America's First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant 522
hankmt writes "The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America. Cellulosic ethanol produces ethanol from cellulose, which all plants have, instead of from sugar, which is only abundant in food crops. Corn ethanol only produces 1.3 units of energy for every unit of energy that goes into growing the crop and converting the sugar to ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol can produce as much as 16 units of energy for every one unit of energy put into the process. The new plant will be online in 2008 and aims to produce 100 million gallons of ethanol a year."
Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to know because it's so hard to compare with oil at that level. It's much easier for a consumer to simply look at the price on the pump. But that only tells us what the market is willing to bear (what the fuel is worth), not the true costs of production.
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it were just about the monetary cost of things even corn ethanol wins over oil, which would be $13/gallon or more if we started charging the oil companies for our military services.
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Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:4, Informative)
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Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane (Score:5, Interesting)
If we stopped keeping sugar prices artificially high, and especially if we let Cuban sugar in, it would be amazingly cost-effective.)
Cuban sugarcane is one reason the trade embargo hasn't been ended long ago, and why Brazilian sugarcane isn't being imported into the US. US sugarecane farmers, centered around Lake Okeechobee, FL, hold a lot of political clout.
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Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your inappropriateness aside, are you actually claiming that the Federal Government does not subsidize the conversion of corn into motor fuel? Huh. That's a remarkable degree of ignorance,
And, that's a remarkable degree of "where the fark did you get that from what I wrote?".
Yeah, whatever. Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us, so, yeah thanks for the link and all that but I don't see it as a problem. In fact I think we should subsidize the infrastructure for same, so we can get this stuff into production and stop pretending we like the arabs.
You seem to have taken my question about "Methanol, who said anything about that, we're talking about Ethanol here" and expanded it into a series of assumptions, some amusing, and some outright wrong.
I wonder why you do that.
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Sugar (Score:5, Insightful)
You can make cellosic ethanol from grass clippings, those bags of leaves that everyone is getting rid of each falls, fallen tree branches, corn husks, not to mention the tonnes of produce that each and every grocery store throws away every single day because it couldn't be sold.
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:5, Informative)
Comparing prices also gets subsidies (especially corn subsidies, but also renewable energy subsidies) involved.
Those numbers certainly ought to include the energy content of the fertilizer -- it's decidedly non-trivial in comparison to the output energy, though I don't have a reference handy so I won't go quoting numbers. Most fertilizer is ammonium nitrate (or other nitrates), which is made from atmospheric N2 + H2 from fossil fuel sources (mostly natural gas, but also oil and coal to some extent). The ammonia is oxidized to nitric acid and reacted with more ammonia to form fertilizer AN, or used directly as anhydrous ammonia.
Corn?! (Score:3, Funny)
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Which is why a true conservative, concerned more about America's security than about corporate profits, would oppose drilling in the ANWR. The ANWR is our true strategic reserve, and will keep us from being out-gunned by the last country to have any oil.
Even putting drilling equipment in place would threaten our national security, since some pissant will turn the tap to solve a "short term" crisis (like his own electability). After peak oil is undeniable, and
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Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it's especially easy with gas. The 'demand curve' is so steep, usually quantity demanded remains very constant regardless of price (at least, in the short term, obviously).
This is noted by gas taxes: the burden is almost entirely bore by the consumer, so an extra 18 cent tax adds nearly 18 cents to the price of gas because the companies know we'll pay it. In addition from gas taxes end up being nearly proportional to the rate.
Compare this with something like cigarettes taxes: The companies actually reduce the price of cigarettes and end up paying (I'm guessing here, from my days as a smoker) roughly half of the tax. This is directly related to the demand curve and the nature of the market. In addition, revenues are not nearly proportional to the tax rate increase because people generally do buy many fewer cigarettes when they cost more. The companies have to balance the tax burden with their loss of revenues, and they hire really smart guys to do this.
By the way, the emboldened words in this post are there to indicate trends and averages.
