$1/Gallon "Green Gasoline" In Sight

[Bob Hubbard]

Saw this, and thought it interesting in light of this thread.




$1/Gallon "Green Gasoline" In Sight

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 22, @06:16PM
from the happy-earth-day dept.

mattnyc99 writes "We've gotten excited here about the startup that claims it can make $1/gallon ethanol out of anything from trash to tires. But we've also seen how cellulosic ethanol is a better option, and how ethanol demand in general is only adding to the worldwide food crisis. So what about $1/gallon gasoline? NSF-funded researchers at UMass Amherst just completed the first direct conversion from cellulose using a new method of hydrocarbon refining, which they claim can be commercialized within 5-10 years and essentially make fuel out of anything that grows. Quoting: 'We already have the infrastructure in place to distribute liquid fuels. We're using them to power transportation vehicles today, and I think that's what we'll be using in 10 years and in 50 years,' Huber says. 'And if you want a sustainable liquid transportation fuel, biomass is the only way to go.'" The process is running at about 50% efficiency now; the $1/gallon figure is based on getting to 100%.

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[newGuy12]

If we can keep Big Oil (and the politicians that are owned by them) from mucking this up, we might see some improvement.

 

[Steel Tiger]

Well it definitely looks like a step forward whereas ethanol looks like a step backward. I can still see the potential for people growing crops purely for transformation into fuel, but if the return rates they are suggesting for this process are accurate then it will significantly lessened the impact of such behaviour.

Interesting that Shell is getting into this.

 

[MA-Caver]

Well it definitely looks like a step forward whereas ethanol looks like a step backward. I can still see the potential for people growing crops purely for transformation into fuel, but if the return rates they are suggesting for this process are accurate then it will significantly lessened the impact of such behavior.

Interesting that Shell is getting into this.

Ethanol may be a step backwards but it's "full circle" when you remember that Henry Ford actually created his Model T to run on ethanol. But it was cheaper to mass produce/refine petroleum products so ... well you know the rest.

 

[ackks10]

Ethanol may be a step backwards but it's "full circle" when you remember that Henry Ford actually created his Model T to run on ethanol. But it was cheaper to mass produce/refine petroleum products so ... well you know the rest.

you beat me to it

 

[Sukerkin]

Cheers for that Caver - you just fulfilled my personally imposed 'learn something new each day' quotient .

 

[Sukerkin]

I know that it's bad form to wholesale transplant someone else's words from another forum but this post by circletimessquare is pretty much what I've been saying for years ... it's just he said it concisely :

same reason i was apopleptic about the idiocy of hydrogen power. which, as a fashionable topic for science morons, seems to have run its course thankfully

please, science idiots, learn:

if you expend lots of energy manufacturing your energy medium, you are being more wasteful than just choosing a more intelligent energy medium

hydrogen is great, of course, because it burns clean. but it is a b*tch to store and transport, and most importantly, although something clean is coming out of your exhaust, everything that went into getting hydrogen into your fuel tank created more pollution than if you were burning coal in your car

the solution to our energy crisis is nuclear and electric cars

japan and france: show us the way to a cleaner, cheaper energy future, without the security concerns: nuclear

its safer than it ever was (you can walk away from a pebble bed reactor and it will just gradually shut down: no active management needed), and horrible waste is only a product of the usa's hesitance to use breeder reactors (because they make bomb grade materials). but if you use breeder reactors, you have a tenth of the nuclear fuel waste which loses its radioactivity in a few centuries, rather in 10,000s of years, AND you get way more energy output. as uranium runs out, use thorium like india. and as we begin to run out of thorium in a few centuries, mankind better have been able to master fusion power by then, or we are doomed anyways

i think, to provide security to nuclear plants, you would need one one hundredth of the amount of security resources you need now to make sure oil still flows to our shores

or just keep counting the body bags coming from iraq because your mind still believes propaganda about nuclear power based on 1960s technology

.

 

[Big Don]

The process is running at about 50% efficiency now; the $1/gallon figure is based on getting to 100%.

