The corn ethanol fiasco creates new opportunities
Filed Under: green automotive technology, Green Politics on October 24, 2009
by Aaron Turpen, Cheyenne Green Living Examiner
Both corn and fuel prices have dropped and farmers are now looking at lower returns on their corn crops this year. The ethanol industry is staring at a glut of fuel on the market, driving down prices and putting many refineries out of business.
More than 120 ethanol refineries nationally are showing big losses and looking at failure, according to Citigroup analyst David Driscoll, despite the heavy price supporting and subsidizing from government.
Gevo, Inc., based in Engelwood, Colorado, is one of several companies stepping in to change the downturn. They’re buying up interest in failing ethanol refineries and converting them to butanol production. Several plants in Nebraska alone have seen this and next in line may be the Carleton, Nebraska plant (Altra).
Why butanol?
The market effects of government manipulation on state and local levels has had two major effects on ethanol and corn-based ethanol in particular. First, it has destroyed market forces and made it profitable for growers and sellers to produce corn for ethanol, but has done nothing to help the producers of ethanol itself. They still have to compete with petroleum-based fuels on the open market. Secondly, it has turned public opinion about ethanol to the negative in all but the corn-producing areas of the nation.
The market is almost never manipulated by government forces in a good way. Most government intervention causes rather than solves problems. This is especially true of things as complex as the fuels and transportation markets. No amount of price fixing, propping up, or tax incentives will make any one product better than another. Only more abundant.
Public opinion is largely on the correct side about ethanol, at least ethanol based on corn. Corn is a poor bio-ethanol base and requires almost as much energy to grow and refine as it supplies at the pump. Worse, ethanol is more heavily susceptible to temperature changes and how they affect its density than petroleum-based gasoline is. Both of these things make most consumers look askance at the product. Ad to that the food scare and higher grocery store prices attributed to ethanol (whether true or false) and it’s a public relations debacle to say the least.
Butanol, however, has few of these drawbacks. It’s a very common industrial alcohol used for everything from solvents to lubricants as well as fuels. Although it’s a byproduct of the petroleum refinery process, there is generally more call than available product, since butanol can be used in such a wide range of applications. Cheaper butanol would be even more valuable in still more uses.
Butanol can be made by fermenting just about any plant-based biomass, including corn, wheat, root crops like beets, and more. Most biobutanol made today comes from non-edible plants.
Butanol is also more complicated to make from a bio-fuel standpoint than ethanol, but it is much mroe energy dense than both ethanol and methanol and is still cheaper to make through large-scale biomass conversion than it is from petroleum. Ad to that the amount of market potential versus current supply and it’s a definite winner in many people’s books.
To put this into perspective, the average 87 octane gasoline has about 115,000 British Thermal Units (BTUs) per gallon, ethanol has about 75,700 BTUs per gallon, and butanol has 104,900 BTUs per gallon. This means the energy loss on ethanol is about 34% per volume while the loss from butanol is only about 8.75%.
There are a lot of other infrastructure advantages to butanol as well. It’s less corrosive to pipelines and internal combustion engines, for one thing, and it’s close enough to regular gasoline that most vehicles can use it in up to a 50-50 mix with petroleum gasoline without retrofitting. Experiments are showing that it may be able to totally replace gasoline without increasing engine wear or other problems, making it a 100% replacement.
So perhaps butanol is the key to righting the wrongs made by the corn-based ethanol face flop. The first step will be to begin replacing the ethanol with butanol. The second step will be to convince the boys in Washington to leave it alone and not meddle. It’s in the air which will be more difficult to achieve.
