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."
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:2, Informative)
DOE has funded five others (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I wonder what the emissions are like? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wonder what the emissions are like? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Free energy (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled (Score:3, Informative)
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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, 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.
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:Carbon neutral? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Carbon neutral? (Score:2, Informative)
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:
Why is this crop illegal in the USA? Oh yeah, because politicians and others confuse it with marijuana, and demigog it to death. HEMP is NOT marijuana! You cannot get high from smoking hemp!
Re:USA's first plan, not America's First (Score:3, Informative)
In the linked map, this is the '6 continent' model, although their map calls the south-eastern continent 'Australia,' rather than 'Australasia,' which can't make inhabitants of New Zealand very happy...
Re:Still harder to make than corn (Score:3, Informative)
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, your crop won't die. You can store the wood for a long time or just leave the trees planted. You don't have that option with switchgrass or hemp -- you can't store the stuff or it will start decomposing.
Besides, as with any type of farming, the best yields will come from a variety of crops rotated to preserve the land as much as possible.
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.
Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled (Score:3, Informative)
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 at huge sizes do you get any sort of decent return - thermal power often gives you more than twice the befefit for twice the size. Having to plan a decade ahead and have a vast amount of money for the capital cost of building the things is a bigger barrier to nuclear power than any conspiracy theory blaming things on hippies.
An almost total lack of R&D effort doesn't help either - what you could buy today from Westinghouse to get built in a decade is effectively a 1950's white elephant painted green. South African nuclear technology is far in advance of that (pebble bed) and Indian technology may be deliver some of the promises (accelerated thorium). There are other reasons for nuclear reactors and that's why We have seen a few small ones built, notably in North Korea, Iran, Indonesia and Egypt. Want some Plutonium for a weapons program? CANDU!
Going back to the poster a few posts above - lay off the hippy conspiracy theories - they really do not have the power you credit them with and do not have some highly organised revenge plan.
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.
Re:How does this meme get propagated? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
FalconGetting 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.
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from? (Score:3, Informative)
Keep googling and you can find more about their dislike of biodiesel and any other non-biomass biofuel. Like this one http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/pressreleases/
Re:Craptastic lead, no guts (Score:3, Informative)