Why not begin selling at $2.50 or $3.00 a gallon NOW, and raise funds to get to 100%?

 

[Rich Parsons]

Why not begin selling at $2.50 or $3.00 a gallon NOW, and raise funds to get to 100%?

Ethanol is 30% less efficient than gas by volume.

E85 is 85% Ethanol. Assume a vehicle that is optimized to run on E85 and not just capable of running on E85 and the cost of the Ethanol would have to be about 26.5% less to have a break even cost for miles for the consumer.

So with Regular jumping to $3.69 yesterday E85 would have to cost $2.71 for the consumer to just break even for their value in miles.

So while I agree having a renewable source of energy is a good thing, there are many people out there who cannot choose to have something of a less value for them. Yes, $3.00 a gallon would seem cheap until they had to fill up more often.

I support this type of development.

I support renewable energy.

I just want the customers to be smart and drive the technology and the cost to their benefit, and not the benefit of some development company.

(* Although the development company should be able to make money on their product, but after taxes and distribution charges making it for $2.50 to $3.00 a gallon now may not be affordable for them. They might loose to much money. *)

 

[ArmorOfGod]

I think I will hold my breath for $1 gasoline to happen.
3 2 1
(suck in breath).......
I am sure it will be any minute now.

AoG

 

[Empty Hands]

The process is running at about 50% efficiency now; the $1/gallon figure is based on getting to 100%.

Then it will never reach $1/gallon, assuming we are using the same definition of "efficiency". No chemical process can ever reach 100% conversion efficiency, there will always be losses to other energy types (usually heat). While energy can neither be created nor destroyed (1st law of thermodynamics), every reaction is accompanied by an increase of entropy (2nd law).

All of this is a fancy way of saying that if the inventors of this process are selling 100% efficiency, then they are lying.

 

[cdunn]

A caloric transfer of over 90% is not entirely unthinkable. Just.. hard. And this is not ethanol. This is, reputedly, a light 'oil', which mostly just needs some distillation and fractionalization to be gasoline. If it can hit the pumps even at $2.50 a gallon post-tax, that's a good thing.

“The temperature window is very critical,” Huber says. If you heat too slowly, you produce mainly coke—elemental carbon residue. If you heat too fast, you make mainly vapors. The sweet spot, about 1000 degrees per second, transfers roughly half the cellulose’s energy into hydrocarbons."

This is going to be HELL to scale up. Further more, I have concerns about the energy loop going on here - How much of the yield is going to come from outside to handle that '1000 degrees per second?' How long does that thousand per second have to go on? We're gonna need nukes to fuel these, how many? How many years will it take to build the infrastructure to make it?

Not reasons to not go through it, if it's real, and if it's scaleable, but, things that do need to be considered.

 

[mrhnau]

No chemical process can ever reach 100% conversion efficiency

Say that to my positron fueled car!:boing2:

 

[mrhnau]

A caloric transfer of over 90% is not entirely unthinkable. Just.. hard.

What is regular gasoline caloric transfer rate? I don't know it off hand... perhaps its not a matter of asymptotically reaching for 100%, but getting close to or surpassing the conversion rate for regular gas.

 

[Empty Hands]

What is regular gasoline caloric transfer rate?

Far better than 100%, if you only consider what energy we have to put into it. The Earth already did all the hard work for us over millions of years, so we don't have to really create gas - just dig it up and refine it. That obviously doesn't apply to synthesizing ethanol.

 

[mrhnau]

Far better than 100%, if you only consider what energy we have to put into it. The Earth already did all the hard work for us over millions of years, so we don't have to really create gas - just dig it up and refine it. That obviously doesn't apply to synthesizing ethanol.

*scratches head* huh? You mean we can dig it and refine it for free? No energy expense?

 

[cdunn]

*scratches head* huh? You mean we can dig it and refine it for free? No energy expense?

There is an energy expense. However, in the current state, it generally requires much less than the 1.7 megawatt-hours recoverable per barrel of crude.

