I think the upside of E85 will outweigh the downside in the long run.
Reducing greenhouse gases and our dependence on fossil fuels will require mutiple approaches. As Guy stated, the obvious place to start is to simply use less. Each of us can do that now, from driving less, using fuel efficient vehicles when possible, turning our home thermostats down in the winter and up in the summer, insulating our homes, investing in more efficent heating/cooling equipment, etc.
At the same time, IMO there must be ongoing efforts to develop alternative fuel sources. E85 will never replace gasoline entirely, but it can (and hopefully will) play a role in reducing our dependence on it. The petroleum needed to produce it could also be replaced with alternative fuels. The technology of making ethanol will no doubt improve and become more efficient if and when E85 becomes more mainstream. BTW, many of the same arguments leveled against E85 can be leveled against hybrid technology as well, i.e., it costs more to produce than it saves in the long run. That could be a valid argument today, but perhaps not tomorrow.
Solar (which includes wind) should play a role as well, especially for powering individual homes. Nuclear fusion may some day become viable, and I think we should keep working on that as well. If fusion reactors become a viable alternative, the 60's vision of an "electric America" could become a reality with electricty powering our cars and the heating systems in our homes (already being done but not cost effective in many areas). Of course, this would require a huge upgrade in power distrubution, which is already a problem in itself.
Fossil fuels will be with us for a long time - we just have to stop depending on them for everything. We should not fall into the trap of looking for a single answer to the problem, and not pursuing alternatives just because they cannot displace all of our dependence or are not economically viable at this time.
And in the mean time, I still fight with my employer to work at home as much as possible. I've got them up to 2 days a week and I'll keep pushing them for more. Maybe instead of oil subsidies, there should be tax incentives for companies that implement a "work at home" policy.
- John - How are we back to square one if all of those tractors are using E85 too? Isn't that the whole point of this? Getting ALL engines run on something beside gas. Corn is not the only crop that can be used for E85. Even praire grasses will distill into Ethanol.
This whole thing is nothing but one big "Moonshine" process. It's all made the exact same way, but you just can't drink this stuff.
You want to use electricity? Just how do you plan to produce all of that you will need. By burning coal? Ethanol can be made from all kinds of scrap materials, including waste from lumber mills, sugar cane mills, and many others. It is also clean to produce and the only exhaust is steam from the Ethanol plants.
What more could you want??????
-------------
- - Last night both 60-Minutes and Dateline had stories on this subject, and with luck maybe a few politicians will do something about it. That is if anyone can find one with enough brains to figure out what it means, and who isn't too busy selling their votes to the oil companies.
- - Maybe if big countries would just get together and provide all of the tools needed to do this process to all other countries, then places like China and Europe and the US would be able to stop kissing the asses of these Arab countries and tell them to take their oil and see what it gets them after that. Just about every country, but them, at least has grasses they can use for E85, so these Arabs better find some new uses for sand.
Let me get this right. You take corn, or some other source, and turn it into ethanol. How does that mash get distilled into ethanol? The last I knew, you had to boil off the ethanol without boiling the water. That takes heat. You get heat from burning fossil fuels. OK. Sunshine can also work, but there doesn't seem to be enough of that commodity. By the way, I drove past an ethanol plant several years ago in Illinois on the banks of the Illinois River. The funny thing is that the coal fired power plant just to the south had no noticable plume, while the ethanol plant, also a coal burner, did not appear to be removing much, if any, of the soot from the flue gas. As best I could find out, there was an exemption from the environmental regulations for the ethanol plant. The word was that the ethanol plant was burning local high sulpher coal while the power plant was buring low sulpher western coal. Neither plant was using a scrubber to get the SO2 out, but the ethanol plant was emitting much more SO2.
Ethanol does not have the heat content of gasoline, so your fuel mileage will plummet. The last time I checked, ethanol contained a fair amount of carbon. While this may help with the oil importation problem, it will do very little for the CO2 problem. Especially as it needs to be distilled.
One thing you do need to be careful about is that some organic materials produce ethanol and others produce methanol. My memory tells me that wood waste produces methanol. Maybe there is a ChE out there to help with this. I remember reading many years ago that the reason gasoline is adulturated with ethanol instead of methanol is that methanol is very aggressive and eats many materials.
Before you gang up on me, I would dearly love to find some other material to power my car. Electricity sound wonderful, but most of that comes from burniong fossil fuels. Nuclear? Just remember, 90% of the uranium is imported, or so I heard recently on some documentary or another.
We seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. As for now, as long as we are stuck with burning carbon for heat to make power, we ought to be investing in a means of improving efficiency of all of our uses. Meanwhile, large sums should be spent looking for other ways to get the power we need. I mean real ways, not politically correct ways.
That takes heat. You get heat from burning fossil fuels.
IMO, this is more of a catch-22 in our thinking than it is from a technical point of view. We can obviously get heat from something other than imported oil. Since you cannot use coal to run a car, and since coal can be burned cleanly, and since North America has coal in great abundance, using coal in the production of ethanol could be viable stop-gap measure at least in terms of energy independence, which I think we need to make a top priority.
No excuse to allow an ethanol plant to use high-sulfur fuel or not take measures to reduce pollution - that is a political problem, not a technical one.
In my original post, "nuclear" = fusion, an emerging technology for energy production. Urianium is not used in a fusion reactor.
Jim - With the current concerns about CO2 and global warming, I was trying to use fossil fuels rather than imported oil or domestic natural gas and coal. It does look as if the earth is warming. Whether this is a result of mankind emitting CO2, methane, SO2, and other greenhouse gasses or a minute change in the solar output of energy, I am completely unable to say. As far as pollution goes, I believe that all grandfathering of older facilities should cease immediately. If you have even seen the piles of sulfer stacked by oil and gas facilities that remove the sulfer from the fuel, you would not believe it. I would say that the pile I saw at one facility measured many acre-feet. If that were burned, it would all go into the air as SO2. Accuse me of bias and trying to stay employed until I can figure out a way to retire.. I have been involved in the power industry, coal, natural gas with oil backup, and hydro, for the last 25 years. Most of this time has been spent in pollution abatement and trying to convince people, with little success, that higher efficiency pays. It cannot be put back into the rate base and fuel costs are a pass through item.
True, Uranium is not used in fusion, but fusion does not exist today. The AEC was staffed in the 1950s by so many people with a guilty concience, after all there is only one country that has dropped an atomic bomb on another country, that they forced an overblown nuclear submarine reactor on the utility industry. A misapplication of technology in my opinion. If the technology had been allowed to develop at its own pace, we may well have a safe and clean form of nuclear energy. I can guarantee that you would not come close to believing the amount of waste radio active material left over from processing uranium into reactor fuel and atomic bombs. Yes, I spent 6 months on a nuclear clean up project until I got off as I don't work the way the DOE requires.
There are power plants being built today that use the initials, IGCC. That stands for Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. These units gasify coal and then burn it through a combined cycle plant (gas turbine with a heat recovery steam generator). There is also work being done on coal liquification, presumably to burn in oil boilers or turbines. I would think that this product could be refined into gasoline as well.
Until we can find a means to power society without creating greenhouse gasses, we must improve the efficiency of the process and install maximum pollution abatement as it becomes available. If we don't, we stand to lose our beautiful countryside. Then what would we take pictures of?
How about horses. They don't pollute the environment and their waste products can be reused to grow more food. Sure would slow the world down, and make it a lot less hectic. Just my 2 cents.
Discussion
9 replieshttp://www.ethanol.org/e85.html
http://www.e85fuel.com/index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E85
http://www.slate.com/id/2122961/
As usual, this will be decided by lobbyists and politicians rather than scientists so we'll have to wait and see.
I personally think investing in public transportation and eliminating oil subsidies will be more effective in the short term.
Guy
Reducing greenhouse gases and our dependence on fossil fuels will require mutiple approaches. As Guy stated, the obvious place to start is to simply use less. Each of us can do that now, from driving less, using fuel efficient vehicles when possible, turning our home thermostats down in the winter and up in the summer, insulating our homes, investing in more efficent heating/cooling equipment, etc.
At the same time, IMO there must be ongoing efforts to develop alternative fuel sources. E85 will never replace gasoline entirely, but it can (and hopefully will) play a role in reducing our dependence on it. The petroleum needed to produce it could also be replaced with alternative fuels. The technology of making ethanol will no doubt improve and become more efficient if and when E85 becomes more mainstream. BTW, many of the same arguments leveled against E85 can be leveled against hybrid technology as well, i.e., it costs more to produce than it saves in the long run. That could be a valid argument today, but perhaps not tomorrow.
