Ethanol Not Feasible as a Fuel?

[skip0110]

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5369284.stm

Says, that among other things,

The grain required to fill the petrol tank of a Range Rover with ethanol is sufficient to feed one person per year.

and

Growing maize appears to use 30% more energy than the finished fuel produces, and leaves eroded soils and polluted waters behind

Now, I've also heard that producing gasoline is a negative-energy process, wich uses more energy than is extracted, but it is useful for us because it is in such a concentrated form.

C&D's article a while back also sort of indictaed that ethanol was not a feasible gas replacement, due to the lousy mileage it gives.

Personally, I think ethanol is a better solution than diesel (I'm sure someone will suggest that)...engines with proper compression and advance and cam curves calibrated for ethanol's higher octane will be more powerful than comaprable gas engines and just as revvy. Diesel is efficient, yes, and it can be clean, but I don't think I could live with a power curve that comes in one big lump. It is okay for towing and semis with 16 cogs, but that's it.

Thoughts?

 

[Jedi2016]

I, like most people, couldn't care less for cleanliness, and we count efficiency only in terms of mileage.

The real kicker is cost. If Ethanol isn't cheaper in cost-per-mile, then I won't bother.

 

[=V8 Power=]

Personally, I think ethanol is a better solution than diesel (I'm sure someone will suggest that)...engines with proper compression and advance and cam curves calibrated for ethanol's higher octane will be more powerful than comaprable gas engines and just as revvy. Diesel is efficient, yes, and it can be clean, but I don't think I could live with a power curve that comes in one big lump. It is okay for towing and semis with 16 cogs, but that's it.

Thoughts?

Wow, someone has never seen a modified diesel truck. Maybe this will change your mind: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-738731599712873948&q=diesel+dyno

God I love diesels

 

[Tornado]

I think Famine already covered this somewhere, but I'm not sure where...
Okay. I found it. And it's even from the infamous Veyron thread (A.K.A. The BlazinXtreme/Poverty flame war).

Out of interest, do you know how much corn is required for an "average" car?

11 acres a year.

Do you know how many cars there are in the US alone? In the UK there's 24 MILLION, so we'd need 264 million acres of corn every year - assuming standard farming practice of one growing, one harvesting, one fallow, that's actually 792 million acres, just to grow corn for bioethanol for the present numbers of cars.

Now, this is a bit of a problem. Because the UK only has 60 million acres of land - we'd need more than twelve UKs worth of land to provide bioethanol for just the UK.

But of course even that isn't the problem with bioethanol...

The real problem with ethanol from corn is that it requires fuel to make the corn. David Pimentel a professor from Cornell has done the analysis . An acre of U.S. corn can be processed into about 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel. That is $1.05 per gallon of ethanol before the corn even moves off the farm.

The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented. As many as three distillation steps and other treatments are needed to separate the ethanol from the water. All these need energy.

Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol which has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU. "Put another way," Pimentel says, "about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTU."

Overall ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of petrol. "That helps explain why fossil fuels -- not ethanol -- are used to produce ethanol" Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. Drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't for government subsidies to artificially lower the price."

and

For reference, there are an estimated 600 million cars on the planet. Want to work those numbers with me?
600 million cars
Average car requires 11 acres corn per year (three field rotation = 33 acres per car per year).
19.8 billion acres of corn required per year for all the cars now (increasing at 40 million cars a year, or (1.3 billion acres).
Earth's land surface area = 36.8 billion acres


We need half the planet's land to be covered with corn. Including Antarctica.

 

[3-Wheel Drive]

Ethanol simply isn't a very green fuel. In addition to the vast amounts of land need for the crops, the making ethanol itslef is a very dirty process. Why? It requires massive amounts of energy to produce, and most energy in the US comes from coal or oil-fired plants that produce large amounts of soot and CO2. It's the same reason the electric car isn't as green as evironmentalists like to claim. Sure they do not produce any emmisions (however the batteries are filled such fun things as lead and caustic bases), but again, the energy they use is usually produced at fossil fuel-fired plants. However, both do have the potential to be green though, we just need to try going for cleaner energy sources, such as nuclear.

Remember, true environmentalists embrace nuclear.

 

[Metar]

Ethanol simply isn't a very green fuel. In addition to the vast amounts of land need for the crops, the making ethanol itslef is a very dirty process. Why? It requires massive amounts of energy to produce, and most energy in the US comes from coal or oil-fired plants that produce large amounts of soot and CO2. It's the same reason the electric car isn't as green as evironmentalists like to claim. Sure they do not produce any emmisions (however the batteries are filled such fun things as lead and caustic bases), but again, the energy they use is usually produced at fossil fuel-fired plants. However, both do have the potential to be green though, we just need to try going for cleaner energy sources, such as nuclear.

