Using Winemaking Waste For Making Fuel 152
Tator Tot writes "Grape pomace, the mashed up skins and stems left over from making wine and grape juice, could serve as a good starting point for ethanol production, according to a new study (from the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry). Due to growing interest in biofuels, researchers have started looking for cheap and environmentally sustainable ways to produce such fuels, especially ethanol. Biological engineer Jean VanderGheynst at the University of California, Davis, turned to grape pomace, because winemakers in California alone produce over 100,000 tons of the fruit scraps each year, with much of it going to waste."
Grappa (Score:5, Informative)
It is called Grappa (Score:4, Informative)
Very old technology. Tastes like nice jet fuel. See Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Or. for a good example.
Routine byproduct (Score:5, Informative)
That's routine for anything that's a fermentation process. California's biggest cheese factory has a sizable ethanol output. Anheuser-Busch is trying to find some way to turn brewery waste into something useful.
It's a marginal business, You start with huge volumes of soggy biomass and try to extract something useful without using too much energy. Then you're left with a smaller amount of soggy biomass that's even less useful than what came in. That has to go somewhere.
There's a vast amount of agricultural waste available at low, low prices if you can find some way to use it. Straw, bagasse (the leftover part of sugar cane), nut hulls, brewers's mash, corn husks, cobs, and stalks - it's out there in bulk. The hope of cellulostic ethanol conversion was to convert some of the cellulose into fuel. So far, it doesn't pay, and it's hard to even get out more energy than goes in. Work continues.
Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Grappa (Score:5, Informative)
"...rather than drinking it, which many people who have tasted it would approve of."
Then you never had a good one.
Try one of these:
http://www.wine-searcher.com/find/grappa+rossi+d+asiago+muscat+rosa+italy/1/-/-/r [wine-searcher.com]
Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable (Score:5, Informative)
Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.
I think you flunked earth sciences. The lawn needs those things; It composts and reduces to fertilizer for the next year. Same with leaves and such. The reason our crop yields are falling and most of our cities are basically slabs of clay with a few inches of top soil over the top is because we're constantly trimming, mowing, and raking away all the nutrients that the plants need to survive and replacing it with pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and all manner of chemicals that are dangerous to us.
I'm not discounting the source: I'm simply pointing out it's already marked for a different use, courtesy mother nature. Ethanol is a supportive technology, like solar, wind, or hydroelectric. But it can't replace the fuels in our vehicles because there's no way to produce enough of it to completely offset oil. In fact, all the alternative energy technologies that are commercially feasible can't do it. It's called energy density, and so far we haven't been able to find a fuel that has both high energy density and a low conversion cost that can match dead dino fuel. Some of them have reached the point where they may be useful for daily commutes in an urban environment, but there is nothing yet created that I can put 80 pounds of it in my car and drive 400 miles, and then stop, wait for 5 minutes to refuel, and then continue. The few technologies that offer decent conversion efficiency and energy density usually have significant drawbacks. Natural gas, for example, has to be compressed to several hundred PSI in order to get a reasonable amount into a car. At those pressures, a hairline fracture in the tank will not only destroy the car, but anyone within a hundred feet of it... I'm not sure I like the idea of riding a bomb to work every day. That's just one example; there are many others, but they all suffer from the same physics problem: Energy density and conversion efficiency.
Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable (Score:5, Informative)
Ethanol is bad for engines. While chances are it isn't going to destroy your modern car's engine, good luck getting your chainsaw, mower, etc. or if you store fuel long-term (backup generators, etc.)
How does stuff like this get upvoted? No, ethanol is not "bad for engines", any more than gas, or butanol, or diesel is!
It's true that ethanol can do some minor damage (such as dissolve some carburetor seals) in cars not made to take ethanol, but all cars sold in the USA for the past few decades won't have a problem at all with ethanol. And it's not that ethanol is particularly bad, it's simply that soft rubber gaskets were originally designed with the assumption that ONLY gasoline was going to be used and so didn't bother to check for other types of decomposition. Further, this problem is only seen with long-term use, not occasional use.
I've used ethanol mix fuel many times in my Briggs and Stratton lawn mower as far back as the 90s, never had a problem. Also, ALL gasoline will go bad after a while, (often just a few months) due to evaporation, oxidation, and biological decomposition (Yes, there are bacteria that eat gasoline) among other things. You can use a fuel stabilizer such as Sta-Bil to make your gas last longer.