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."
You dont say? (Score:5, Funny)
Who knew a process by which the ultimate goal is to produce ethanol would be a good starting point to produce ethanol?
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Isss'a mirrracl! *hic*
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And then after they have been used to produce more ethanol (which probably is contaminated by some other things than ethanol which would make it less pleasurable to drink) the remains can be dried and then burned to produce even more energy - like heat for the distillation. The ashes can then in turn be taken back to the wineyard and used as fertilizer.
Step by step to create the full cycle. And don't forget that the same procedure can be used with other kinds of waste - like what comes from when producing c
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Just notice that a lot of potential energy is wasted and literally goes down the drain at every household. But it's partly because energy still is too cheap compared to the cost to utilize the energy from waste.
There is very little alcohol that goes down the drain 90% of alcohol it broken down by the liver and only 5% goes down the drain. On top of that there is less then 0.1% alcohol in the urine of an intoxicated person.
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Just notice that a lot of potential energy is wasted and literally goes down the drain at every household. But it's partly because energy still is too cheap compared to the cost to utilize the energy from waste.
There is very little alcohol that goes down the drain 90% of alcohol it broken down by the liver and only 5% goes down the drain. On top of that there is less then 0.1% alcohol in the urine of an intoxicated person.
Bear Grylls will reclaim his wasted alcohol.
Re:You dont say? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who knew a process by which the ultimate goal is to produce ethanol would be a good starting point to produce ethanol?
True that. I'm far more impressed by the people who realized that you could make dresses from wine making waste. [cnet.com]
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Well there is more to the point. Energy is getting so expensive that there is a growing economical incentive to be efficient with your waste products (AKA Wasted energy)
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(Yeah yeah, *whoosh*.)
Grappa (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, grappa was the first thing I thought of, too. This is just a silly idea. The yields from grappa-making are pitifully low - which helps explain why that stuff's so expensive.
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]
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Or Grappa di Frascati! A bit rare on the market.
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On the other hand the good ones tend to cheat by starting from the whole grape. the rule is 'The wetter the better' . Talking about the pomace here.
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Yeah, komovica is the first thing that came to mind - it's very similar to grappa.
All the seeds and whatnot are quite woody, so there is less room for error distilling this stuff. (the wood makes methanol).
I thought they normally fed it to pigs, if not making liquor.
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If you are going to burn the liquid it really doesn't matter if it's pure ethanol or if you also have some methanol in it. The vehicle burning it won't mind either.
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You can have my Grappa when you take it from my cold, dead hands; HIPPIE!
Use corn, thats easy to grow and would just be wasted on feeding poor people otherwise!
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Folks have been making pomace brandys [wikipedia.org], like grappa [wikipedia.org] for centuries. This suggestion is just to put it into an engine rather than drinking it, which many people who have tasted it would approve of.
INDEED, in the places where wine has been made for thousands of years there are no waste products uses include as mentioned Grappa but also getting the grape pumice, mixing it with ash and using it as fertiliser, also it's used in the making of port wine to make the brandy which is added to fortify the base wine and there are other uses to it as well.
Seems that California for all it's over zealous recycling bollocks cannot see the value that European wine producers have seen for thousands of years!
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Having just spent two weeks in Italy, drinking grappa after nearly every meal ... I approve this message.
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My uncle has a bunch of vines and he makes wine by himself, and then he makes some grappa.
Granted, it's not a lot of stuff and he makes that for his own pleasure only.
It happened when I was a lot younger I was there while he was distilling some grappa.
He used the "old" direct-flame method, and a few minutes after the grappa started dripping out of the alembic I saw him grabbing the can and throwing the content away.
Noticing my curiosity he promptly explained: "That was pure alchool. You have always to throw
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You can't get all of the gasoline out through distillation, Everclear is probably cheaper than buying the gas and distilling out the ethanol anyways.
Not a practical solution to our energy problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can, fermenting it and making alcohol. Nor am I against flushing all toilet and livestock waste into giant fermentation tanks to capture the methane energy.
However, I don't think this is a "solution" to the problem of energy in the future. It will produce some, but not all of our needs, and there will be significant energy inputs required to make it work.
I am more interested in throwing all of our spare money, time and energy into long-term solutions, like cleaner nuclear reactors, better fuel cells, solar sails and even personal methane harvesters.
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solar sails ???
I think you meant solar cells
Solar sails may work as a slow method of transportation in space (Wind from the Sun) but are not going to work on earth.