Remember, true environmentalists embrace nuclear.

Nuclear (fission) isn't that clean either. Even if you do count out the risks of a leak or meltdown (which really aren't that common), nuclear plants produce huge amounts of radioactive waste, which then has to be buried, at sea or in deep mines, where it continues to pollute.
Nuclear Fusion, however, is much cleaner - it's basically the reverse of nuclear fission. It doesn't produce the waste, and is safer, and almost 100% efficient. But mankind still didn't manage to create one.

Even wind-power isn't that enviroment-friendly. Israel is a bottleneck for birds going south in the winter - millions of big birds fly here. Some of them get trapped in the wind-turbines, which are in they're way.
I guess Solar power is the cleanest energy, but nobody managed to produce solar-cells that are efficient enough to make it worth the money.

 

[amp88]

Personally, I think ethanol is a better solution than diesel (I'm sure someone will suggest that)...engines with proper compression and advance and cam curves calibrated for ethanol's higher octane will be more powerful than comaprable gas engines and just as revvy. Diesel is efficient, yes, and it can be clean, but I don't think I could live with a power curve that comes in one big lump. It is okay for towing and semis with 16 cogs, but that's it.

Thoughts?

Well, it seems like the rest of the thread has already been discussed (here and elsewhere), but I just thought I'd pick up on this point. I'm really surprised by the miseducation of what appears to be the majority of Americans to diesel powered vehicles. In Europe diesel cars outsell petrol ones so the problem you appear to associate with diesels (unusable power/torque characteristics for normal driving) are incorrect. My family has two diesel cars and they both have very usable engines (compared to petrol-engined cars they're actually more usable, having more torque lower in the rev range means you don't need to change gears nearly as much). I wish there was better education on this issue in America.

 

[3-Wheel Drive]

Nuclear (fission) isn't that clean either. Even if you do count out the risks of a leak or meltdown (which really aren't that common), nuclear plants produce huge amounts of radioactive waste, which then has to be buried, at sea or in deep mines, where it continues to pollute.
Nuclear Fusion, however, is much cleaner - it's basically the reverse of nuclear fission. It doesn't produce the waste, and is safer, and almost 100% efficient. But mankind still didn't manage to create one.

Radioactive byproducts can be taken care of with proper storage with no contamination of the area around the vaults (Yucca Mtn. for example). The Japanese are even working on a disposal process that makes the waste much more radioactive, so it becomes inert sooner, along the same principle of the candle burning brighter burns shorter. This means the storage will only need to last a couple hundered years as opposed to tens of thousands, which reduces costs dramatically. Some nuclear plants can even run off of the nuclear wastes of other plants (the process used is slightly different which allows it to use the normally unusable).

Fusion, while clean, is still not viable yet. The process can only be sustained for nanoseconds, and we haven't been able to go past the break even point in terms of input/output power levels, and is ungodly expensive to maintain. Maybe in 30 years it could become a reliable, economical option, but not right now. It's still in its infancy, still in the experimental stage. Until then, fission is fine.
Nuclear power is still the best we've got. When done correctly, it is a clean, evironmentally friendly source, that is very safe.

Here's a fun fact:
Coal-fired power plants, as a whole, annually release the equivilent of the Chernobyl disaster in terms of radioctive isotopes.
Individually, the average coal plant produce 3 times the radiation a nuclear plant of equal power output.

 

[Metar]

Fusion, while clean, is still not viable yet. The process can only be sustained for nanoseconds, and we haven't been able to go past the break even point in terms of input/output power levels, and is ungodly expensive to maintain. Maybe in 30 years it could become a reliable, economical option, but not right now. It's still in its infancy, still in the experimental stage. Until then, fission is fine.
Nuclear power is still the best we've got. When done correctly, it is a clean, evironmentally friendly source, that is very safe.

Exactly - it is better, but we still can't use it continously.

 

[3-Wheel Drive]

Why not? France has been using the atom for 80% of their energy for years now, and they don't seem to be having any problems.

 

[Metar]

Why not? France has been using the atom for 80% of their energy for years now, and they don't seem to be having any problems.

I reffered to the Fusion.

Nuclear Fission is a good energy-source, but it is limited sometimes. As an example, here in Israel, there is no place to store the waste, and if a plant explodes, the whole country will be dead... Nuclear power suits bigger countrys more than smaller ones.
There is a "secret" plant in the desert, but since it's "secret" (which it isn't), nobody knows where they hide the waste.

