Ethanol... why!?!

[bkelly]

Carl- When does your syndicated column come out?

[Go240Zags]

You should do some more research. Hydrogen isn't the answer - it still takes more to refine than you get out of it, oil is still better and much more stable. Can't argue the cost as much, since oil is getting increasingly expensive, but Hydrogen ain't cheap. Solar???? Give me a break - that's akin to your flying cars. Photovoltaics aren't small enough and you can't store enough energy to power a vehicle.

There was a great show on Science Friday on NPR where they said we could build a solar array big enough to power ALL the electrical needs of the United States. The array would take up a huge piece of desert, but is possible with the technology available today. In the past the question has always been how do we transmit the power from say California, Arizona or Nevada to the East Coast and all points of the U.S. because of the great transmission loss. However, according to the program and its guest experts, there is only a 10% loss in transmission from the west to the east coast. Not bad if you're getting otherwise nearly-free power. With that electricity you can make all the hydrogen you want to power the clean-car of the future. Yes, building the thing would be hugely expensive, but so is building a nuclear plant.

Cold fusion would be great, let's find a way to do it. Nuclear would work as well to generate electricity to make hydrogen, but as I said in another post, until they get a handle on what to do with the nuclear waste it just doesn't make sense. Living in Washington State, we already have a giant mess of nuclear waste slowly leaking into the Columbia River. We just don't need any more.

[jmortensen]

There was a great show on Science Friday on NPR where they said we could build a solar array big enough to power ALL the electrical needs of the United States. The array would take up a huge piece of desert, but is possible with the technology available today. In the past the question has always been how do we transmit the power from say California, Arizona or Nevada to the East Coast and all points of the U.S. because of the great transmission loss. However, according to the program and its guest experts, there is only a 10% loss in transmission from the west to the east coast. Not bad if you're getting otherwise nearly-free power. With that electricity you can make all the hydrogen you want to power the clean-car of the future. Yes, building the thing would be hugely expensive, but so is building a nuclear plant.

The speaker in the video I linked to has a similar diagram of the US with a tiny section right in the middle of the country that he says could provide enough power for everyone. He does cost analysis of different production methods as well. Nuclear is A LOT cheaper than solar at the present. Oh, and forget about putting your solar array in the CA desert. There's undoubtedly some endangered species of something out there that would kill that project before it ever got off the ground. CA is the NIMBY capital of the US, if not the world.

[Go240Zags]

The speaker in the video I linked to has a similar diagram of the US with a tiny section right in the middle of the country that he says could provide enough power for everyone. He does cost analysis of different production methods as well. Nuclear is A LOT cheaper than solar at the present. Oh, and forget about putting your solar array in the CA desert. There's undoubtedly some endangered species of something out there that would kill that project before it ever got off the ground. CA is the NIMBY capital of the US, if not the world.

Jon, you're probably right about some group in Cali that would oppose it. Maybe Nevada it would be a better bet -- they seem to be a little less stringent on a lot of things. Ironic that something that could produce clean, renewable power -- what should be the Holy Grail to the environmental community -- would actually be opposed because of a kangaroo mouse or something. Of course, many (not all) environmental movements are actually professions nowadays and it is not in the higher ups in these groups' best interest for the problems to actually be resolved. We have the same thing here with the salmon debate. A whole industry of "Save the Salmon" has sprung up -- people getting paid to find ways to make our electric rates in the Northwest go up, take water away from the farmers and just generally try to grab control of our water rights. Even when scientists proved that hatchery salmon and wild salmon are genetically identical the enviros were able to throw out "Best Science" (the standard they expect everyone else to adhere to) and get people to believe they weren't. Funny part is, most wild salmon and steelhead are actually second or third generation offspring of hatchery fish. Go figure. Sorry, just another one of my rants.

[Go240Zags]

And from my cousin who thinks I'm some sort of crazed anti-ANWAR-drilling liberal: http://www.politicsandcurrentaffairs.co.uk/Forum/peak-oil-economics-environment/47674-200-billion-barrel-oil.html

[mdbrandy]

...Nuclear would work as well to generate electricity to make hydrogen, but as I said in another post, until they get a handle on what to do with the nuclear waste it just doesn't make sense. Living in Washington State, we already have a giant mess of nuclear waste slowly leaking into the Columbia River. We just don't need any more.