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:5, Informative)
It comes from a selection of five papers from the late nineties which did the calculation in a number of ways. Generally, they attempt to account for the entire manufacturing process, from energy in oil used in fertilizers to fuel for farm equipment, to transport of the ethanol or corn, to the refineries that distill out all the water. I do not believe they go so far as to account for feeding the farmer, but I honestly suspect that is a very minor correction, as much as I like farmers.
However, there is a fairly well known outlier which claimed to do a better job of accounting for processing costs. Pimentel and Patzek attributed what they claim are more accurate inputs to the agriculture, transport, industrial, and distribution components of the manufacturing process, giving the also oft-quoted value of around 25% energy *loss*. Ordinarily, people would probably dismiss that one given the seemingly overwhelming amount of contrary evidence, but Pimentel and Patzek are very well-respected scientists. It's difficult for me, as an energy researcher, to know who to believe. I suspect it's nigh impossible for people who only study this passingly.
Personally, I'm inclined to believe that even if Pimentel et al are wrong, 1.3 is just way, way too low to be reasonable. Improvements to technology (as this plant represents), are the only way that ethanol can ever be practical. We'll see soon enough if it's as good as they claim.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July05/ethanol .toocostly.ssl.html [cornell.edu] has a summary of the debate.
As long as you're around... (Score:2)
How could this be bad news in any context?
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Although I agree with you its good news from, an economic, geopolitical and environmental point of view at least.
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The number comes from estimates that agricultural analysts make about the energy inputs of farm production. Human inputs are generally not considere
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it is in fact an energy-positive process, the extra energy can be sold. If the process is economically viable, then pretty much by definition of "economically viable" they will be able to run at a profit. If it is not, then they will eventually go out of business.
Now, my point is not that this is desirable. It must be the ultimate goal of any alternative energy production system, but in the short-term you can make good arguments about subsidizing things to get over start-up costs, experiment with multiple things before we know which is the correct answer, etc. My point is simply that you can do math from now until the last drop of oil is pumped out of the ground and you won't really know whether such a marginal process is truly net-positive.
That's the beauty of money; it's hard to wrap your mind around it, but if you just let it do its thing, it will automatically account for labor costs, equipment costs, etc., and with some judicious law making (which has a roughly 0% chance of happening) it can account for the externalities as well, and the final result will be obvious and unambiguous. It can even account for corruption and mismanagement etc., which are really real risks, not illusions. It's the only way to go from theory to reality.
Still harder to make than corn (Score:4, Insightful)
How would hemp do?
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Re:Still harder to make than corn (Score:4, Funny)
But like, chill out, man. I mean, who needs to drive to work after smoking one of these, man? I use less fuel by staying at home. Hemp is a win.... god I am hungry
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Re:Still harder to make than corn (Score:5, Informative)
http://fuelandfiber.com/Hemp4NRG/Hemp4NRGRV3.htm [fuelandfiber.com]
Hemp is one of the top producers of biomass per acre. It is much better than corn and can be grown on fallow fields as well. And you can't even smoke this type of hemp, it grows 10-20 feet high and is all stalk with a clump of seeds at the top. Of course, nobody ever smoked this form of hemp, even when it was one of the primary cash crops of the south prior to the 1930's.
Too bad, since hemp is evil. It makes you rape white wimin: http://www.oddfrog.com/paper.htm [oddfrog.com]
Re:Still harder to make than corn (Score:5, Interesting)
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Switchgrass is one of the better ones. It grows everywhere and is very disease, drought, etc resistant. You can't kill the shit even if you try and it requires very little, if any, maintenance. For longer term crops, depending on the environment type, poppler and willow are good choices. The nice thing about fast-growing trees is that if your refining process gets tied up,
How would hemp do? (Score:5, Informative)
In 1892 Rudolph Diesel designed his engine and ran it on vegetable oil. He used hemp oil amoung them. Then in the 1930s Henry Ford built a vehicle not only using hemp [wikipedia.org] in the construction but was fueled with alcohol made from hemp, hemp he grew on his Iron Mountain Estate. Hemp was found to be a good source for fuel. Also in the 1930s MIT did a study showing an acre of hemp produced more paper than an acre of forest. Eventually some who felt threatened by hemp's industrial uses pushed to make it illegal and via the 1937 Marijuna Tax Act [wikipedia.org] and between them they were successful.
