I understand fully the idea of coal and natural gas not being good motor fuels because of the reasons you explained.
But, don’t you think there are more efficienct ways to turn coal, diesel oil, and natural gas into a portable automotive fuel than by having farmers cultivate, plant, and harvest millions of acres of corn each year, and then grinding, fermenting, and distilling the corn into ethanol?
During WW II when the Germans were using coal in synthetic fuel plants, they didn’t go through the intermediate step of first converting the energy to corn, and then processing the corn into alcohol.
BTW, diesel fuel works great for autos. When I’m not riding my bike, I drive a diesel-powered car with a manual transmission. It gets 50+ mpg. If we could convince the whole country to drive diesel-powered cars with manual transmissions, we wouldn’t be importing any oil. (But that’s another subject.)
Okay, a technical point. I’m sick of business. Short answer: not yet.
Long answer: The conventional wisdom points to methanol (CH3OH). Methanol is methane (natural gas) with an oxygen atom added. The extra weight of the oxygen, plus the fact that it forms a polar bond, helps methanol be a liquid at room temperature and pressure. So it’s a reasonably-dense fuel, though not as dense as ethanol, with almost all of natural gas’s octane. And it can, on paper, be sold through existing pumps. When natural gas was dirt cheap, so was methanol, so it held promise.
Unfortunately, the price went up, and methanol is just different enough from ethanol and especially gasoline. While ethanol is miscible in gasoline at any blend, methanol has a limit. The energy density is also more different- neat methanol gets you just over half the mileage of gasoline, compared to about three-quarters using ethanol. If Americans can’t deal with the metric system, they sure can’t grok such a noticeable drop in MPG.
Methanol is also much more toxic. Methanol causes blindness after a few spoonfuls, and death if untreated. Because of the small, polar molecule, it will even soak through your skin. Methanol also burns so dimly that the flame is considered invisible in daylight. (Open-wheeled racing fans may know this from watching pit crews.) Ethanol, on the other hand, is primarily dangerous to your reputation.
The last nail in methanol’s coffin is compatibility. Ethanol, poured into a vehicle or station designed strictly for gasoline, may swell some O-rings or gaskets. At worst, you’d plug something. In recent vehicles, you don’t have to worry about even this, since fuel systems are also hardened against the similar MTBE additive.
But methanol is highly corrosive- it will literally dissolve any aluminum and magnesium in a vehicle’s or station’s fuel system after a few hours of exposure. Not staining, not pitting- dissolving. Retrofitting a gasoline vehicle to methanol is no longer dotting i’s and crossing t’s. Also, the injector flow rate is a much bigger switch from gasoline to methanol. Ethanol is close enough to gasoline that many gasoline injectors can reach stoichiometric at one end of their range. Methanol would require new, larger injectors.
This is ethanol’s greatest advantage- near-transparency to the customer and retailer, and much less of the chicken-and-egg problem. Millions of Flex-Fuel Vehicles (FFVs) are already on the road, able to take ethanol instead of gasoline without service. The engine computer simply moves to a different point on its injection and ignition maps automatically. Meanwhile, ethanol pumps are as cheap as, or readily converted back and forth from, gasoline pumps.
California experimented with methanol (Flex-Fuel) cars and stations. It was cheaper than ethanol, since coming from natural gas it had the fossil-fuel infrastructure and financial backing. When the price of natural gas went up in the mid-nineties, the pumps closed and the cars went back to gasoline.
In the future, methanol is probably how we’ll liquefy coal. We don’t do it now, because we don’t have to. It’s a pretty polluting process. And the mechanical handling of coal adds cost that petroleum and natural gas just don’t have.
Also, unlike natural gas, the variability of coal and wood organics produce methanol tainted with aldehydes and ketones. If you think methanol alone is corrosive, straight-run product containing aldehydes and ketones will lay waste to your tank, your engine, and everyone behind you. The real cost of non-natural-gas methanol plants (in both financial, and energy balance terms) isn’t the conversion itself, it’s the purification equipment for these contaminants. I believe this was a problem for the German plants you mention, but you know more about those plants than I do. By the time we absolutely need to liquefy coal, this problem may be solved.