Thank Jimmy Carter for most of the waste problem with US Nuclear. Reprocessing the spent fuel would solve most (not all) of the waste problem, but it was banned due to worries about plutonium proliferation, the latter being a very solvable problem as well. Security versus technology.

And if you're talking about the Hanford reservation in Washington State and nuclear waste, then you really can't compare that to commercial nuclear. I worked at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina (the East-coast version of Hanford) for five years. The environmental challenges at both sites are large, but that is because of many years of government weapons production through the 50s and 60s (and some 70s), mostly before the commercial nuclear industry was even online, and totally without the commercial industry's regulations.

So you're right - we have to solve the waste problem to get Nuclear viable in the US; but much of the solution is already available. We just have to use it.

Mark Brandyberry

Ph. D. Nuclear Engineering

But Not working in that industry because it pretty much died in the US...

[Go240Zags]

Mark, we also have at least one commercial reactor online as far as I know. Wash. state was also a destination for waste from all over the country from other region's reactors. So we are dealing with far more than just what came from Hanford, if that wasn't bad enough. As I said in a different post. I wouldn't mind so much if it was a case of if your state benefits then you keep your share of the waste. My favorite example is: "828 radioactive dead beagles were shipped from California in 55-gallon drums to Hanford, Washington for burial. The cold-war experimental dogs also produced 17.5 tons of radioactive excrement which also must be buried under federal rules governing low-level radioactive waste. Taxpayers can rejoice in the knowledge that they will pay $22 million dollars to have all this crap buried." See: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19901015&slug=1098419

Also, they've spent millions of dollars on waste glassification and have little to show for it.

[mdbrandy]

Mark, we also have at least one commercial reactor online as far as I know. Wash. state was also a destination for waste from all over the country from other region's reactors. So we are dealing with far more than just what came from Hanford, if that wasn't bad enough. As I said in a different post. I wouldn't mind so much if it was a case of if your state benefits then you keep your share of the waste. My favorite example is: "828 radioactive dead beagles were shipped from California in 55-gallon drums to Hanford, Washington for burial. The cold-war experimental dogs also produced 17.5 tons of radioactive excrement which also must be buried under federal rules governing low-level radioactive waste. Taxpayers can rejoice in the knowledge that they will pay $22 million dollars to have all this crap buried." See: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19901015&slug=1098419

Also, they've spent millions of dollars on waste glassification and have little to show for it.

Well, I certainly won't say that I know about every leak in Washington, but I really expect that any commercial plant is the least of your worries. Even your dog example stems from cold-war, government-sponsored research long before regulations started reigning in what the government could do with impunity at these sites. I'm sure Hanford was the recipient of a whole lot of junk, just like Savannah River was. I worked on the Defense Waste Processing Facility at Savannah River for a while (a glassification plant) too. I don't know what actually happened to it, but that was 15 years ago, and since Yucca Mountain is not yet available, they have no place to put the glass anyway. That's another political fiasco.

Bottom line is the glassification is a band-aid to fix decades of production of millions of gallons of high-level waste that wouldn't now be necessary as a by-product of reprocessing spent commercial-grade fuel (note that commercial reactor fuel is VERY different than what went into the production reactors at both Hanford and Savannah River). So I'm just saying that as a country, we already know how to solve the technical waste problem (mostly) if the politics could be solved.

[kiwi303]

the politics can be solved... march on washington with rifles in hand. War of independance II

That can only be done before the liberal gun fearing wussies dearm everyone.

[Mat M]

This was interesting to me, and I haven't seen it here yet...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/te...ofueler&st=nyt

WHAT if you could make fuel for your car in your backyard for less than you pay at the pump? Would you?

The first question has driven Floyd S. Butterfield for more than two decades. Mr. Butterfield, 52, is something of a legend for people who make their own ethanol. In 1982, he won a California Department of Food and Agriculture contest for best design of an ethanol still, albeit one that he could not market profitably at the time.