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In theory, the CO2 is recycled (Score:5, Informative)
In theory, the CO2 that is released from burning the ethanol is reabsorbed by the plants used to make the ethanol, so there's no net CO2. This is why ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists. In practice, there are other CO2 costs involved, such as (probably) fertilizer, transportation costs, conversion costs, etc. (By "costs" here, I'm referring to CO2 output and nothing else. Of course, there are other costs involved as well.)
Still, it's probably much better than burning fossil-fuels with respect to CO2 output.
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In theory, the place where you are growing corn or sugar cane was already occupied by CO2-absorbing plants, either natural ones or food-destined ones. If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground.
How does this meme get propagated? (Score:5, Insightful)
Biodiesel is not a carbon SOURCE. Petrodiesel is a carbon source in that it takes carbon that was NOT part of the biospheric carbon cycle before and MAKES it part of the carbon cycle.
This is not hard to understand. Try retaking 9th-grade earth science, chief.
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Um, yes it does. Beleive it or not, plants were around long before fertilizer ('ammonia nitrate') was created.
Now, if you are talking about 'forcing' the plants to grow faster and bigger, then YES, farmers can and do use a lot of fertilizer. But fertilizer can be made of other things than ammonia nitrate. Imagine fields fetrilized by human (and other animal) waste. Since it's not a food crop, there is no health issue.
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The whole point of cellulosic plants is that we don't have to use craploads of fertilizer and pesticides to push production of one single overengineered monoculture of corn...
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You do realize that a oil wells, pipelines, refineries and all the other related infrastructure is going to destroy a lot more natural plant life than a farm, right?
And since lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up, using that land for fuel crops would probably be a good idea.
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It's not that either. People forget that it's made out of rocks and not magic beans. The enrichment process involves heating Uranium up until it becomes a gas - which requires a bit of fossil fuels but overall wiht the best Uranium ore the CO2 emissions will end up less than a third of what you would get if you burnt natural gas to make electricity.
The biggest barrier to it's use if of course that it is an expensive way to boil water and only
Laughter... (Score:3, Insightful)
I just had to laugh when I saw this, given that Shell in particular is investing in both ethanol and biodiesel.
I hate to toss around insults, but what a fucking retard you are!! Ethanol is the darling of farmers who want to make money because they're capitalists. See how that works? They turn corn husks and straw into ethanol, sell the ethanol, and make money.
Cellulosic? (Score:5, Funny)
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I wonder what the emissions are like? (Score:2, Insightful)
The ethanol plant uses a two-stage process to turn cellulose into gas, and then crack the gas into ethanol. Bet the emissions might be interesting.
Do we hold these guys to the standards we expect out of the oil companies, or do they get a pass because they are "greener."
Re:I wonder what the emissions are like? (Score:5, Informative)
DOE has funded five others (Score:5, Informative)
Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
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1 gallon of BioDiesel is about 130,000 BTUs or energy. 150,000 gallons is thus 19,500,000,000 BTUs.
Realistically, sunlight energy at ground level is about 100 watts per square foot, plus or minus. At 43,560 sq.ft. per acre, that's 4,356,000 watts per acre of raw sunlight.
Assuming a cautious 5 hours a day, every day, of sunlight at that wattage, a year will net you 4356000 watts * 365 days * 5 hours/day * 3600 sec/hour = 28,618,920,000,000 total incident joules of sunlight.
