The crux of the article pointed out what I was looking for in the movement to make ethanol a serious contender as a replacement to oil.
The fact that ethanol is an energy source that takes more energy to produce than energy yielded has long been a a basis of why it’s foolish to persue. But Friedman, whom I’m not a fan of, makes a strong argument based on what Brazil is doing. Since it’s Friedman making the point, I have a large chunk of salt sitting next to me, but I’m willing to listen.
He writes about how Brazil has begun to use the bio-fuel to partially produce ethanol. IOW, using the energy from ethanol-production to produce ethanol.
A big hit ethanol has taken is the amount of energy to make it. Based on the amount of “source” material for ethanol, it doesn’t seem a stretch to use that to generate the energy to produce usable energy from ethenol-producing crops.
We (the US) have the capability to grow crops in hydroponic conditions. Add to that the insane amount of land for crops, and it seems reasonable we could use ingenouity to harness fuel to produce fuel.
It smacks of “perpetual-motion” and “free-energy”. So I’m sure there’s a mojor flaw I’m just not seeing.
But I just can’t see America failing to come up with some way to harness ethanol energy efficiently to produce ethanol.
Free energy is impossible. I don’t know how this works exactly: are they using by-products of ethanol production to make even more ethanol? Are they burning by-products to run the process?
Yes. The idea that ethanol is somehow it’s own perpetual motion machine is ridiculous. But people will believe the facts & figures they want to believe IF the end result is the fantasyland they wish to live in.
Ethanol is being pushed by special interest groups just like oil has special interest groups. If ethanol becomes the fuel of choice the left will eventually hate “big ethanol” just as they hate “big oil” today.
PATRICK BEDARD wrote an outstanding article about ethanol. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
I’ve read some commentary that says the numbers used to show ethanol as fuel to be economically doable assume that most of the biomass to grow it will be used to produce it.
That will (supposedly) then lead to soil depletion, because with current farming practices, the unused portion of our crops is left behind and allowed to help re-enrich the soil. That won’t happen in these projections.
Sorry, no cites. Just what I heard on NPR last week.
Hydroponics is viable in a cash-crop situation, where for example, people are willing to pay a premium for a fresh and tasty tomato or a delicious sprig of basil. Further, the only way that hydroponics truly pays off is if you’ve got a closed loop, a Saint Croix System, a fish farm that feeds the veg farm.
Further, you can’t feasibly grow grasses hydroponically. You’d spend more on the plastic (petroleum) “grow baskets” than you would on three years of tractor diesel.
I have been swayed lately to believe our best insurance policy is a great dense forest of poplar breeder trees, deployed now to make a dent in the fuel crisis to come in 10 years.
My understanding was that the problem with ethanol production is also that land, nutrients and water are required to make the stuff. This means ethanol production is in direct competition with food production. There is not enough land/water/sun/nutrients available for it to replace oil as fuel. Though, based on the economics, it can suppliment to a small extent.
Keep in mind ethanol has a lower energy density than petroleum based fuels.
Gasoline 44 MJ/kg
Diesel 47 MJ/kg
Ethanol 22.6 MJ/kg
also note:
Compressed Natural Gas (700 bar) 54 MJ/kg
LPG 34 MJ/kg
and there is lots of that stuff around.
What is going on here is that plants convert solar energy into chemical energy, and ethanol refining converts the plants’ chemical energy into a more useful form. No “free energy” involved.
This is an interesting topic that I hope to learn something about-- I’m starting at almost 0 level of knowledge right now. Here is the DOE’s take: Net Energy Balance of Ethanol. (The article mentions Bush in the first sentence, so don’t get your hackles up. )
In regards to Brazil, I read in the past year that the reason they were able to do the ethanol thing to the degree that they have is because they cut down a big whoppin’ swath of Amazon rain forest to make way for all the new sugar that had to be grown. One report has over 10,500 sq. miles of ex-rain forest dedicated solely to ethanol production. Also, another 10,000 sq. miles is expected to be cut down by 2012 to feed growing demand. Cite (at least on the second claim… the first stat is referred to, but not in regards to its impact on the Amazon rain forest).