Solar (which includes wind) should play a role as well, especially for powering individual homes. Nuclear fusion may some day become viable, and I think we should keep working on that as well. If fusion reactors become a viable alternative, the 60's vision of an "electric America" could become a reality with electricty powering our cars and the heating systems in our homes (already being done but not cost effective in many areas). Of course, this would require a huge upgrade in power distrubution, which is already a problem in itself.
Fossil fuels will be with us for a long time - we just have to stop depending on them for everything. We should not fall into the trap of looking for a single answer to the problem, and not pursuing alternatives just because they cannot displace all of our dependence or are not economically viable at this time.
And in the mean time, I still fight with my employer to work at home as much as possible. I've got them up to 2 days a week and I'll keep pushing them for more. Maybe instead of oil subsidies, there should be tax incentives for companies that implement a "work at home" policy.
This whole thing is nothing but one big "Moonshine" process. It's all made the exact same way, but you just can't drink this stuff.
You want to use electricity? Just how do you plan to produce all of that you will need. By burning coal? Ethanol can be made from all kinds of scrap materials, including waste from lumber mills, sugar cane mills, and many others. It is also clean to produce and the only exhaust is steam from the Ethanol plants.
What more could you want??????
-------------
- - Last night both 60-Minutes and Dateline had stories on this subject, and with luck maybe a few politicians will do something about it. That is if anyone can find one with enough brains to figure out what it means, and who isn't too busy selling their votes to the oil companies.
- - Maybe if big countries would just get together and provide all of the tools needed to do this process to all other countries, then places like China and Europe and the US would be able to stop kissing the asses of these Arab countries and tell them to take their oil and see what it gets them after that. Just about every country, but them, at least has grasses they can use for E85, so these Arabs better find some new uses for sand.
Ethanol does not have the heat content of gasoline, so your fuel mileage will plummet. The last time I checked, ethanol contained a fair amount of carbon. While this may help with the oil importation problem, it will do very little for the CO2 problem. Especially as it needs to be distilled.
One thing you do need to be careful about is that some organic materials produce ethanol and others produce methanol. My memory tells me that wood waste produces methanol. Maybe there is a ChE out there to help with this. I remember reading many years ago that the reason gasoline is adulturated with ethanol instead of methanol is that methanol is very aggressive and eats many materials.
Before you gang up on me, I would dearly love to find some other material to power my car. Electricity sound wonderful, but most of that comes from burniong fossil fuels. Nuclear? Just remember, 90% of the uranium is imported, or so I heard recently on some documentary or another.
We seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. As for now, as long as we are stuck with burning carbon for heat to make power, we ought to be investing in a means of improving efficiency of all of our uses. Meanwhile, large sums should be spent looking for other ways to get the power we need. I mean real ways, not politically correct ways.
IMO, this is more of a catch-22 in our thinking than it is from a technical point of view. We can obviously get heat from something other than imported oil. Since you cannot use coal to run a car, and since coal can be burned cleanly, and since North America has coal in great abundance, using coal in the production of ethanol could be viable stop-gap measure at least in terms of energy independence, which I think we need to make a top priority.
No excuse to allow an ethanol plant to use high-sulfur fuel or not take measures to reduce pollution - that is a political problem, not a technical one.
In my original post, "nuclear" = fusion, an emerging technology for energy production. Urianium is not used in a fusion reactor.
I agree completely with your last paragraph.
True, Uranium is not used in fusion, but fusion does not exist today. The AEC was staffed in the 1950s by so many people with a guilty concience, after all there is only one country that has dropped an atomic bomb on another country, that they forced an overblown nuclear submarine reactor on the utility industry. A misapplication of technology in my opinion. If the technology had been allowed to develop at its own pace, we may well have a safe and clean form of nuclear energy. I can guarantee that you would not come close to believing the amount of waste radio active material left over from processing uranium into reactor fuel and atomic bombs. Yes, I spent 6 months on a nuclear clean up project until I got off as I don't work the way the DOE requires.
There are power plants being built today that use the initials, IGCC. That stands for Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. These units gasify coal and then burn it through a combined cycle plant (gas turbine with a heat recovery steam generator). There is also work being done on coal liquification, presumably to burn in oil boilers or turbines. I would think that this product could be refined into gasoline as well.
Until we can find a means to power society without creating greenhouse gasses, we must improve the efficiency of the process and install maximum pollution abatement as it becomes available. If we don't, we stand to lose our beautiful countryside. Then what would we take pictures of?
Pete D.
http://www.clubvr4.net/videos/KiwiTT/Trafficcam.wmv