And then there’s propane. We could make petroleum stretch farther by cracking it down to propane instead of just gasoline. Vehicle range would still be acceptable. But as a quasi-gas, it has almost all the storage problems of natural gas. Vehicle retrofitting is thus almost as expensive as natural-gas retrofitting; people won’t do that in the name of efficiency alone. Back when propane was cheaper than gasoline, there was a definite subculture, but not anymore. Somehow, gasoline is cheaper than a waste-product from gasoline manufacturing!!!
The left-field alternative is electricity. Burn fossil fuels in a massive, efficient plant, and use the electricity to run cars. Even with transmission losses, well-to-wheels efficiency increases. But the cars have short ranges with today’s battery technologies. (That’s still probably good enough for a good chunk of the population. But why settle for reduced capability? Ain’t the American Way, not when gasoline’s cheap.)
Natural gas, and to a lesser extent coal, can be converted to hydrogen and used in fuel cells, sort of a different form of electricity. But that’s decades away. Yes, decadeS- I see all the hydrogen hype as salesmanship and smokescreen. And you still have the chicken-and-egg problem, which is much worse with hydrogen. Some propose methanol- or even ethanol-fuel cells, which would at least salvage parts from our existing gas stations.
It’s possible that some other fuel or conversion process will appear. The Fischer-Tropsch process may streamline a bit here and there to become competitive, but then it bumps into the same issues as ethanol. Given the lag time of any new technology, let alone acceptance from something as fickle as a nation of drivers, I don’t see anything else for a good long time.
In short, we use ethanol because it works, not just on a production level, but in sales and driveability. Henry Ford even designed the frickin’ Model T to be an ethanol/gasoline FFV. The _1908_MODEL_T, PEOPLE! If you won’t switch to ethanol, then you just don’t like piston engines, which you and I both pretty much agree on.
Not so fast. Price spikes would be pretty much erased, since the difference between a shortage and a surplus is only a few percent. But no imports? That’s a little dramatic. We import 60% of our petroleum. Elimination thus implies tripling our fuel economies, across all vehicles and industries. Diesel is better, but not that much.
You do bring up biodiesel. Biodiesel is domestic, renewable, and clean (compared to fossil diesel, but what isn’t). Its positive energy balance is apparent to any serious observer. Note that ethanol from grain is not incompatible with biodiesel. Ethanol production only needs sugar. The germ and its corn oil can be separated and transesterified into biodiesel. In fact, all ethanol plants are separating corn now. Selling off the corn oil as a co-product is good business sense. (See, can’t get away from that filthy profit.)
Sorry about the grossly-off-topic post,
Rene Carlos
This one’s more on-topic, but it does get back to business somewhat.
Again, as long as natural gas and coal are cheap, you’d be a fool not to use them. And they’re not foreign. Again, whatever energy is used for ethanol production, it’s domestic (at least, within the ethanol facility). While we may need to start importing some natural gas, it’s likely to come from Canada and Mexico for a while, maybe Britain. And we won’t need to import coal for, oh, several centuries. Thus we’re already thumbing our nose at OPEC.
But you raise an interesting point: can we cut off fossil fuels entirely? I’ll speak for the ethanol plant itself, since I’m an engineer, not a farmer. There’s another fuel that’s better than ethanol for stationary applications: biomass.
Biomass is the inedible portion of crops. For corn, that would be “stover” (cobs, husks, stems and leaves); for wheat, it’s called “chaff.” Because they’re solid and low-density, biomass materials are absolutely worthless in modern vehicles, or almost anything else save compost. But they can be burned as a heat source. Independent (hobbyist!) distillers have demonstrated distillation using stover alone, on a batch process. A continuous process would need even less energy. Obviously, biomass counts as energy, but it’s domestic and non-fossil energy. Just like the sun needed to grow the corn.
