Tavarez

What do ya'll think of the upcoming of ethanol. Is ethanol actually viable as a long term fuel? Is it probable it can cut our dependency on oil? All of a sudden Ethanol seems to be the big thing. I think by May 10th all our gas will have 10% ethanol in it. Hopefully this won't effect C6 performance too much. I think Verasun actually signed a deal with GM and Ford for flex fuel cars capable of running E85. I don't understand though, can ethanol really replace gasoline? Whatever happened to hydrogen? This might be the wrong section because it involves much more than just the C6 but hopefully some experts can chime in with some real information on Ethanol. Hell, if ethanol is as energy providing as gasoline this could really help in putting our US farmers to work. I think ethanol is 113 octane but somehow has less BPU?

Found some info here.

http://www.ethanol.org/

MannyS

I don't know about the farmer thing. Ethanol in Brazil is made for less than half of what it cost in the US. Brazil is the largest exporter of ethanol, so the future US question will be whether to import cheaper ethanol.

Tavarez

Yeah I think brazil makes the ethanol using Sugarcane. But It seems there are a lot of U.S. refineries popping up. Archer Daniels Midland is located in Decatur, IL is an agricultural giant. Not to mention it's being boosted by its ethanol production also. Pacific Ethanol also just got a huge investment from Bill Gates. If it got further supported by the government i'm pretty sure all that U.S. farmland can grow a lot of Corn and whatever else is necessary. Maybe i'm too optimistic?

kenjisan

The future of our energy needs will become more fragmented with time . Ethanol, Diesel-Bio Diesel, Propane and others will find markets in different areas depending on many factores such as refineries to convert or deliver the various products.
At the present time Ethanol must be shipped by rail or truck because its afinity for water will corrode the pipes used for oil and the seals will have to change . The day of gasoline as the major fuel for transportation needs will begin to yield to these othersbut the transition will be slow because of the limited delivery and distribution points but it is inevitable.
In the world of supply and demand , it doesnt seem that we are willing to reduce our demand so the substution on the supply side of the equation is the next best approach.
I doubt that ethanol will able to replace gasoline because there isnt enough crop land to handle the total demand and as the use expands it will cause an increase in the raw material price.
The problem with the "fragmentation" approach is at the delivery point. How mant different pumps/tanks or stations will have to be added ? For local use you might favor straight ethanol and when traveling you might have to settle for straight gas because there isnt any etanol station en route
Whatever happens, it will be more difficult than our gasoline system we enjoy paying increased prices for today.
The fact that ethanol milage isnt as good as gaoline and it takes more energy to produce than it creates ,didnt matter to Brazil because they had a big surplus of sugar cane and couldnt afford gasoline.

Now , do you want to ask about " fuel cells " and were we will get the hydrogen from ?

Hoonose

Nuclear -> electroysis

talldude67

85% ETHANOL is NOT cheap, it's doing just like I thought it would going from $2.56 gal to $3.01 gal in less than 2 weeks, what ever they find out there at a better price/value is not going to stay at a "give the customer a break" price. Again it's time to grab your ankles and smile...

Tavarez

I doubt it'd be cheap until production is amped, if it's not being produced enough it probably can't be sold cheap just yet as it's not available. I'm not sure you can get it in all parts, because frankly I haven't seen it. 10% ethanol on the otherhand will be in all gas.

need-for-speed

Only in the lab. Maybe someday on a large scale basis, but for now hydrogen is derived from that evil fossil fuel a.k.a. natural gas


muahahaha!!!! muahahaha !!!

need-for-speed

Everyone is so giddy over ethanol. We can't grow enough corn or sugar cane. And you wouldn't want to pay the price for the fuel if the subsidies were removed.

The answer is right at our finger tips. The answer would greatly reduce air emissions. That's why it's so ironic that the hippies and the tree huggers killed the solution.

The solution is to use nuclear power for all of our power generation and save fossil fuels for cars. In that case, electric cars would actually make sense. Right now, a power plant burns fossil fuels to generate electricity which can be used to power electric cars. Doesn't make much sense now does it?

Hoonose

I would think that if the price was right the country could up the ETOH production massively, and provide for maybe 25% of our fuel needs. I'd rather pay subsidies to dying off farmers/towns in the midwest than support wars in the middle east.