(Or even for interstellar probes, even if some think thats a Cazy Eddie idea)
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Or, yeah, solar cells. Massively increased efficiencies for solar have been promised to be 2 years away for like the last 10 years...
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I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can, fermenting it and making alcohol. Nor am I against flushing all toilet and livestock waste into giant fermentation tanks to capture the methane energy.
However, I don't think this is a "solution" to the problem of energy in the future. It will produce some, but not all of our needs, and there will be significant energy inputs required to make it work.
I am more interested in throwing all of our spare money, time and energy into long-term solutions, like cleaner nuclear reactors, better fuel cells, solar sails and even personal methane harvesters.
Too bad the "spare" money is going to military...
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Well, relatively simple.
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Petroleum is just recycled sunlight and atmospheric CO2, what's "greener" than that?
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However, I don't think this is a "solution" to the problem of energy in the future. It will produce some, but not all of our needs, and there will be significant energy inputs required to make it work.
The era of plentiful natural fossil fuel reserves will end. With that in mind, we have to start thinking about liquid fuels like ethanol as energy storage. It will take significant energy input to make any highly-energy-dense substance, but we can use that process to capture vast amounts of energy (solar, nuclear fission, fusion?!?) for use in those internal-combustion clunkers.
That said, we will be far more worried about the abysmal efficiency of internal combustion engines if we think of the fuel as chemi
Is it really waste? Fertilizer? Animal Feed? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can ...
Is it really waste? Isn't this stuff used as fertilizer or animal feed?
We may need to offset the ethanol benefits with the need to turn to big chemical and big agriculture for more fertilizer and feed.
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I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can, fermenting it and making alcohol.
I know a few people who could benefit from this process.
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If we're going to solve our energy problem, we need to do the following:
1. Start to seriously look at producing oil-laden algae on a HUGE scale to refine into motor fuels and ethanol.
2. Develop safer, more advanced nuclear reactors such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, a molten-salt fuel nuclear reactor that is vastly safer than today's uranium-fueled reactors and generates very little radioactive waste per reactor.
3. Develop more advanced batteries based on dry-electrode lithium-ion, lithium-air and
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Here in my country, the grape leftovers are fed to pigs. They get slightly intoxicated sometimes, but the meat is more tender and better tasting afterwards.
Drunks, beware of the food crysis.
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Drunks, beware of the food crysis.
I don't think I've ever been drunk enough to eat a game! [wikipedia.org]
drop in the bucket (Score:5, Insightful)
so the 100,000 tons, times 2000 pounds per ton, divided by 13 (as per article only half the yield of dry corns 26 lbs. per gallon ethanol), gives 15 million gallons of ethanol. the USA uses 380 million gallons of gasoline per day.
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Also, when can we get around to getting ethanol out of the gasoline? Until we can get back gasoline, don't forget to drain your lawnmower/weed whacker of fuel over the winter, or it might not work come spring due to corrosion from ethanol.
Re:drop in the bucket (Score:4, Funny)
Thank you for doing the math and confirming it.
Agreed. When it comes to wine making, scientific correctness should always be our first priority. The moment I saw this headline, I thought, "I hope someone can Bacchus up on this!"
/me ducks and runs....
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There is one gas station here in town that sells pure gasoline, no ethanol or other additives.
The price is typically 10 cents per gallon over the price of ethanol fuel, but I buy it anyway.
For small engines, you don't want anything but the good stuff.
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It's not a very good idea to put ethanol fuel in small engines.
Re:drop in the bucket (Score:5, Insightful)
so the 100,000 tons, times 2000 pounds per ton, divided by 13 (as per article only half the yield of dry corns 26 lbs. per gallon ethanol), gives 15 million gallons of ethanol. the USA uses 380 million gallons of gasoline per day.
Ya? and that means 15 Million less gallons of gas that would be used.
It's a start, combined with other things, would help make a dent in the usage of gas/oil.
I guess you want to wait till gas is $20 a gallon before we start using other fuels? Maybe you do. I don't drive, so I don't buy gas, so really, I don't care much, but it's this attitude that everything has to be big to be effective that is annoying.
Much like no one is going to make a WoW beater, no on is going to come up with a solution that can totally get rid of the use of gas/oil. But we can find a bunch of renewable resources that together can help a lot.
Re:drop in the bucket (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come on.
1) as pointed out above, this is less than a drop in the bucket. I would not call that a dent.
2) It is completely unclear if this would generate any net energy. A case can be made that many of these more inefficient biofuel processes consume more energy than they produce. How does that help.
