The surplus of electricity produced by the plants in Brazil is in addition to the ethanol they produce as their main activity.
 
Dymanic said:
I hope you understand what I was saying. The surplus of electricity produced by the plants in Brazil is in addition to the ethanol they produce as their main activity.
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We will soon see which is a more feasible source of energy as Brazil just discovered a huge oil deposit.
 
robinson said:
In a related note, I've read that Diesel created his engine so that framers could grow their own fuel.
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Diesel's Germany was fixated on national self-sufficiency, especially in fuel, a critical strategic resource. Germany had no oil of its own, nor an oil-producing empire, and were very aware of their vulnerability to blockade. Germany was also first-up with fuel from coal; when push came to shove they just had to scale up proven technology.

Watch out for the sugar-coating :).
 
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JEROME DA GNOME said:
We will soon see which is a more feasible source of energy as Brazil just discovered a huge oil deposit.
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The original estimates of the size of Saudi's Ghawar field was around 170 billion barrels. It's not just that this is roughly 25 times the size of the recently discoverd Tupi field off the coast of Brazil, it's that the former is a conventional source, while the latter is a deep water source. "Huge discoveries" are being announced all the time, but none of them (as in ZERO) are conventional sources. Don't be misled. The amount of oil that's there doesn't matter nearly as much as does the amount of effort required to extract it.
 
Dymanic said:
"Huge discoveries" are being announced all the time, but none of them (as in ZERO) are conventional sources.
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Been there, did them, got the T-shirt :). We've even done some unconventional sources at their time, such as the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. The expense keeps going up.

Don't be misled. The amount of oil that's there doesn't matter nearly as much as does the amount of effort required to extract it.
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There's also the matter of the money that has to be sunk into it years before anything's extracted, at whatever price it may trade in by then.
 
Ziggurat said:
Plus, it's less corrosive. Car fuel systems have to be specially built to handle ethanol, because lines and seals which can hold octane will corrode under ethanol exposure. Which is why there's those warning signs on E85 fuel pumps: you'll screw up your car royally if you pump that stuff into a non-flex fuel car.
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Use the appropriate materials and you don't have to worry about the corrosivness.
 
Ethanol, used properly, has a higher fuel density than gasoline and is more efficient. We've become locked into one fuel source, to the point where we don't properly build our engines to take advantage of Ethanol. Flex is not enough, we really need the proper compression ratios to keep Ethanol from polluting and use all the energy.

I think there's some future there, the question is if fuel cell technology gets ahead. Fuel cells have a lot of really key advantages, but some nasty disadvantages too.
 
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As mentioned, ethanols viability depends on the source.

Dynamic mentioend Brazil, where they use surgarcane, and it does the job quite well.

In the praries, where I live, what ethanol we make comes from wheat. Wheat is about the least efficient way of doing things, and cannot sustain itself.
Besides, it's food.
However, here in Manitoba, we have abundant supplies of electricity courtesy of hydroelectric dams. Great news for hybrid/electric vehicles (even if our winters aren't).

What I figure will happen with regards to automobiles is each region will use vehicles compatible with the power source(s) most readily available in that region. Think of it as evolutionary speciation events cause by selective pressures...
 
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