Tavarez

I agree, i'd rather fund our farmers than the middle east. Hell any step to alternative fuel is a step ahead for me. E85 compatible vehicles need to be made along with wider spread distribution. Don't some high performance cars actually use ethanol? I think indy cars run on 100% ethanol? Can an engine be made to actually make more power with ethanol?

shopdog

You have to raise the compression ratio and/or turn up the boost a lot in order to make more power on alcohol. That makes the already bad fuel economy even worse, of course. Cold starting and corrosion problems with straight alcohol are severe too.

This is the main problem with E85. To retain flex fuel capability, you can't raise the compression ratio. So you get less power, much less economy, and still have to contend with cold starting and corrosion issues.

Note that the only reason E85 is price competitive with gasoline at the moment is a 51 cent a gallon federal subsidy. That's set to expire in 2010. Even with the subsidy, because fuel economy in a flex fuel vehicle is about 30% less than for a gasoline vehicle, you still wind up paying more.

shopdog

To meet our auto fuel needs, we'd have to increase the amount of land devoted to growing corn by 25 times. There isn't that much good corn growing land we can put into production. Even the 6.25 times increase needed to meet a goal of 25% would strain our abilities, and our soils, water table, etc to the point where we'd be looking at massive ecological problems.

If you think that subsidies actually reach family farmers and small towns, then the massive farm subsidies we're paying out now should have the farm areas booming. They obviously aren't, so the money must not be reaching the farmer. In fact, it is going into the pockets of outfits like ADM and the other huge agribusiness near monopolies who squeeze the farmer on one end while squeezing the consumer on the other.

Corn farmers today are making approximately one tenth as much money (in constant dollars) per bushel as they were making in the 1950s. That's basically because they have no control of their own markets. They have to accept whatever the big agribusiness conglomerates will offer them for their crop while paying whatever those same conglomerates want to charge them for the seeds, fertilizers, and chemicals they need to produce the crop.

The only way farmers are surviving, those who are surviving, is by increasing the scale of their operations to gain efficiencies of bigger equipment, and increasing yields per acre by use of more intensive farming techniques. Corn yields have roughly quadrupled since the 1950s. That's come by planting much more densely, and by pouring enormous amounts of chemicals, most made from petrochemicals, on an increasingly strained soil and water infrastructure. Demand for biofuels will only make an already deteriorating situation worse.

Tavarez

I'm pretty sure corn isn't the only way to get ethanol though.

shopdog

It isn't. Rice, sugarcane, even potatoes can be turned into alcohol. But corn is the most economical to grow on a massive scale in the US. We just have to be very careful that we don't wreck our soils and water table in the process. The Brazilians have been ruining their land at a rapid clip trying to do it. Their only salvation, and it is temporary, is that they have a lot of jungle they can slash and burn to obtain fresh land.

TMyers

The break through with ethonal is going to come from using all the product of the plant. That is what is being worked on very hard. The other thing to think about is we really don't need more land. We can grow plant hydroponically(sp). They are no cheap answers to finding a replacement for oil other than finding lots more oil. It will take a combination of solution until we can transistion to hydrogen and that will take many decades to accomplish.

Walt White Coupe

Does anyone know how much oil it takes to make a gallon of ethanol? From fertilizer, to pesticides, to farm vehicles used to cultivate, plant and harvest and to the actual converson process.

ronsc1985

I heard the same baloney about 30 years ago during the first oil crisis. The same problems with wide scale use of ethanol that made this silly then are still present today i.e. BTU content abut 1/2 of gasoline per gallon, highly corrosive due to it's hygroscopic nature, uses more energy to produce then it returns, even if it's combustion doesn't pollute at all, which is does, pollution produced from it's production is greater than burning gasoline etc.

Physics and chemistry hasn't changed.
Hydro-phonically? Do you realize how may acres of land would be needed to put water on to grow the crop.

The only difference between then and now is the farm lobby and the so called environmentalists have a larger voice, mostly due to the increasingly scientific illiteracy of the American public.

The real agenda here is to increase the value of farm land by devoting vast acres to the production of corn for ethanol and thereby creating a shortage of cultivatable land. This is not idle speculation. A friend of mine who is a lobbyist for the ethanol lobby will admit this after a few drinks at the 19th hole.

dollarbill

I guess a Tea Sipper and an Ag can agree from time to time.
Bill

Hoonose

You missed 60 minutes last night. An overview of a midwest town being reincarnated by their own corn-alcohol initiative.