3) Most importantly, things like this distract from the ONE thing that has a real chance at reducing our dependance on oil, which is nuclear. Solar and wind might help a little, and maybe biofuels can help with energy storage, but what is described here is not a significant part of any real solution.
You can talk about little steps here and there, but it is magical thinking. If we want to get serious about reducing gas usage (I'm not getting into whether this is the right thing, that's a whole separate topic), then nuclear has to be a huge part of the solution.
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So is a single oil well or a single coal mine or a single power plant. By your logic, they should each be shut down because they're such a tiny part of the whole.
It doesn't have to. It's not an energy source, it's an energy storage system. It's a way to transfer energy from fixed sources into mobile energy consumers.
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I look forward to your explanation of how you plan to power your car with nuclear power. I really, really hope you're not going to claim we should put reactors in cars.
That concept is old. Boy am I glad they never put it into production. [wikipedia.org]
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gasoline is king. diesel's actually really good too -- higher energy density and all that, and it's less combustible.
nuclear's pretty plentiful. we throw down on some serious cutting-edge shit and we'll have a glut of cheap energy -- the nuclear waste sitting around all over? can be used to make more power! LOTS more, more than the process that created the waste generated.
just take that excess energy and poof it into some wacky hydrocarbon chains, you've got gas. it's better than ethanol. less chance
You do care even if you don't drive ... (Score:2)
If you are not a farmer/rancher just how do you think food gets to the city and suburbs? Or manufactured goods? Trains *may* get things to a regional distribution center but from there to local stores it is pretty much heavy trucks which use diesel. Petroleum costs are reflected in the price of food and manufactured goods.
FWIW, the Pickens Plan is interesting in that these heavy trucks could be converted to natural gas. Their rou
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This is too small of a fix to be worthwhile, most likely. 15 million gallons... per YEAR is 0.01% of 380 million * 365 days.
I have to imagine there are so many alternative things to invest in that would make more than a 0.01% dent.
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so the 100,000 tons, times 2000 pounds per ton, divided by 13 (as per article only half the yield of dry corns 26 lbs. per gallon ethanol), gives 15 million gallons of ethanol. the USA uses 380 million gallons of gasoline per day.
Ya? and that means 15 Million less gallons of gas that would be used.
It's a start, combined with other things, would help make a dent in the usage of gas/oil.
I guess you want to wait till gas is $20 a gallon before we start using other fuels? Maybe you do. I don't drive, so I don't buy gas, so really, I don't care much, but it's this attitude that everything has to be big to be effective that is annoying.
Much like no one is going to make a WoW beater, no on is going to come up with a solution that can totally get rid of the use of gas/oil. But we can find a bunch of renewable resources that together can help a lot.
I'd like to know where you got your conversion from gallons of ethanol:gallons of gasoline. Because last time I checked, ethanol contained less energy per gallon than gasoline, equating to less efficiency; thus 15 million gallons of ethanol does less than 15 million gallons of gasoline
http://www.hho4free.com/gasoline_vs_ethanol.htm [hho4free.com]
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2011/01/the-great-ethanol-debate/index.htm [consumerreports.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel#Ethanol-based_engines [wikipedia.org]
I sure hope you know something I
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I don't drive, so I don't buy gas, so really, I don't care much...
Ah, but you see, you should care. Regardless of how much fuel you, personally, use, fuel contributes to the cost of everything you buy. Those Birkenstocks don't get delivered to your local store by storks. Even if they were, you'd have to feed them. That food has to be harvested... blah, blah, blah... I'm boring myself now, so I'm gonna go for a little drive.
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Food is very, very cheap in the developed world. Even if energy costs went up by an order or magnitude it would not be a major problem.
Transport costs are a bigger deal as is electricity production. We need to start building nuclear plants. Yesterday. The sooner politicians start grooming the public to accept this, the better.
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I don't drive, so I don't buy gas, so really, I don't care much, but it's this attitude that everything has to be big to be effective that is annoying.
$20 gas is still going to hurt you, as the price of transporting everything will cost that much more. The price of everything will go up.
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I don't drive, so I don't buy gas, so really, I don't care much, but it's this attitude that everything has to be big to be effective that is annoying.
$20 gas is still going to hurt you, as the price of transporting everything will cost that much more. The price of everything will skyrocket.
FTFY
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There are no 100% solutions to our energy problems.
This is a 4% solution.
