Posted on 09/15/2013 7:29:32 AM PDT by IbJensen
A Dutch company and an American ethanol producer hope to put a new kind of fuel in your gas tank — whether it makes economic sense or not. Thanks, Washington.
Amid the cornfields of Emmetsburg, Iowa sits an ethanol plant that takes in 20 million bushels of corn and churns out about 55 million gallons of corn ethanol a year. Rising next to it is a revolutionary new facility. It will make ethanol as well, but instead of using juicy kernels of corn, its feedstock will be 285,000 tons a year of corncobs, leaves and husks. Although its 25 million gallons a year of projected output will be chemically identical to ethanol made in the old plant next door, the product will have a different name: cellulosic ethanol.
(Chesapeake's Strange Plan To Make 'Green' Gasoline Christopher HelmanChristopher Helman Forbes Staff)
The cellulosic plant is a joint venture between Poet, the nation’s second-biggest ethanol producer (1.6 billion gallons a year), and Royal DSM , a Dutch company that makes agrichemicals. In the new plant highly engineered enzymes will break down the tough cellulose, exposing the sugars inside to the yeast bacteria that will ferment it into ethanol. If it works as well as Poet’s test facility, the plant–called Liberty–will bring to reality a dream long deferred.
Cynics like Patrick Kelly, policy advisor at the American Petroleum Institute, mouthpiece for the oil industry, smirk that after years of empty promises cellulosic ethanol remains a “phantom fuel.” That even if all the plants work as hoped, their output won’t amount to even a drop in the bucket of the 130 billion gallons we pump into our cars every year.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
My Shelby GT500, lawn tractor, chain saws, wood chipper and weed eater will never, ever be forced to consume ethanol.
Don’t forget we have a government that’s completely out of it’s cotton picking mind!
People are paid with the money we’re mugged for that just sit around trying to think of something stupid to do.
'Conventional oil' bad.
Internal combustion engine fueled by refined oil bad.
Perhaps refining cucumbers or cabbages might be better.
What, pray tell, might the mighty Sphinx see in our future and don't tell me plugging in your car to a wall socket is the answer.
If only cars could run on bullsh-t!
What % of the corn crop is sold on the cob?
But have you noticed, the increase in yields is also associat6ed with a lowering of oil and protein content. There are no free lunches.
"The mighty Sphinx." I like it.
The mighty Sphinx thinks China is getting wheels, India is getting wheels, and pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world has figured out they don't have to remain poor. Meanwhile, the world's marginal oil supply is located in mostly nasty, politically unstable places. Conventional oil will continue to get more expensive. Fracking buys us some useful time, but we still have a long term problem. Another three years and Obama will pass from the scene; with luck, we will then have a government that wants to grow the economy, not sabotage growth for the sake of a leveling agenda. When that happens, growth will resume, and so will the rise in energy costs.
If I had to bet today on transportation fuels a generation from now, I'd bet on third generation feedstocks for biofuels. Algae, or a microbial soup. This will not require prime farmland or potable water, it could be scaled up as needed, and the production potential is enormous. I haven't checked in recently, but the algae researchers a few years ago were talking in terms of a production potential of 10,000 gallons an acre per year. That is a game changer.
This is already being done on a pilot and demonstration scale. It's too expensive now to compete with oil on a level playing field. But conventional oil will continue to become steadily more expensive, and biofuels feedstocks and processes will continue to improve. The cost curves will cross.
Still on cars: Electrics are further out, but I would not be surprised if the engineers solve that problem as well. We need much better battery storage capacity to extend range, and we need a baseline generating capacity to feed the batteries. This would probably be nuclear, which we should be doing anyhow.
I have no animus against the oil industry, and I think oil has a long future as a blending agent with ethanol. But in the very long run, petroleum is probably too valuable as a chemical feedstock to be burning for fuel.
For field, or dent corn, which is used for non-human use, feedstock, ethanol, plastics, etc. practically none.
The combines, or field harvesters, separate the kernels from the cob right in the field.
Sweet corn, the kind you buy in the store, to be candid, I don't know. Overall however, sweet corn is only a small fraction of total corn production.
I’m still working on the Kudzu/Marijuana cross.
I’ll let you know when it works.
It will either be Marijuana that runs wild or
Kudzu you can smoke...
I’m no longer close enough to farming to know the protein content etc.
However, corn is now bred for specific uses, feed, ethanol, plastics, whatever, and can then be matched to it's end use.
I'm reasonably certain that protein content for corn bred for animal feed has a higher content now than even 10 years ago, thanks to genetic modification.
For example, a recent magazine had a comparison chart on which hybrids have the better production for ethanol under varying conditions, including the shorter growing seasons, which may be caused by general atmospheric cooling.
While there is no such thing as a free lunch, we are still in the position of only exploiting a fraction of our seed potential.
Think of seed production as in the computer stage where the 286 CPU is the latest and greatest. We've only scratched the yield potentials, and future production is more likely than not to exceed even our wildest imaginations today.
If they can make money through using corn cobs to make fuel then it should be done, the process after a few test sites should not require subsidies or why do it.
Very interesting process that I had played with 10 years ago. Part of me wants to apply for the job, but the issue is that I don’t see this plant being there in 10 years.
I go out west some, and there nice fields of corn in places you couldn't GROW corn a few years ago.
Fertilizers, genetics, and tillage practices have pretty much ended the worries of stripping the land.
I agree, but I don't think they can make money, it will probably have to be subsidized.
All of the stover, the stuff left after harvest, including the cobs, is normally plowed under and becomes nutrients for next years crops.
Although cobs are a small percentage of all that, their nutritional value has to be replaced somehow, with manure, or more practically, commercial fertilizer.
The cost of doing so would probably be larger than the value and cost of removing the cobs.
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