Why don’t we use biomass now? Although the sale price is low, biomass is solid and low-density (both BTU/lb and $/lb), so logistics costs are high. Natural gas comes out of a pipe, which is paid off quickly; biomass comes in truck after truck, incurring labor and maintenance on every trip. And within the plant, natural gas turns on and off with a switch, lending itself to modern, computerized process controls.
As the price of natural gas rises, biomass may supplement it. With process refinement, industry momentum, and new technologies, ethanol plants may become smaller and more widely-distributed. Thus trucking costs will decrease, as facilities use biomass produced nearby. But this will only happen once industrial economies of scale are broken. Even then, I imagine some amount of “flowable” energy, either natural gas or electricity, will probably be used for transient control.
And don’t tell me we can’t sustainably burn biomass. The fraction of a year’s crop needed for tillage and ground cover next year is one-fifth to one-third.
Similar to biomass is biogas. As I mentioned earlier, ethanol producers sell animal feed from the spent mash. (The process is unprofitable without such sales.) The cattle manure can be digested by bacteria, producing fertilizer and releasing methane. That methane is essentially non-fossil natural gas. None of these technologies are new, they’ve just never been daisy-chained.
A South Dakota company tried to build the first such plant, but never opened. And they didn’t design such a facility because they’re so environmentally friendly, but because there’s money to be had. South Dakota currently “exports” raw corn, not a surprise. But they also export calves, to be “finished” and slaughtered in other states. In essence, South Dakota industries are sending out low-priced commodities, while other states perform the value-added steps and get more of the profit. If this company could turn the corn into fuel, and turn the calves into saleable beef, they could “steal” that profit back from the other areas. No national-security directive or legislative order was necessary.
But while it’s technically sound, such an enterprise depends on a lot of customer relationships. You need guaranteed supplies of corn (not really a problem), and consistent herds of cattle to feed. Then you need consistent ethanol and beef prices. I guess the negotiations got so convoluted that the company could not assure consistent profits. Neither ethanol producers nor oil companies run on altruism, and we can’t make them.
Again, and I keep repeating myself, biogas and biomass necessarily make good boiler fuels, because they make bad motor fuels. They’re physically unwieldy, distributed poorly, and require major modifications to piston engines. Therefore, there’s no reason to skip over them and burn ethanol, not when cheaper fuels work as well.
Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but I just noticed something. There’s an ethanol (E85) pump a few towns over. I don’t have any vehicles that can burn high-test ethanol, but I pass that station every now and then. During 2002, E85 cost somewhere in the $1.80 range. This was slightly higher than premium gasoline, which was to be expected, since its 99-octane is much higher than premium gasoline. Then, during the Second Gulf War, I passed the station again. Gasoline had jumped noticeably, but the price of E85 was the same. E85 was now about as much as mid-grade gas. If I were a racer, E85 would be my best source of octane.
This fall and winter, there’s been a lot of talk about natural gas prices. Seems we’re setting records due to high demand and stagnant supply; the price of natural gas has apparently doubled (can anyone confirm?). There’s even talk of a Congressional investigation. Meanwhile, petroleum is at $34 a barrel- high by anyone’s definition, and it’s been more or less high for a while- i.e., the entire 2003 corn growing season.
So I checked the E85 pump this Tuesday- a gallon was $1.86. Pretty amazing- despite a troubling increase in fossil-energy prices, ethanol had increased by pennies at most. If ethanol requires so much tractor fuel and boiler heat, why aren’t the price increases reflected at the pump? No one denies that ethanol uses some fossil fuels- heck, the very name E85 means the fuel is a blend of 15% gasoline, 85% ethanol. So where is the trickle-down pricing?
One possibility is that ethanol plants have switched from natural gas to coal. I doubt this. Switching a boiler from a gaseous fuel to a solid fuel is non-trivial. You also have to renegotiate your fuel contracts; any ethanol producer with an ounce of business savvy negotiates a bulk-fuel supply for months in advance. It seems to me that ethanol is just insensitive to fossil-fuel prices. I can’t conclusively say that ethanol production uses low amounts of fossil fuels- so low, that the product is price-insensitive. But the evidence is printed right there on the pump.
