*Correction (5/12/08): This article originally identified the power consumption as 150 watts per day.
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Company debuts ethanol home refinery system to offer consumers an alternative to gasoline
*Correction (5/12/08): This article originally identified the power consumption as 150 watts per day.
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40 Comments
Add CommentThe numbers don't add up--even with their Carbon Credit discount, and even at the lower estimated sugar price (15 cents/lb), at 14 lbs of sugar to make a gallon of gasoline that's $2.10 a gallon, which last time I checked wasn't less than $1.00. And at the (more-realistic) higher estimated sugar price of 30 cents/lb, it's actually more expensive than gasoline, even not counting its lower energy content (and therefore lower mpg).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bit about saving even more by adding water is pure B.S.; you can't burn the water for energy, and in fact vaporizing it absorbs some otherwise-useable energy, so you will most likely waste money by doing this, in addition to having to refuel more often.
And this isn't even addressing the question of how they plan to get around the U.S. law requiring anyone producing ethanol any more concentrated than what you can get by simple fermentation to have a distiller's license.
This sounds like a total scam to me.
For the price of this unit you could purchase 2800 gallons of gasoline. Having dealt with ethanol for many years one should not discount the flammability aspect either. Pure ethanol has a flash point around 55F and even when diluted with water to a 10% concentration it is still highly flammable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBreathing causes pollution, too. Should we stop that as well? There is a dirty little byproduct to every energy transfering reaction. A quantitative analysis needs to be applied to both sides of this arguement for an intelligent choice to be made. Neither side has provided data for how much byproduct is produced nor are the relative toxicities of those products discussed. Perhaps the publicists should bow out and let science determine what is best!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes not compute. Anyone seen the price of sugar? It's expensive. The corn lobby made that possible, promoting sugar import tariffs. That way, food manufacturers would switch to corn syrup for sweetening. These same blokes also are promoting the ethanol biofuel scam, because most of the ethanol is derived from corn.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou want to bring gas prices down? Open up drilling in ANWR, on the continental shelf. Streamline the process for building oil refineries. Offer tax credits instead of subsidies.
--
Edited by CraigC762 at 05/09/2008 2:18 PM
As any rational American can tell you the solution to high gasoline prices is simple:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. Build nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuel plants. We need the price of electricity reduced as well;
2. Drill for oil everywhere in America. Start today.
3. Build more refineries and better delivery systems for oil.
4. Pass legislation to prohibit lawsuits at anylevel that would delay these measures.
JUST DO IT.
David Drapkin
The solution to high-priced gas is already at hand and is being implemented in car dealerships across the land, as sales of fuel-efficient cars has jumped dramatically and sales of large SUVs and V-8 sedans have plunged. High gas prices (to a point) are a good thing; they are causing us to adopt market-based solutions to global warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNon anahydrous ethanol won't blend with gasoline. True it can run in an internal combustion engine, but sooner or later you will have to stop for gas, or E85. Blending these liquids will cause the water to seperate out and then you have problems. Might be a good short range fuel source if that's all you will run. (plus you will need a cheap sugar, or feedstock source. That's hard to find) We should be making ethanol out of garbage, crop waste, wood waste and dead trees, and even sewage from out treatment plants. Ethanol itself is a fine fuel. Just what are we going to make it from?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLets forget ethanol, get the m/c and stay home and get drunk; Three crops a year of hemp will solve all our problems and I defy all science to say it aint so
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you can grow your own suger (or part of a community effort), will be much cheaper than even last year's gas. About oil, we can't just continue to dig up what's left of the oil, unless we use it to construct solar energy (preferably, thermal, using "light colored" mirrors) across the deserts, and to mass manufacture batteries or (hopefully) supercapacitors. I know this sounds naive, however, it is much more so to assume that "everything's alright" as we approach death by oil depletion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also had hopes for nuclear, but no one wants it and it would be more possible to land a bomb in the (would be)many more containment ponds.
Besides, we need the SOLAR to produce thousands (if not millions) of jobs and for the power for all of these hypothetical suger to fuel machines!
Renewable energy is the cure for
Death by oil depletion
Did SciAm run the numbers on this before publishing it? At 30cents/lb of feedstock and 14 lbs/gallon of ethanol, it would cost $4.20 to produce a gallon of ethanol (not counting maintenance and electricity costs). If you factor in the fact that ethanol only has 2/3 the energy content of gasoline by volume, you're actually paying $10,000 in up-front costs for the dubious privilege of making your own equivalent of $6.30/gallon gasoline.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo respond to a couple of folks who suggested increased drilling in the US is the answer to high gasoline prices: Opening up protected areas to drilling would only provide a marginal increase in the US domestic oil supply; at today's prices OPEC could easily afford to slash production to compensate, and keep the price high. US oil companies wouldn't object; they're raking in record profits (funny how most other industries suffer when the price of their raw materials skyrockets...). As far as areas that aren't protected from drilling, if the oil companies thought there'd be any profit in it, they'd already be doing it, especially at today's prices.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon't worry, though. OPEC won't let the price of crude oil go too much higher; if they did, they'd risk making it profitable for us to start extracting oil from our vast oil shale fields in Colorado, which contain more than enough to make us completely self-sufficient for decades to come.