Now he thinks that he can, thanks to his partnership with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thomas J. Quinn. The two have started the E-Fuel Corporation, which soon will announce its home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler. It will be about as large as a stackable washer-dryer, sell for $9,995 and ship before year-end.

The net cost to consumers could drop by half after government incentives for alternate fuels, like tax credits, are applied.

The MicroFueler will use sugar as its main fuel source, or feedstock, along with a specially packaged time-release yeast the company has developed. Depending on the cost of sugar, plus water and electricity, the company says it could cost as little as a dollar a gallon to make ethanol. In fact, Mr. Quinn sometimes collects left-over alcohol from bars and restaurants in Los Gatos, Calif., where he lives, and turns it into ethanol; the only cost is for the electricity used in processing.

In general, he says, burning a gallon of ethanol made by his system will produce one-eighth the carbon of the same amount of gasoline.

"It's going to cause havoc in the market and cause great financial stress in the oil industry," Mr. Quinn boasts.

He may well turn out to be right. But brewing ethanol in the backyard isn't as easy as barbecuing hamburgers. Distilling large quantities of ethanol typically has required a lot of equipment, says Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he says that quality control and efficiency of home brew usually pale compared with those of commercial refineries. "There's a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It's entirely possible that they've done it, but skepticism is a virtue," Mr. Kammen says.

To be sure, Mr. Quinn, 53, has been involved with successful innovations before. For instance, he patented the motion sensor technology used in Nintendo's wildly popular Wii gaming system.

More to the point, he was the product marketing manager for Alan F. Shugart's pioneering hard disk drive when the personal computer was shifting from a hobbyists' niche to a major industry. "I remember people laughing at us and saying what a stupid idea it was to do that disk drive," Mr. Quinn says.

Mr. Butterfield thinks that the MicroFueler is as much a game changer as the personal computer. He says that working with Mr. Quinn's microelectronics experts - E-Fuel now employs 15 people - has led to breakthroughs that have cut the energy requirements of making ethanol in half. One such advance is a membrane distiller, which, Mr. Quinn says, uses extremely fine filters to separate water from alcohol at lower heat and in fewer steps than in conventional ethanol refining. Using sugar as a feedstock means that there is virtually no smell, and its water byproduct will be drinkable.

E-Fuel has bold plans: It intends to operate internationally from the start, with production of the MicroFueler in China and Britain as well as the United States. And Mr. Butterfield is already at work on a version for commercial use, as well as systems that will use feedstocks other than sugar.

Ethanol has long had home brewers, and permits are available through the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. (You must be a property owner and agree to make your ethanol outdoors.) But there are plenty of reasons to question whether personal fueling systems will become the fuel industry's version of the personal computer.

For starters, sugar-based ethanol doesn't look much cheaper than gas. It takes 10 to 14 pounds of sugar to make a gallon of ethanol, and raw sugar sells in the United States for about 20 cents a pound, says Michael E. Salassi, a professor in the department of agricultural economics at Louisiana State University. But Mr. Quinn says that as of January this year, under the North American Free Trade Agreement, he can buy inedible sugar from Mexico for as little as 2.5 cents a pound, which puts the math in his favor. While this type of sugar has not been sold to consumers, E-Fuel says it is developing a distribution network for it.

In addition, it's illegal in the United States to operate a car on 100 percent ethanol, with exceptions for off-road vehicles like Indy cars and farm equipment. Mr. Quinn has a federal permit to make his own fuel, and believes that if MicroFuelers start popping up like swimming pools, regulators will adapt by certifying pure ethanol for cars.

Despite all the hurdles, Mr. Quinn and Mr. Butterfield may be on to something. There are plenty of consumers who want to reduce their carbon footprint and are willing to make an upfront investment to do it - consider the success of the Prius.

And if oil prices continue to rise, the economics of buying a MicroFueler will become only better and better.

[Mat M]

Another article, which I belive is on the mark:

May 23, 2007

The Many Myths of Ethanol

By John Stossel

No doubt about it, if there were a Miss Energy Pageant, Miss Ethanol would win hands down. Everyone loves ethanol.