Upshot: ethanol is politically dependable. When oil prices are high, and even an overwhelmingly-domestic source like natural gas is in contention, ethanol keeps humming along. Say what you will about energy balance (the bookkeeping will always be questioned, due to millions of farmers doing different things, and ethanol coproducts being assigned an approximate energy credit). But the proof is in the price: ethanol hasn’t increased noticeably in the past 18 (turbulent) months.
Rene Carlos
Interesting that E85 cost $1.86 per gallon where you live. That is about $0.30 more than I’m paying for gasoline where I live.
Actually, to be a wise buy, E85 should cost only about three-quarters of what gasoline cost. A gallon of E85 contains about 82,000 Btu of energy, while a gallon of gasoline is about 114,000 Btu. That means it takes 1.4 gallons of E85 to move your auto the same distance as one gallon of gasoline. If you fill your tank with E85, your vehicle’s range is about 25% less than with gasoline. If it costs you the same (or more) to fill your tank with E85 as with gasoline, why would a prudent driver decide to use E85 – unless E85 sold for a price proportional to its energy content?
However, if the price of ethanol and E85 was proportional to its energy content, farmers and the ethanol energy companies couldn’t make any money (at least without the government subsidies they now receive) because ethanol production flies in the face of the laws of thermodynamics.
I suspect the reason you see little fluctuation in the price of E85 is that the price of ethanol and E85 isn’t market driven. Whatever we pay for ethanol and the blend known as E85 is because of subsidies, not because of supply and demand.
The ethanol subsidy is almost constant- about 52 cents a gallon, varying by exactly a penny depending on fiscal year. That doesn’t change, nor does it explain the price stability over three fiscal years. If you weren’t aware of that, you are now. Petroleum subsidies vary by fiscal year, though, even if you don’t include wars.
The price of ethanol is definitely not proportional to its energy content- it’s proportional to economic values (both of the raw materials, and the final product). How many times do I have to tell you- BTUs do not equal dollars. Energy has quality as well as quantity. A million BTUs in the form of bark chips does not bring in the same price as a million BTUs in the form of, say, 110V AC current. People are paying for format, convenience, and delivery in addition to thermodynamics. If you need to run, say, a wristwatch, then a mountain of bark chips is absolutely worthless to you no matter how many jillions of BTUs it contains. This is I think the fourth time I have had to explain this to you- it will be the last.
Also, I never once brought up the energy density. You used that to change the subject. Whatever energy density ethanol has, it’s been constant this year, last year, and the decade before. (And if you mean straight ethanol, it’s been constant for centuries.) Volumetric energy density is a factor in station and vehicle fuel system design, not thermodynamic balance. If you want to debate fuel system design, go ahead, but it has nothing to do with the question of net positive or negative energy. Geez, someone pointed this out in the fifth or so post!
My point was that ethanol is publicly, demonstratably unaffected by two fossil markets. Natural gas up. Petroleum up. Ethanol not up (subsidies not up). Is that clear enough for you? I even stated that this is regardless of what BTU content it may or may not represent. If you want to debate price stability, please go ahead. If you want to debate energy density, which is another subject, then don’t even pretend you’re countering the original subject.
You apparently don’t know how the ethanol subsidy works- so either read up, or stop pretending that you do know. Or several other business principles- would you like me to post Ethanol 101 (Process Theory), 301 (Modern Processes in Practice), and 401 (Further Industry R&D)? And you apparently don’t know how to stay on a subject. You have repeatedly deflected explicit points by myself and others by segueing into something else. If you have a theory, post the evidence like my pump price. If all you have is pooh-pooing of peer-reviewed journals, or hand-waving about the Second Law, then formulate a hypothesis, and I will blow holes in it. At least, until your subsequent post, when you segue into the First and Third Laws (of Newton).