You only need 24 more 4% solutions to get to 100%.
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<Gilda Radner>never mind</Gilda Radner>
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Re:drop in the bucket (Score:5, Insightful)
And? It's essentially free, other than the cost of the actual process. Free raw materials might make it economically viable *now*.
No single solution is going to solve our problems. Even biofuel in general isn't a complete solution. But do the math for this, plus dozens of other types of biofuels, plus geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, wind, solar, hydrogen fuel cells, and potentially nuclear fission and fusion. See if those can replace coal, oil and natural gas.
Re:drop in the bucket (Score:4, Insightful)
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To extend on GP's title,
Yes, it's just a drop in the bucket. But given enough drips, the bucket will fill.
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Nuclear fission is, at least in my opinion, the least-acceptable technology that is still acceptable. It produces non-trivial waste, it is not infinitely renewable, and it is rather dangerous. It's better than coal/oil/gas, definitely, and we should be expanding on it because it's one of the few "green" techs that is proven to work large-scale.
But, if there are any better alternatives, even if they cannot supply 100% of our power, I believe they are well worth investigating. Geothermal is superior if you're
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Our fossil fuel use also dwarfs the production of any particular oil well. By your argument, each well should be evaluated in isolation, found insignificant, and shut down.
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If the yield is half that of corn, and you need 26 lbs. of corn for one gallon of ethanol, then you'd need 52 lbs. of this waste for one gallon of ethanol. So, divide by 52 instead of 13. This would reduce the yield you calculated by 4.
This could still (pun intended) be used by
Ethanol isn't sustainable (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no way to ever produce enough to replace gasoline. Right now 40% of our corn stock is, by federal law, ground up and turned into Ethanol, and it manages to offset about 15% of gasoline. We could turn our entire yearly production of grown food into ethanol production and still fall short. It isn't a sustainable technology, no matter how much waste, byproduct, etc., is produced. There simply isn't enough land to make it. Oil took millions of years to create, and was formed from the organic waste of the entire planet. We'll have depleted that million-plus year stock in just under 100 years.
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The problem here is that you are only counting food biomass, and extrapolating a definitive conclusion from it that ethanol in general cannot provide 100% fuel requirements.
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.
Even if cellulosic ethanol cannot be efficiently industrialized, there re other processes to convert carbohydrates into c
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.
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Naw, didn't fail earth sciences. Just pointing out what is routinely done. (People routinely discarded lawn waste before the widespread use of mulching mowers. I remember the 1980s quite well.)
The issue is indeed what you state; density. You can convert biomass into syngas very easily, just seal the canister and heat it with a solar concetrator. But the resulting syngas has only half the energy density of natural gas.
You can take the syngas, add more energy, and get methane.
You can take the methane, add mo
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A "hairline crack" in a correctly designed pressure vessel will do nothing but leak. Otherwise known as leak-before-break. It will only explode (from the pressure, fatigue, corrosion) if it is poorly designed. Now of course the danger from ignition of the leaked gas is another issue, but that is an issue we already have with gasoline since gasoline fumes are extremely flamable.
I'd post a link but all the good articles seem to be .pdf and I figure it is bad form to post a link to a document. Search "leak
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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.
You probably won't produce enough fuel from those lawn clippings to make up for the cost of running the lawnmower in the first place.
You'd be better off replacing the grass with something like thyme, which requires less water, doesn't grow as high (doesn't need to be mowed as often, or at all, depending on whether your city has stupid laws), and which is resistant to weeds like dandelions (meaning you won't need the nasty herbicides people put in their lawns, either).
Re:Ethanol isn't sustainable (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no way to ever produce enough to replace gasoline.
Who are you arguing with? Neither TFA nor TFS makes that claim. It's a description of a technique for turning a particular class of waste into a useful product, not a turnkey solution to the energy crisis.
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The problem with these kinds of ethanol stories isn't that they claim they can replace all the energy -- you're right, they never make this claim outright.
The problem is that they perpetuate the fiction that ethanol is any kind of an energy solution outside of some post-apocalyptic story where some last-man-on-Earth type runs a wood-fired still to produce tiny quantities of alcohol for his last-motorbike-on-Earth.
The ethanol industry wants to keep inundating us with all this "free" stuff that can be turned
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The problem is that we need something that can produce ethanol on a scale not possible now.
And the potential solution is oil-laden algae. Not only does large-scale production of oil-laden algae produce a LOT motor fuels (diesel fuel, gasoline, heating oil and kerosene), but the "waste" from algae processing into motor fuel can be turned into ethanol rather easily.