"Ramp up the availability of ethanol," says Hillary Clinton.

"Ethanol makes a lot of sense," says John McCain.

"The economics of ethanol make more and more sense," says Mitt Romney.

"We've got to get serious about ethanol," says Rudolph Giuliani.

And the media love ethanol. "60 Minutes" called it "the solution."

Clinton, Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards not only believe ethanol is the elixir that will give us cheap energy, end our dependence on Middle East oil sheiks, and reverse global warming, they also want you and me -- as taxpayers -- to subsidize it.

When everyone in politics jumps on a bandwagon like ethanol, I start to wonder if there's something wrong with it. And there is. Except for that fact that ethanol comes from corn, nothing you're told about it is true. As the Cato Institute's energy expert Jerry Taylor said on a recent "Myths" edition of "20/20," the case for ethanol is based on a baker's dozen myths.

A simple question first. If ethanol's so good, why does it need government subsidies? Shouldn't producers be eager to make it, knowing that thrilled consumers will reward them with profits?

But consumers won't reward them, because without subsidies, ethanol would cost much more than gasoline.

The claim that using ethanol will save energy is another myth. Studies show that the amount of energy ethanol produces and the amount needed to make it are roughly the same. "It takes a lot of fossil fuels to make the fertilizer, to run the tractor, to build the silo, to get that corn to a processing plant, to run the processing plant," Taylor says.

And because ethanol degrades, it can't be moved in pipelines the way that gasoline is. So many more big, polluting trucks will be needed to haul it.

More bad news: The increased push for ethanol has already led to a sharp increase in corn growing -- which means much more land must be plowed. That means much more fertilizer, more water used on farms and more pesticides.

This makes ethanol the "solution"?

But won't it at least get us unhooked from Middle East oil? Wouldn't that be worth the other costs? Another myth. A University of Minnesota study http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/103/30/11206 shows that even turning all of America's corn into ethanol would meet only 12 percent of our gasoline demand. As Taylor told an energy conference last March, "For corn ethanol to completely displace gasoline consumption in this country, we would need to appropriate all cropland in the United States, turn it completely over to corn-ethanol production, and then find 20 percent more land on top of that for cultivation."

OK, but it will cut down on air pollution, right? Wrong again. Studies indicate that the standard mixture of 90 percent ethanol and 10 percent gasoline pollutes worse than gasoline.

Well, then, the ethanol champs must be right when they say it will reduce greenhouse gases and reverse global warming.

Nope. "Virtually all studies show that the greenhouse gases associated with ethanol are about the same as those associated with conventional gasoline once we examine the entire life cycle of the two fuels," Taylor says.

Surely, ethanol must be good for something. And here we finally have a fact. It is good for something -- or at least someone: corn farmers and processors of ethanol, such as Archer Daniels Midland, the big food processor known for its savvy at getting subsidies out of the taxpayers.

And it's good for vote-hungry presidential hopefuls. Iowa is a key state in the presidential-nomination sweepstakes, and we all know what they grow in Iowa http://www.iowacorn.org. Sen. Clinton voted against ethanol 17 times until she started running for president. Coincidence?

"It's no mystery that people who want to be president support the corn ethanol program," Taylor says. "If you're not willing to sacrifice children to the corn god, you will not get out of the Iowa primary with more than one percent of the vote, Right now the closest thing we have to a state religion in the United States isn't Christianity. It's corn."

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[full house]

I believe this one could help!

"If you want to reduce gasoline usage, like I believe we need to do so for national security reasons as well as for environmental concerns, the consumer has got to be in a position to make a rational choice," Bush said. "And so I appreciate very much the fact that American automobile manufacturers recognize the reality of the world in which we live and are using new technologies to give the consumers different options."

The Big Three made their 2012 pledge contingent upon the existence by then of a nationwide infrastructure to deliver the high ethanol blend, called E-85 (a reference to the fact that it is 85 percent ethanol). To date, there are only 1,100 E-85 pumps and 1,000 biodiesel pumps in the United States.