Rene Carlos
I mentioned energy density only to point out that E85 is not a good buy at $1.86 per gallon, especially when a gallon of E85 can move my car only 75% as far as a gallon of gasoline that costs $1.55 per gallon.
Both gasoline and E85 are equally portable and equally convenient. (Sort of at least. You can’t send ethanol and E85 through pipelines and must use trucks to transport it. Pipelines are much more energy efficient than trucks for moving fuel.) If both gasoline and E85 are available, why would a smart consumer want to pay more for the fuel with lower energy density?
Arrrrggh!!! Before you hit the “submit” button, SkyCowboy, did it ever occur to you that your post was exactly what I warned you about???
No one asked if YOU, SkyCowboy, wanted ethanol. Not Cecil, not Roger R. the original question submitter, and not anyone else on this thread. (You can’t readily use ethanol, because you use bicycles and diesel engines, remember?) You added that little bit of trivia, like pipelines just now, to prove how smart you are. Meanwhile the thread careens into the ditch. I know this, because that’s your whole MO:
-In the lefty-catcher thread, you enlighten us with what you would do as a baseball manager.
-In the decapitated-head thread, you answer a human biology question with how to render a chicken, and experience a nuclear blast.
You’re the kid that won’t stop raising his hand in the middle of class, regardless of how far the tangent has gone. You’re worse, actually: you’re the seminar student that asks a question to show everyone you can ask a smart question. In some cases, such as the marine/army thread, you are in fact adding information. In this case, you have shown obfuscation and regurgitation with no real industry knowledge. In fact, you have shown a distinct lack of knowledge on some basic economics. And yet you keep coughing up this or that factoid, to prove what an energy stud you are.
I believe my posts speak for themselves: I am as concerned about net energy as anyone here, and have examined the problem from many angles. Hell, you even got me going on methanol and natural-gas vehicles. So, how about I agree not to act like I know one thing about military service, and you agree to hold a linear discussion without smartass segueways?
Rene Carlos
I don’t whether to be flattered or frightened that you have gone to the trouble to compile a dossier of my recent posts to Cecil’s fine column. This forum is supposed to be fun, entertaining, and educational – don’t take it so seriously.
Be that as it may, my interest in this thread has been solely to discuss whether or not ethanol production is a valuable adjunct to our national energy policy, or nothing more than a futile folly flying in the face of the laws of thermodynamics.
This link goes to a discussion of ethanol production by a gentleman in the UK. Perhaps it will interest you.
Laws of Thermodynamics notwithstanding, Ethanol is cheap to produce. Are you talking about the commercial manufacture of Ethanol? Modern distillers spend fortunes reducing the Ethanol content of their products to meet Government regulations and tax code problems. The bigest obstruction to Ethanol production is indeed the tax code. I’ve been involved with farmers and have several in my family. Ethanol is so cheap and easy to produce that all the reapers, sawmills and tractors have run on it for generations. Illegal by code, practical for use. The biggest problem is that it can and will be drank. In WW2 sailors used to drink the fuel (ethanol) that powered torpedos. It doesn’t smoke, it makes water steam as a by-product of combustion. It can be produced with any modest fermentory and needs not be 100% pure to fuel an internal combustion engine. Distilling is regulated and licensed and distilling is required to make it fuel grade. Drop the law and the pretense, Distilled liquor is a horror, but why blame the resource we can and do have and line the pockets of the oil people because some individuals choose to intoxicate themselves with its misuse?
Both true statements, but misleading. Both statements are also true of gasoline. The combustion products of ethanol and octane (or any other hydrocarbon) are the same, assuming complete combustion: Carbon dioxide and water (albeit in different proportions). Smoke is only produced from these fuels if you have incomplete combustion, something you want to avoid in an engine anyway, because it means your engine is less efficient.
Also, as has been stated many times in this thread, ethanol production does not fly in the face of the laws of thermodynamics, since there is an external energy source. It may or may not be a self-sustaining business; that’s a valid topic of discussion for this thread. But even if it’s not sustainable, that’s a problem with the engineering, not with the physics. Improvements could, in principle, be made in agricultural efficiency such that it would become practical.