19.50E9
Re:Skeptical (Score:5, Informative)
The energy contained in 150,000 gallons of diesel @85% = 150,000 gallons/year x 133,000 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 5.8MMkwh/year acre. The energy falling on one acre of land = 5kwh/m2 - day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4MM kwh/year - acre. 5.8/7.4 = .78. That is about 78% efficiency in converting sunlight to liquid energy.
I incorrectly remembered the 85% figure, which is a different measure, but it's still in the same neighborhood.
Looking at your calculation, you seem to have forgotten to convert BTUs into joules. 1 BTU = 1,054 joules. That put your calculation out by a factor of 1000. You got 0.07%, when the actual number is closer to 70%.
I wish you were right though.
Back to the Future? (Score:2)
On the flipside, I wonder what sort of waste products this plant is going to produce...
Anything like this is a good thing (Score:2)
Long term, its still just a patch... what is really needed are batteries with far more energy density than what we have now, and more research into fission, fusion, solar, and other energy generating technologies that don't spew carbon into the air.
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There are some numbers that are off about the technology -- the amount of waste usable as input, for example -- but it seems to be an effective method of fuel production.
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The problem is that when there is no market for turkey processing waste it is free or extremely low cost. When the second plant comes online there is now a bidding process that is going to happen (one way or another) for the raw materials - see, they aren't waste anymore. They are valuable raw materials now.
Same thing happens with used vegetable oil. It is cheap and works fine as long as there is no market. Once there is a mark
Re:Anything like this is a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
The carbon-hydrogen class of molecules have excellent energy storage properties, from methanol (CH4) up to octane (C8H18). Some have higher energy density, cleaner burning, etc. Humanity has around 100 years of investment into the internal combustion engine and it would be wise not to do away with that until we've found something SIGNIFICANTLY better. And by significantly, I don't mean 20-30%. I'm thinking more like 100-300% before it really looks worthwhile.
Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming.
Soylent fuel is people (Score:2)
So it works on people too?
Why don't they burn the wood chips (Score:2)
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I know, I know, you're thinking: electric cards, electric semitrucks, electric tractors, electric everything. Well it's not so easy.
Liquid fuel appears to be a better energy sink than batteries at the moment by a long shot.
C//
Sweet (Score:2)
Kudzu? (Score:2)
Thermochemical? (Score:2)
And their explanation of expensive enzymatic reactions? Hogwash. Enzymes work for 1000's of turnovers (at a minimum) before they become poisoned and lose their efficiency. They don't go to ethanol solutions, they go to starch solutions, which then get converted to sugar (think beer), and THEN get converted to ethanol.
That goes into a refluxing column, add a
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Hemp Contains the Most Cellulose (Score:2, Informative)
Compared to other North American crops, such as corn or switchgrass, HEMP contains the highest percentage of cellulose [fuelandfiber.com].
This is yet another reason to re-legalize industrial hemp in the US.
This great annual crop, grows in even the most arid lands, virtually anywhere in North America, without the use of pesticides, or herbicides, and can be baled like hay for easy transportation. It can be used to make:
Nip / tuck (Score:5, Funny)
Ethanol from Kudzu? (Score:4, Funny)
What is the environmental impact, in comparison? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm worried (Score:3, Insightful)
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What encourages me about this is we will be able to produce a very efficient, clean burning fuel domestically. As will just about any country that can grow wheat straw, corn or whatever else. Remember this is just
First? (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever happened 2 fuel cells? (Score:4, Interesting)
Craptastic lead, no guts (Score:3, Insightful)
So ignore the lead.
Now for the meaty guts of the story..... cellulose to alcohol. Searching, searching, ...... Nope, not the teensy tiniest clue re : how they're doing it. Usually you'd see some words like "chemical process", "patent pending", or names and links to competent colleges, scientists, or chemical companies. Not a one.
As to actual verifiable facts, here's only one, and it's non-sensical:: a 100 million gallon a year pilot plant.