In the case of petroleum fuels, we are only working one leg of the chemical energy cycle. The cyclical process goes roughly
CO2 +H2O (Ground State) -> Complex Organics (Energy From Env.) -> Crude Oil (Energy From Env.)-> "Man-made" Oil Products (Energy From "Man") -> CO2 +H2O (Energy Released By Burning. Return to Ground State.) Lots in from nature, a little in from man, a lot out.

Any fuel sourced from biomass is, in essence, attempting to sidestep the several hundred million years of heat and pressure that causes organics to turn into oil under the ground. The energy applied by this heat and pressure must, in some manner, be replaced. We are left, then, with a much lower energy profit - if the energy applied is high, and the release is low, it's an energy loss, an insufficient fraction of the final release coming from the organic phases to overcome ineffiencies of the overall cycle.

 

[mrhnau]

There is an energy expense. However, in the current state, it generally requires much less than the 1.7 megawatt-hours recoverable per barrel of crude.

In the case of petroleum fuels, we are only working one leg of the chemical energy cycle. The cyclical process goes roughly
CO2 +H2O (Ground State) -> Complex Organics (Energy From Env.) -> Crude Oil (Energy From Env.)-> "Man-made" Oil Products (Energy From "Man") -> CO2 +H2O (Energy Released By Burning. Return to Ground State.) Lots in from nature, a little in from man, a lot out.

Any fuel sourced from biomass is, in essence, attempting to sidestep the several hundred million years of heat and pressure that causes organics to turn into oil under the ground. The energy applied by this heat and pressure must, in some manner, be replaced. We are left, then, with a much lower energy profit - if the energy applied is high, and the release is low, it's an energy loss, an insufficient fraction of the final release coming from the organic phases to overcome ineffiencies of the overall cycle.

Indeed, but there is some interesting research going on in this field too. For instance, I personally know a geneticist that is trying to increase the oil production in corn by genetically modifying it. The goal is to triple the quantity of oil produced/harvested. These kind of innovations can, IMHO, get us to a reasonable input/output ratio, and start making some of these technologies worthwhile! I believe our society is ingenious enough to come up with clever ways to get this to work... maybe not corn, but algae or some other medium... the next few decades should prove interesting

 

[tellner]

Cellulosic ethanol isn't exactly news. I started seeing serious development buzz on it about two years ago. The nice thing is that a lot of cellulose is currently treated as garbage and plowed under, burned or left to rot. The days of the Hogg Fuel and sawdust furnaces are long gone - our 1906 house used to have one. But with dead dinosaurs going for $4/gallon it's starting to make economic sense. Anytime a cost can be turned into a resource and you can get a microbe to do the heavy lifting you're onto something worth pursuing. Last I checked the 18 million gallon/year pilot plant was still on track.

Lipid-rich algae are another promising avenue. The strains I've seen referenced are about 50% lipid by weight with a good portion of the remainder as glycerol. You can't burn glycerol. Nobody has come up with a burner that doesn't smoke and clog pretty quickly. But it's got a thousand other industrial and agricultural uses. Extraction of ht lipids and conversion into diesel is pretty easy - basically a matter of pressing and/or centrifuging. Boeing is taking it seriously enough to start a company specifically for making algae-based fuel.

The latest advances in photovoltaics are promising. OTEC is under-studied.

None of these will return us to the era of cheap energy. But they can help a lot.

If Chevron would do something wiht the metal-hydride battery technology it bought from GM we could have a much better and cheaper way of powering EVs. Unfortunately, they have been squatting on it like a bloated venomous spider because EVs would interfere with its business model. Similarly, Lockheed has acquired a number of battery technologies including some interesting variations on sulfur-sodium but is only using them for "military and national security". That means the Army gets them. Halliburton gets them. The plebes can buy gas at $6/gallon or whatever maximizes Exxon's profits.

Congress has the power to grant patents "for a limited time" to "encourage progress in the mechanical arts". When patents are used to retard progress in critical times it may be time for Congress to start examining how the privilege is being abused.

 

[mrhnau]

Great post Tellner!

I'm still holding out hope for Fusion, even though it is probably a generation or so down the road. The topic of alternative energies has always fascinated me...