Finally, I’d like to point out that a fixed-amount subsidy should cause ethanol fuel to fluctuate more in price, not less. They won’t change the absolute size of the fluctuations, but they will decrease the total cost and therefore increase the relative size of fluctuations. The fact that the price of ethanol nonetheless remains stable to within 5% or less would appear to be significant.
I am not a big fan of ADM. I not a big fan of government subsidies.
I submit the folowing points for consideration.
There are many kinds of alcohol. There are many processes that can produce alcohol. It is risky to make blanket statements about the thermodynamics associated with alcohol production.
Much of the energy required to produce alcohol from grain, sugar or what ever can be supplied by what would otherwise be waste heat in some cogeneration process.
Several others in this thread have made a similar point–that is, that it would be good if we could be rid of dependence upon foreign oil for our energy needs. In particular, biomass/biodiesel seems to have several folks excited.
I hope I don’t get anyone too riled up by posting this. A few tempers have heated up discussing things that I’ve truly tried to understand, yet still don’t. Hence I’m trying to preach to no one. And I hope it’s on-topic, which is why I quoted above.
As of a couple of years ago, the US used about 3.29 terawatts–millions of megawatts–of total energy per year. For ethanol, or biodiesel, or wind power, or solar, or anything else to have any hope at all of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, it would have to provide a lot of power.
My bottom-line question is, does anyone here really believe that any alternate energy sources have the potential to provide enough energy to truly free us from foreign oil?
I’m not sure exactly how you’re using the word “reserves,” but if you are referring to oil that just hasn’t been pumped or even discovered yet, sure, there’s a lot of disagreement over that issue.
But, like I said, that’s another thread, and would take a lot of research to post on intelligently. All I’m doing is pointing out that there is another legitimate point of view from the one that says we’ll be paying exorbitant (by today’s standards) prices for petroleum products within eight to twelve years.
Of course, inflation alone might raise the price that much, in which case things would be a lot like they are today: people complaining about “record high prices” that are in fact lower than they were during the seventies, when the dollar is adjusted appropriately.
Of course, it’s also possible that I have misinterpreted you entirely, and that you didn’t have “exorbitant prices due to short supply” in mind when you wrote
Eventually the ratio of energy consumed in the production process to energy produced in the production process will be close enough to 1:1 (or over enough) to not warrant getting any more oil out of the ground. The ratio is a lot closer around my parts (Alaska’s North Slope) than it is in, say, Kuwait. But if the ratio is expensive enough in terms of energy cost, it won’t matter if Americans are willing to pay $100 a barrel, or $100 for a gallon of gas for that matter. I’m all looking forward to that day! Folks will stop buying gasoline when people aren’t selling it anymore and not before that day, unless I miss my guess.
Note: I am not an economist (you couldn’t tell?) but I do work in the petrochemical industry.
When I wrote my estimate, I was thinking of using the term ‘real dollars’. Maybe I should have
By reserves I mean oil that is thought to be in the ground. Shell admitted earlier this year that it made a tremendous cock-up and overstated its reserves by 4 billion barrels. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3524438.stm
Now by my estimates, that’s a piddly amount equal to what the world uses in less than 2 months. (based on a daily oil usage of about 83 million barrels a day).
But by any calculation, this was oil that was thought to be easily accessible. And it’s generally accepted that all the easily tapped oil has either been tapped, or is being tapped. There may be vast oil fields under the ocean floor off the B.C./Alaska coastline, or locked up in tar sands, but actually acquiring that oil won’t be easy, which means it won’t be as cheap. Add on the expected growth in oil usage by the developing world (even with increased fuel efficiencies), and it means an increase in the real price of transportation.
When I’m not riding my bike, I drive a diesel-powered car with a manual transmission. It gets 50+ mpg. If we could convince the whole country to drive diesel-powered cars with manual transmissions, we wouldn’t be importing any oil. (But that’s another subject.)
