EPA Delays Final Decision on Increasing Ethanol Blend Limits Until mid-2010 Posted on December 6th, 2009
In brief: The Environmental Protection Agency has delayed final decision-making on increasing ethanol blend limits until sometime next year, depending on further testing and results.
The word
The United States EPA says that they will delay a decision on increasing allowed blend limits of ethanol:gasolin from 10:90 to 15:85 (E10 to E15) until sometime next year.
In March, an advocacy group for ethanol and biofuels called Growth Energy petitioned the EPA to allow for the increase, relaxing current rules.
The EPA says they will not have a final decision on the waiver until mid-2010 at the earliest, citing the need for more testing.
The EPA’s letter to Growth Energy was encouraging, however, citing that tests so far have shown that later-model cars are capable of utilizing E15 without apparent detrimental effects.
In concert with the Department of Energy, the EPA has been undertaking studies to see how various vehicles handle increased ethanol mixes.
And so …
Questions about bio-based ethanol’s sources aside, the delay is probably beneficial overall, giving time for various interests to test the effects of these blends.
For more information on bio-fuels, click here, and for more information on bio-ethanol, click here.
Photo credits: EPA
USN Synthesizes Renewable Missile Fuel Posted on November 16th, 2009
by Aaron Turpen, FutureCars.com
In brief: The U.S. Navy has successfully synthesized renewables-based, high-density fuel with properties similar to JP-10 missile fuel.
Vehicle in the news
Make/Model: JP-10
Manufacturer: USN
The word
Navy researchers have found fuel candidates with up to 90% yield from B-pinene, which is a renewable compound derived from wood and plant pulps. Pinenes get their name from pine resin, where they are abundant, but can also be found in the resins of most conifers and other plants.
Energy & Fuels published a paper written by the Navy’s researchers this month.
JP-10 is a tactical fuel used most often in cruise missiles and other air-breathingvehicles requiring high-density fuel.
The Navy has long been working on replacing much of the aeronautic fuels used today in order to get away from petroleum as a primary fuel source.
The Navy, through DARPA, for instance, pioneered research into algae as an alternative oil source for biodiesel.
This new, renewable JP-10 could come from agricultural waste, wood pulp waste, or bioengineered stocks of plants or microbes.
And so …
The testing involved three bases of pinenes, finding Nafion to work the best, producing up to 90% the dimerization of JP-10. The next step will be scaled laboratory testing of the fuel.
The corn ethanol fiasco creates new opportunities Posted on October 24th, 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.
The Netherlands Powered by Chicken Poop? Posted on August 26th, 2009
Workers Agree: Our New Plant Smells Lovely!
A new power plant has opened in the Netherlands and the Dutch plan to run it on.. chicken poop. No lie. Chicken manure, much prized by gardeners for its extreme fertilization properties, is also very good fuel, apparently.
The Dutch are utilizing one of their largest semi-natural resources – chicken manure – and turning it into a green fuel. This plant is the world’s largest biomass power plant that runs exclusively on chicken crap and it has a capacity of 36.5 megawatts or 270 million kilowatt hours per year. That’s enough to power about 90,000 homes or 200,000 Prius(es? i?).
OK, 90,000 homes anyway.
Of course, burning poop isn’t exactly “green” or “carbon neutral” in and of itself. The trick here, as with any sustainability issue, is to look at the entire process rather than just one aspect of it.
When chicken manure is spread over a farm’s fields, poured into leaving ponds (this happens at most large chicken factor… er… farms) or similarly disposed of, it decomposes and gives off both CO2 and methane. When it’s compacted and burned, however, it gives off only trace CO2 in comparison. So it’s much greener that way and it produces electricity, displacing (in theory) coal and gas-burning plants.
This huge plant will use about 440,000 tons of chicken droppings per year, which is about a third of what the Netherlands produces in total. I guess they really like chicken.
So now, when you recharge your 9-volt Dutch battery and touch it to your tongue, you can claim “It tastes like chicken!”
To which I will reply, “CRAP!”
Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels Teaming Up in Texas Posted on July 22nd, 2009
Dow Chemical has announced it’s teaming up with Algenol Biofuels to build and run a pilot-scale algae fuels biorefinery for ethanol in Freeport, Texas. Other participants include the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Georiga Institute of Technology, and Membrane Technology & Research to give expertise and scientific testing to the project.
Algenol, for its part, has submitted a formal request to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) for financial support to help fund the pilot project. The grant approval is key to the project moving forward.
Dow will be providing the land as well as the development of advanced materials for the specialty needs of the project, such as photobioreactor films and water treatment solutions. A nearby Dow manufacturing facility will also contribute CO2 from its emissions.
Part of the plan is to scale the ethanol production to fit a CO2-producing facility like a factory or a power plant and utilize the CO2 for both the algae production and the biorefinery’s processing. Algenol has a process they’ve been developing in the lab for this as well as their Direct to Ethanol technology.
This process links algae’s sugar production with photosynthesis and enzymes to produce a high-sugar oil product that can be more easily converted to ethanol. The algae that Algenol has metabolically enhanced can produce the ethanol while resisting high temperatures, salinity, and the high ethanol levels naturally occurring in the algal oils themselves. These have all been barriers to commercial scale production of algae-based ethanol.
Algenol expects to have their production capability (of the algae) up to 10,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year by the end of 2009. That compares to corn’s whopping 400 gallons per acre/year. Algenol thinks that, in the not-too-distant future, it may be possible to double that 10,000 gallons, given the right circumstances.
Algenol is also working on other strains of algae to produce higher-carbon oils which could be used to make plastics and polymers, something that Dow is also very interested in.
