Just in time for record natural gas production and declining gasoline use in America...
crap ethanol destroys engines and parts....
Back in engineering thermo, they made you draw “control volumes” and specify inputs and outputs of matter, mechanical energy, heat etc, which simplifies the whole problem into an exercise in bookkeeping via conservation laws. Missing from those lectures and problem sets from long ago, indicating the backward thinking of the pre-green era, was an arrow labled “government subsidies”.
Stanley Meyer and his brother on how the water fuel injection works
Stanley Meyer 1992 Global Sciences Congress Subtitled (Spanish)
the Enviro-weenies will still hate it.
those inedible parts of plants feel pain and have emotions too!
It’s long past time to cut off the corn ethanol subsidy. Remember this process started to create demand for corn back when there wasn’t enough and the gummint was paying farmers not to plant, so it’s come full circle. Now in most of the midwest there’s not much idle acreage that isn’t already in a production cycle. That means there are no empty fields just waiting to be planted with a crop of switchgrass or something, and we can obtain higher premiums for soy and corn. So the trick is to use actual plant waste matter for which there is no use today. For example, the biodiesel industry decided that it would use yellow grease (McFries effluent) that restaurants were having to pay someone to haul off, and that backfired by elevating the price to the point where they can’t make money using that feedstock. Yard waste, etc - sure, but what does it cost once you haul enough of it to a central processing plant? There’s not enough cellulosic or other non-food feedstocks to replace what is coming from corn today. But they can have all the weeds in my yard if they want to come and get ‘em...
Time to feed the plant with lots of Kudzu and take care of two problems!
Technology developed in the 1990s...
“We expect to spend the remainder of 2013 putting the plant through its paces, and demonstrating” that the plant can reach its official capacity of eight million gallons per...”
What they forgot to say is: “That after this evaluation period we found that it is possible to produce the eight million gallons of ethanol yearly at this plant, unfortunately the cost will be $55.00 per gallon requiring government subsidies until the year 2075 when Bernanke’s QE will have caused massive inflation rendering the whole situation mute. Until then, we implore the Executive Branch to order the military to buy and use all the ethanol at $55.00 a gallon.”
Ethanol is ethanol. How can ethanol be “advanced”?
“This isn’t a beer, officer. This is Advanced Ethanol. With all due respect, sir, I wouldn’t expect you to know the difference, but in fact they are completely different.”
Thus depriving agricultural soils of a needed source of organic matter.
We have plenty of oil and gas. We should stop mining topsoil pursuant to fantasy science, be it oil as a "fossil fuel" or anthropogenic global warming. Both are false.
I know I'm not going to like the answer, but what are they using to create that heat? And to vaporize plant material, we're not talking 100 F, were talking 300 - 500 F!
So a lot of "heat" for that CO & H2...
I worked on this ten years ago. The Russian’s had a process that worked well with wood chips and other cellulose.
Trouble is the byproducts. We made some at a pilot plant that had good yield, but left a sticky black goo that plugged up the cooker.