 

[3-Wheel Drive]

I reffered to the Fusion.

Oh,
Again, it would be sweet to see Fusion become viable, but it's a new technology that simply isn't ready yet. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it done, and if perfected ,it will be far superior to fission in every way. But it will take some time for this to occur.
And who knows, maybe we'll discover a new green energy source that even more practical than fusion before then?

Edit:

I think we both agree on the same two things but continue arguing

Agreed. We've taken this thread off topic enogh, let's let it return to the original point.

 

[Metar]

Oh,
Again, it would be sweet to see Fusion become viable, but it's a new technology that simply isn't ready yet. Don't get me wrong, if perfected it will be far better than Fission. I'd love to see it done, but it will take some time.

I think we both agree on the same two things but continue arguing

 

[YSSMAN]

Given that Michigan will be one of the United State's largest producers of Ethanol in 2006 and 2007, the topic does hold some importance to my state. Promises of having Michigan cars powered by Michigan corn have been quite prominant during this election season, and given how much of it is fueled by the Automotive Industry that plays a major role in this state's economy, it isn't that much of a surprise.

...Is it the best idea we have right now? Certainly not. Is it a temporary fix? Certainly so. To decrease foreign oil consumption, it works out allright as an alternative, but even then the lower fuel economy and nearly identical prices between 89 octane and E85 fuel, it just isn't a logical choise at the moment.

 

[skip0110]

My family has two diesel cars and they both have very usable engines (compared to petrol-engined cars they're actually more usable, having more torque lower in the rev range means you don't need to change gears nearly as much). I wish there was better education on this issue in America.

I'll admit I've never driven a diesel. But do they rev as willingly as a petrol? I suppose the 1500-3500 rpm band of a diesel is basically the same width as the 2000-4000 rpm band where a petrol engine likes to operate.

But the C&D comparison of a 330d and it's petrol counterpart indicated that the diesel was not very fun to drive at all.

To decrease foreign oil consumption, it works out allright as an alternative, but even then the lower fuel economy and nearly identical prices between 89 octane and E85 fuel, it just isn't a logical choise at the moment.

I'd say, if an engine was designed with more spark advance and compression to take advantage of the extra octane of E85, you'd get more power out of a smaller displacement giving you basically equal economy.

 

[Tornado]

...Is it the best idea we have right now? Certainly not. Is it a temporary fix? Certainly so. To decrease foreign oil consumption, it works out allright as an alternative, but even then the lower fuel economy and nearly identical prices between 89 octane and E85 fuel, it just isn't a logical choise at the moment.

And that doesn't even take into account the fact that Ethanol is only cheper because it is taxed considerably less (by cents ratehr than dollars), which I would give a year before that practice stops.

 

[CDailey]

Wow, someone has never seen a modified diesel truck. Maybe this will change your mind: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-738731599712873948&q=diesel+dyno

God I love diesels

Holy. Freaking. Crap. I want a diesel truck now.

 

[YSSMAN]

I'll admit I've never driven a diesel. But do they rev as willingly as a petrol? I suppose the 1500-3500 rpm band of a diesel is basically the same width as the 2000-4000 rpm band where a petrol engine likes to operate.

I've pretty much been stuck with Volkswagen diesel models myself, an although the 1.9L TDI is on the way out, I found the engine to work out just fine. It isn't going to spin up the RPMs like a Honda B16, but it was more than enough to keep me satisfied going between the 2.0L 8V and the TDI. It was that lower-end torque curve that made the car seem "quick," but you aren't going to mistake it for a 1.8T or 2.0T FSI...

But the C&D comparison of a 330d and it's petrol counterpart indicated that the diesel was not very fun to drive at all.

I belive their word to describe the car was "compromise." If you want more than 30 MPG and similar performance to the current 330i (now the 328i?), it is your kind of car... But if you just can't get over that whole "oil burner" issue, it certainly isn't the car for you.

...To be completely honest, I'd spring for it. Given the same performance of the car can come from both models, there is the added fuel efficency, and only a slightly higher prices (based on US/EUR conversions in Germany), it is enough to make me want to buy. The question becomes that if BMW wanted to bring the diesel engine to the US, would people go for it?

GM, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler and maybe even Ford all think so...