So lacking the tiniest foothold, and plenty of nonsense, we'll have to assume this is all PR crapola.
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Gasification and Subsequent Fuel Synthesis (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are interested in the chemistry and thermodynamics behind gasification you should obtain and read "Synthetic Fuels" by Ronald F. Probstein and R. Edwin Hicks, published by Dover (1982, 1990, 2006), ISBN 0-486-44977-7. The first portion of it deals with gasification. The later parts of it deal with taking the "synthesis gas" and forming it into bigger molecules of methane or even liquid fuels. The amount of energy consumed, and the heats and presures and sometimes expensive catalysts, are fairly depressing to the backyard hobbiest.
However, it might be possible to build something that gasifies waste into hydorgen and steam and carbon dioxide, which would then be burned in an engine. A recent slashdot article [slashdot.org] about a gasification procedure that uses microwaves [newscientist.com] seems hopeful, because if you gasified in the presense of steam with no oxygen you might have less carbon monoxide. Usually, oxygen has to be present because a portion of the waste is burnt in the same chamber as the gasification occurs, to provide the heat needed.
Of course, playing around with a microwave magnetron has it's own dangers as well.
I believe it is possible to build an apparatus about the size of two shipping pallets and 6 feet high that would take in household garbage and yard waste and produce a considerable amount of electricity. Whether it would be economical, except in places where grid electricity is not available, is a different matter. Having it produce a liquid fuel suitable for storage and use in an internal combustion engine seems like a big leap, but that's what I would like to aim for.
Can we feed it junk mail? (Score:4, Funny)
Getting past the blogodreck, it's a minor step. (Score:5, Informative)
OK, first we get past the blogodreck from some site that wants traffic, and look at the Range Fuels site. [rangefuels.com]
This is funded by Kosla Ventures, which is Vinod Kosla's venture capital fund. That's a good sign; he has a decent track record as a VC. (He was one of the founders of Sun, but he later invested in Excite.) Anyway, they're not looking for money; they've got that.
People have been working on cellulostic ethanol for a while. It's not that hard to do; it's hard to do cost-effectively. Here's an overview of the known approaches. [purdue.edu] Range Fuels uses a heat-driven process, which of course takes energy to run, but is standard chemical engineering. There's other R&D underway to develop a bioengineered enzyme that will digest cellulose at commercially feasible rates. Such enzymes have been created, but they're too slow and making the enzymes costs too much. Work continues.
Anyway, this doesn't look like the big cellulostic ethanol breakthrough. But it's progress.
one tonne of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil (Score:3, Interesting)
We seldom see these issues described in a compact form. I keep seeing terms like "Ethanol is an oxygenated fuel". In fact it is a partially oxidized fuel which is why it carries considerably less energy than say gasoline or diesel. Liquid motor fuels are for the most part Alkanes and have a chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Ethanol is an alcohol which has an OH tacked on to an alkane. Ethanol is C2H5OH which is a partially oxidized propane. The oxygen makes it liquid hence relatively safe and easy to transport. Methanol is partially oxidized methane: CH3OH.
Hence it is immediately clear that if we had a large supply of propane then the shortest chemical route to produce ethanol would be from the gas - not from sugar or starch and certainly not from cellulose or other plant matter... except for one thing. The biologic source is renewable. The geological source as best we know is not renewable.
Now the thing that is not emphasized in these discussions is that every gallon of ethanol produced from starch will come out of someone's mouth. It might not be your mouth or mine - it might be a pig's mouth or a chicken's mouth but it will be someone or something currently in the food chain who will have to give up their source of food in order for us to feed our cars.
This is obvious. We do not have a HUGE amount of excess agricultural capacity and we also do not have huge piles of unused grain hanging around. Hence it is clear that we eat what we produce and there is little long term surplus.
The world consumes about 82-84 million barrels of oil per day. This can be found in the BP statistical oil review - there are other sources but this is a very good one. North America consumes about 24-25 million barrels per day if you include Canada.
