Ethanol is biting us in the a$$

[rylan]

http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/19/smbusiness/Chernoff_pizza/index.htm?postversion=2008031912

...At the Chicago Board of Trade a bushel, 60-pounds of wheat, now trades for more than $1100, more than two-and-1/2 times what it was just a year ago.

Why? You can lay part of the blame on ethanol. Huge demand for ethanol has farmers planting more corn to produce the fuel when they could be growing wheat.

"Ethanol was competing against wheat for acres in 2007," said Joe Victor, grain analyst with Allendale Inc. ...

Gotta love all the hype over the past year or so about how ethanol is some magical substance with no negatives. Too bad nobody cared to report on the impact of actually producing the stuff.

[Umfriend]

On the other hand, increased prices for foddstuffs might just enable us to stop subsidizing farmers and get some agricultural industry started in Africa.

[Brian Ellis]

And just ask a Mexican what he thinks about corn prices for the same reason. His finished tortilla has doubled in price as a result of ethanol.

The stupid thing is that to produce ethanol requires more energy than you can extract from the finished product. The process is simple: the corn is harvested and transported, often over hundreds of km in filthy, soot-spewing, diesel trucks/trailers combos. It is then mashed with water, yeast is added and, after a few days, heated to about 35 deg C, the sugar is converted to a 5-6% solution of ethanol, which is absolutely useless as a fuel. It is therefore distilled in a reflux still by heating to ~87 deg C. The condensate is still not ethanol but a water/ethanol azeotrope, which has a lower boiling point than either ethanol or water and has a fixed composition of 96% Et-ol. If you add this to petrol/gasoline, the alcohol will dissolve in it and the water will drop to the bottom of the tank. This is fine for solutions of <35%, as it can be drained off but it is not fine for Et-ol>75% as the solubility of it in the fuel is limited and some water will remain. This can cause all sorts of problems in storage and for the ICE, so the alcohol has to be rectified. This is usually done with silica gel columns which absorb the water and leave the alcohol at about 98-99%, which is generally acceptable. However, the moisture-retaining capacity of silica gel is limited and it has to be regenerated by heating it to 110 degC for 24 hours to evaporate the water.

The cost of all the fuel needed for the different transport/heating operations plus what the farmers are paid is more than the cost of the fossil fuel the alcohol replaces, which is why the ethanol production is heavily subsidised. It is no coincidence that the main producer of ethanol in the US has offices in Washington DC and a number of senators and Admistration officials on its board. This means that, every time you fill up with an ethanol-containing fuel, every taxpayer in the country is helping push that fuel in your tank and you are wasting energy. IOW, it is a scam.

In Europe, "biofuels" means essentially diesel fuel from pressed seeds, rather than ethanol. I'm not saying that is any better, as the commodity prices on oil seeds and oil has also risen, but at least the energy recovered over the energy invested is greater than unity.

[dZeus]

And just ask a Mexican what he thinks about corn prices for the same reason. His finished tortilla has doubled in price as a result of ethanol.

The stupid thing is that to produce ethanol requires more energy than you can extract from the finished product. The process is simple: the corn is harvested and transported, often over hundreds of km in filthy, soot-spewing, diesel trucks/trailers combos. It is then mashed with water, yeast is added and, after a few days, heated to about 35 deg C, the sugar is converted to a 5-6% solution of ethanol, which is absolutely useless as a fuel. It is therefore distilled in a reflux still by heating to ~87 deg C. The condensate is still not ethanol but a water/ethanol azeotrope, which has a lower boiling point than either ethanol or water and has a fixed composition of 96% Et-ol. If you add this to petrol/gasoline, the alcohol will dissolve in it and the water will drop to the bottom of the tank. This is fine for solutions of <35%, as it can be drained off but it is not fine for Et-ol>75% as the solubility of it in the fuel is limited and some water will remain. This can cause all sorts of problems in storage and for the ICE, so the alcohol has to be rectified. This is usually done with silica gel columns which absorb the water and leave the alcohol at about 98-99%, which is generally acceptable. However, the moisture-retaining capacity of silica gel is limited and it has to be regenerated by heating it to 110 degC for 24 hours to evaporate the water.

The cost of all the fuel needed for the different transport/heating operations plus what the farmers are paid is more than the cost of the fossil fuel the alcohol replaces, which is why the ethanol production is heavily subsidised. It is no coincidence that the main producer of ethanol in the US has offices in Washington DC and a number of senators and Admistration officials on its board. This means that, every time you fill up with an ethanol-containing fuel, every taxpayer in the country is helping push that fuel in your tank and you are wasting energy. IOW, it is a scam.

In Europe, "biofuels" means essentially diesel fuel from pressed seeds, rather than ethanol. I'm not saying that is any better, as the commodity prices on oil seeds and oil has also risen, but at least the energy recovered over the energy invested is greater than unity.

isn't the only big advantage in extracting biodiesel from crop left-overs? i.e. the stuff that doesn't get used in the end normally. Which of course will never be able to cover the fuel needs to any substantial degree.

[Brian Ellis]

Biodiesel is an oil: crop residues do not, as a rule, contain oils. Ethanol can be made from some crop residues, but it is even less economically or environmentally viable than producing it from purpose-grown crops. Otherwise, they can be composted to produce natural gas, but this is even less likely to be viable.