 

[skip0110]

Wow, someone has never seen a modified diesel truck. Maybe this will change your mind: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-738731599712873948&q=diesel+dyno

God I love diesels

I've seen plenty. Any throwing out lots of black smoke means they went with a "safe" tune, but not the best tune...that means they are dumping tons of fuel to keep EGT's down, but what they need is a balanced and cool fuel/air combo to make maximum power (and with no smoke). The truly nice truck buildups use propane and nitrous injection to cool the chrage. There was an episode of Trucks! not so long back where they put out ~1200 ft-lbs from a 5.9 Cummins buildup using that type of a system.


Cool as it may be, HD fullsize trucks make up a tiny part of auto sales. You wouldn't want a 5.9 Cummins in your Stratus.

 

[YSSMAN]

If you want to have a Neon under your hood, you could certainly cram the 5.9L Cummins there. Of course, I don't quite know what a Neattus or a Strateon would do...?

 

[skip0110]

If you want to have a Neon under your hood, you could certainly cram the 5.9L Cummins there. Of course, I don't quite know what a Neattus or a Strateon would do...?

Strateon, heh, thats good

 

[harrytuttle]

Thoughts?

Yes. Two:


The main reason for endorsing ethanol (a product that must be farmed) by both the government & car manufacturers is that it is the one thing the Middle East will have the most problems producing, leaving them out in the cold. However, this problem will only shift to either Russia or Africa 50 years from now.


The real problem (with just about everything) is overpopulation. More people use more cars more of the time to more places. If 9 out of 10 people would just transmogrify themselves to bugs, we can finally squish them LIKE THE ANTS THAT THEY ARE!!!


Oh, uh, did I say that out loud?

 

[niky]

I'll admit I've never driven a diesel. But do they rev as willingly as a petrol? I suppose the 1500-3500 rpm band of a diesel is basically the same width as the 2000-4000 rpm band where a petrol engine likes to operate.

There are, admittedly, some problems with the modern turbodiesel.

For one, it's not as fun come the corners as a petrol of the same type, because of the extra weight slung between the front wheels. While suspension tuning helps, this will always be a defining difference between a petrol car and a diesel car based on the same platform.

For another, that short power band, true, is a handicap, but not as much as you think.

Last diesel I drove? 110 hp, over 1100 kilograms, yet it can do 0-60 mph in flat 8's. For comparison, a gasoline Honda Fit at around the same weight, with 110 hp and over 2000 rpm more on the dial, can only do it in high 8's. The extra torque of the turbodiesel makes it feel like it has 20hp more. Oh, and it gets 65 mpg +++ on the highway (real world data... claimed is around 90 mpg... utterly ridiculous, and I'm glad they took that placard down).

If the diesel car is fast enough, you'll never miss the extra revs... it'll hit the rev limiter so fast that you'll be fumbling the gearshift just trying to catch up. A traditional diesel likes to live in the 1000-2500 rpm zone, but modern direct injection turbodiesels feel very smooth up until they fly into the 4500-5000 rpm rev limiter. Seeing as how many gas engines don't produce much useable grunt over 5500 rpm anyway, it's not a handicap.

So... a little less cornering and a little less engine snarl for better fuel efficiency? I'm sold.

Unfortunately, direct injection + variable geometry turbo + diesel block = $$$ compared to a gasoline car with the same abilities... but it's still faster, cleaner (less gas used still equals lower emissions) and much much cheaper than a hybrid with the same fuel economy and performance... well, at least it's more fun to drive than the Prius.

 

[daggoth]

cleaner (less gas used still equals lower emissions)

I think that is correct if you are thinking about CO2 numbers. The problem is that Diesel cars have a lot of NOx emitions, much higher than a petrol or hybrid car with an aproximate performance, even with particle filters. Correct me if I'm wrong please.

 

[skip0110]

If the diesel car is fast enough, you'll never miss the extra revs... it'll hit the rev limiter so fast that you'll be fumbling the gearshift just trying to catch up. A traditional diesel likes to live in the 1000-2500 rpm zone, but modern direct injection turbodiesels feel very smooth up until they fly into the 4500-5000 rpm rev limiter. Seeing as how many gas engines don't produce much useable grunt over 5500 rpm anyway, it's not a handicap.

You've swayed me

 

[niky]

NOx? I guess it depends. The new particle filters are supposed to be very good... as is Bluetec... but with all the additional technology required to make modern diesels as good as or better than their gas counterparts (in driveability and emissions, that is... they've always had better economy), a modern CRDi engine costs about as much more than a modern gas engine of the same power than that modern DOHC variable timing gas engine costs over an old OHV lump.

Again, technology trumps economy... but at least in the case of diesels, the ROI time of the diesel is relatively short... maybe 1 or 2 years, given the price of gas, whereas I've calculated ROI for hybrids out to nearly a million miles compared to modern diesel engines.