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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.
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Ethanol gas voids your chainsaw warranty. Think seriously about putting in a boat as well. In addition the ethanol plants use energy from the grid, if it was a worthwhile endeavor they would run their plants on their own product. ADM is a bunch of crooks and liars but have great lobby.
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Gasoline is bad for lawnmower engines too, unless you add oil to the gasoline in your 2 stroke mower!
Point being, the engine is designed with the fuel in mind. If I want to use another fuel, I should consider buying another lawn mower. If I put something into the tank that it wasn't designed for, I shouldn't be angry at the fuel!
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Nonsense. Apart from dissolving some (generally older) gaskets/seals/paints and the varnish left by previously used petrol, ethanol is no worse for engines than fossil hydrocarbon distillate fuels (eg. petrol). In some ways it is actually better as it burns cleaner and is less likely to clog up the engine with carbon deposits.
Ethanol can also be used in two-stroke engines as long as a suitable lubricant is provided (either pre-mix or post-mix). The exhaust fumes from ethanol are less noxious than those of p
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.
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Not true. You can do it if you don't mind working with potentially toxic gasses.
Syngas, for instance.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas [wikipedia.org]
basically, load the soggy biomass into a crucible furnace, seal it down tight, point a solar concentrator at it, collect the gas. Profit.
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Over looked sources (Score:2, Interesting)
facts (Score:2, Interesting)
Since they don't provide any useful facts, allow me to insert pseudo facts to fill the gap.
First, the words 'especially ethanol' ring a bit hollow due to the low fuel efficiency and great cost in terms of equipment, raw materials, etc relative to petroleum. Reserve the word 'especially' for biodiesel- a much more promising but still long term project.
Now if we start with 100k tons of grape stuff and push our imaginations to the extreme, let's suppose that will support 100k vehicles. That would be 2% of the
Duh ... (Score:2)
No shit guys. It's called Grappa [wikipedia.org], and the Italians have been doing it for centuries:
My wife says it tastes like jet fuel, but it's an acquired taste. :-P
Did someone think they've discovered something new?
Ouch, my liver... (Score:2)
How about that! (Score:2)
It's the perfect combination of drinking and driving!
Look at it another way (Score:5, Interesting)
We have it here in Italy (Score:3)
We call it "grappa", half nation runs on it.
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We call it "grappa", half nation runs on it.
+5 Informative.
At least the judge in the earthquake case was ripped to his tits on the stuff.
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How can you drink that crap?
Wait, I know the answer.
"Bring us the good stuff!" we said, and he did.
The downside? The crap stuff was free, the good stuff cost us plenty
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Well grappa is an acquired taste ;)
Also, there are thousands of different grappas distilled in Italy, maybe you just got a bad one...
The secret is not to go for shots, but sip it slowly.
Vin Diesel (Score:2)
...or they could make... (Score:2)
Very interesting! (Score:2)
They all say Americans are the worlds best businessmen. But they are nothing compared to the French who have convinced the whole world that their spoiled milk and rotten grape juice is gourmet food.
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Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce.
The whole point of something like this is to utilize waste, which means that we aren't giving up food production or having to cultivate more land in order to make the fuel. I'll agree that corn is stupid, but this is using wine waste - IE grape stuff. Most true environmentalists don't back corn at all, they know how stupid it is. However the corn lobby is powerful and has 'Environmentalists' on it's payroll. Ethanol production from corn has gotten a lot more efficient, but it needs to be an OOM or so, a
Re: (Score:2)
1. Not going to argue that cornfields have lower diversity
2. Did you miss my point that corn > biofuel = stupid? Though I dropped some words - 'OOM or so better'. 'stiff -> still'
3. Heck, I specified Ethanol as not a good fuel as well.
4. 'Mostly electric cars'
As the AC mentioned, Corn is far from the only potential biofuel. As I mentioned, the only reason it's the primary source here in the USA is the corn lobby. Algae working out or not, I hope they crack the problems with turning cellulose i
Re: (Score:2)
No, electric cars are not the future. At least not a future that is anywhere near.
Batteries are the problem. Battery technology is creeping along very, very, very, very slowly. And has been for 50 years.
We've finally reached the point where an all-electric car is practical....in a warm climate....if you have a short commute....and you don't mind long recharge time.
Practical all-electric cars that work for almost everyone are decades off because batteries to power such vehicles are decades off.
Far more pr