I share the opinions of those who say we are probably at the world peak of oil production. We will probably stay near this peak for a couple years more. On the news two days ago was an EIA forecast that world consumption is forecast to grow by another 2 million barrels per day next year and that OPEC is expected to step up to the plate. I laughed. I expect that OPEC production will be flat and that the forecast demand will simply drive the price up until the demand is destroyed. Mathew Simmons says it could take over $300 per barrel to destroy the demand. I don't know if I believe what Simmons says will happen before 2015 but I do have a great deal of respect for him. He could very well be right.
Now the issue of cellulostic ethanol. Probably this makes some sense. But you still need to collect and transport a tonne of organic matter to the ethanol plant in order to create the equivalent on an energy bassis of two (2) barrels of oil. Then this material has to be converted at 100% efficiency into ethanol and at zero (0%) cost.... and it has to be 100% convertable into ethanol.
Other alternatives are coal liquifaction and coal gasification to create a hydrogen source for the development of synthetic crude.
As I see it - the ONLY way that make sense is synthetic crude.
We are doing this in Alberta at the tar sands. We are expecting to ramp up production into the 3.3 million barrel per day level by 2015. The problem is that by 2015 if world oil peaks between now and 2010 for instance then we can lose conventional production at a rate of 10% per year on a production base of say 84 million barrels at peak - and this compounds annually... it is an exponential function.
Without nuclear power to create a source of hydrogen we either have to discard literally 1/2 of the carbon we mine or we have to use a chemical process such as Fis
Re:Free energy (Score:4, Informative)
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No, you idiot. (Score:4, Informative)
The output is enough ethanol to generate 16 units of energy.
In practice, these plants often loop part of the output back to power itself, so the process is simplified to:
X of raw cellulosic product in, 15 units of energy out.
Which is pretty cool.
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Re:USA's first plan, not America's First (Score:4, Insightful)
More significantly, I have *never* seen a truly convincing argument or explanation as to why Europe and Asia are (or were ever) considered separate continents- it seems to be a cultural distinction, which has nothing to do with physical geography. At any rate, North and South America are *far* more separate then Europe and Asia are.
Ironically, you can see this in the picture that you linked to.
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Well, I had always assumed they were different tectonic plates separated by the Urals, but apparently that's not the case [wikipedia.org].
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According to Wikipedia, Australasia is actually a part of Oceania, although the only time I've seen the term Oceania used before has been in 1984, to refer to the the Americas, the British Isles, Australia, and a few other scattered bits of the world.
In the linked map, this is the '6 continent' model, although their map calls the south-eastern continent 'Australia,' rather than 'Australasia,' which ca
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Arguably, any distinction would be culturally (or nationally) based. I'm sure the people of Central America have very different ideas about which bit they lie in than the rest of us.
Europe is another area where regional definitions are being stretched. At school I
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If by "splitting" you mean having shores on both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, then by "only" you mean Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Chile.
Re:USA's first plan, not America's First (Score:5, Funny)
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Carbon is from the air (CO2). Fertiliser provides nitrogen in the form of nitrates.
It doesn't change you're argument, it's just information.
Re:Carbon neutral? (Score:5, Informative)
There's your problem, right there.
Plants mine the air for carbon. They literally suck up CO2 in their leaves and use sunlight to break it into C and O2. (Technically the 02 from CO2 is turned into glucose, and two Os from H2O are released as O2)
Plants mine soil for other minerals they need to grow, mostly nitrogen to make amino acids.
Petroleum-based fertilizers are primarily Ammonium nitrate, which contains no carbon at all. In fact, carbon would be an undesirable contaminant in fertilizer.
In addition, there are bacteria that are able to get nitrogen out of the atmosphere, and several species of plants incorporate these bacteria in a symbiotic relationship. If you use the bacteria, you don't need nearly as much fertilizer.