The guys who own the ethanol plant here in our little town don’t pretend they’re working on a replacement for petroleum. It’s an interim step, and they hope new technology will make ethanol refinement more energy-efficient. Ultimately, they hope ethanol will part of a larger non-petroleum fuel solution. But we won’t ever know that unless they produce the ethanol in the first place. Meanwhile, it’s good for mixing with gasoline to reduce emissions.
Ethanol isn’t the only thing produced, by the way. The exhausted corn mash is fed to cattle (there’s no alcohol in it) and the quantity of exhausted mash is almost exactly equivalent to the quantity of shelled corn that would have been fed to cattle anyway. So all of the diesel fuel that’s burned planting and harvesting the corn would have been burned anyway – only we get a second use from the corn.
At least that’s what the guys making millions of dollars making ethanol tell us.
“Free energy” has absolutely nothing to do with ethanol. The energy in ethanol comes from the sun. The corn or sugar cane or whatever synthesizes carbohydrates from CO2 and H2O in a process called photosynthesis. It’s not a magic perpetual motion machine. Sheesh.
Well, I think most of us realize that. But there is still a legit question as to how much energy you have to put in to the process in order to extract whatever energy you get out.
Exactly. Comparing a process where you have a known energy source doing the input (the sun) with a perpetual-motion machine is whacky. By the same logic, a coal-powered locomotive is a “perpetual motion machine” if you discount the energy input from the coal.
Nobody has quite said it here, but I have in the past encountered arguments to the effect that if the energy contained in the ethanol exceeded the energy in the fossil fuels burned harvesting and producing it, this would constitute a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.
This would of course be false, because the energy in the ethanol comes from sunlight that fell on the growing plants; not from the fuel used collecting it.
Now it may very well be that due to the efficiency limits of photosynthesis, and of our machines, we have trouble in designing an industrial-scale ethanol production operation that isn’t an energy sink in terms of fossil fuels, but there’s no law of physics that insists this must be the case.
As I said, nobody has quite argued the above yet anyway, but it bears repeating.
It is of course possible to produce ethanol without using any fossil fuels at all.
One big issue about widespread ethanol is you are competing directly with food. If we continue down this path we may see a day where the lower classes can’t afford to drive or eat, while the upper classes can drive their SUV’s and stuff their faces, we will be back to the days that fat=rich.
The bulk quantity may be comparable, but if the mash has been used to produce ethanol, that must mean that some of the food value in it has been removed; that’s not to say it isn’t, overall, more efficient to get two uses out of it than one (and it’s certainly more efficient than simply throwing the mash away), but you still can’t get something for nothing.
I’ll worry about that when the government stops paying farmers to not grow crops, and the farmers are so overwhelmed with orders for both food and ethanol production that they’re OK with that.
Isn’t one of the big advantages of ethanol the effect it can have on reducing greenhouse gases? When you pump oil out of the ground and burn it, you’re releasing “new” carbon into the atmosphere, but the carbon released from burning ethanol was absorbed by the plants as they were growing. Of course, any fossil fuels you burn to manufacture ethanol need to be counted in the process, but once you have enough ethanol production going it should be able to sustain itself, right? Or, at least reduce the overall burning of fossil fuels.
That’s what I’d always understood, John. The real calculation, of course, is the tipping point between how much energy it takes to produce 1 watt of energy from fossil fuel, vs. how much it takes to produce 1 watt from ethanol; but the net carbon output will always be lower in the latter case, so in “carbon cost” terms, at some point will be cheaper.
(Similarly I recently had the realisation that the carbon-sinking of hydrocarbon polymers, aka “putting plastics in landfill” in greenhouse terms might, on balance, be more beneficial than recycling.)
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