See the catch? The ONLY way you can buy cheap sugar is if you buy the MicroFueler for 10 grand! I have been making moonshine for 35 years, I could run my car on it but it does not pay because they won't sell you cheap sugar unless hand them 10 grand for their fermenter/distiller, total rip off!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this--
Edited by Magnus at 05/09/2008 11:21 PM
fireofenergy wrote:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this> you can grow your own suger
X-(
It is physically impossible to grow sugar!
If people could grow their own sugar they would have started doing so 30 years ago and ALL cars would be running on pure ethanol by now.
The future is in nanotech super capacitors which will soon be available for electric cars. They will be comparatively light weight, store a tremendous amount of power, they charge up very quickly, and they will be relatively cheap. Wind power will supply the electricity to charge them. There are enough viable wind power sites on the earth to power the whole world's total energy needs four times over.
--
Edited by Magnus at 05/10/2008 12:36 AM
"150 watts per day"??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy do they assign non-scientific authors to write about science? Please...watts is meaningless really, watt-hours would be a better measure, but we don't know for sure the thing uses 150 watts 24hrs a day.
Making fuel from home garden waste and kitchen waste, using waste from every home is much better than creating new products. Creating new products means more land opened up and once again we are at the mercy of big corporate farm owners setting the prices.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProblem with Ethanol (alcohol) is its evaporation point at somewhere around 85 degrees F. The warner states and countries are wasting money on Ethanol and adding water to their tanks. Once the Ethanol evaporates it leaves water behind.
Let's see, 14lbs of feed stock X avg $0.225 /lb = $3.12 per gal. How does that equal less than a dollar per gallon?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow long will they guarantee feed stock at that price.
How much will it cost to have 450lbs of feed stock shipped to your house every week?
Also they did not figure the efficiency penalty with ethanol. 1 gal of gas is equal to 1.33 gal of ethanol.
Trulys101
Whoops, forgot about the nature and numbers about "feedstock", and really thought i was being naive about the supercaps, however, after thinking, they store actual electrons (unlike batteries that convert juice to chemical and back again). Which leads to the thought "how many electrons can be stored within the space of an AA battery?". By chemical means, probably only between a fraction and a few times the content of the "bonding" atoms, (if not only one), but from a purely space point of view, millions if not trillions the space of a "holding" atom, since they are so much smaller than the proton or nuetron. Scratch the trillions, (just searched... wiki.answers...) It seems to be a thousand times smaller than the neutron or proton.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf quantum nature allows "x to the third power" as in everyday volume, then it would be about a billion electrons per "holding structure". And that's just within the space of a neutron of an atom.
Now, how many electrons equal an amp second which is a farad, the unit of capacitance...also equal to a coulumb?
6.25 * 10^18, or 6.25 billion billion (from how stuff works). Now, let's just assume that we need exactly one (oversized) atom to store each electron. The diameter of an atom ranges from about 0.1 to 0.5 nanometers (1 × 10-10 m to 5 × 10-10 m). (from http://hypertextbook.com/facts/MichaelPhillip.shtml) and that even a plutonium atom which weighs about 200 times that of the hydrogen, is less than 5 times as large. Let's assume the "holding" atom is 5 times larger (than the hydrogen). That would be 5/10,000,000ths of a mm. ... But if you go "5 - ten millionths = 1/2,000,000ths", then you can times that by itself, and again the third time, then you get 8 billion billion (2,000,000^3) atoms per cubic mm, plenty of room to store a farad.
Now, there is exactly (only) 3,600 amp seconds in the Ah, the usual measurement for batteries. Using the cube root from http://www.analyzemath.com/Calculators_3/cube_root_calculator.html
An amp hour should be stored in a cube about 16 mm , about 5/8ths of an inch, This is for only 1 volt, thus an AA sized capacitor, in the near future, should be able to slightly surpass that of the battery (with awsome 100,000 charge/discharge capabilities)!
Imagine a "holding atom" for the 1 billion electrons instead, then we could contain a billion 1 volt amp hours in that same space!
Quantum nature may allow overlaps...here's something to prove that nothing is impossible... from
http://www.physorg.com/news63037231.html
"Scientists demonstrate quantum nature of entanglement swapping"
If humanity can get past this dwindling oil thing...
What does "consuming about 150 Watts per day" mean? A Watt is a J/s therefore the article says this device uses 150 J/s/day which is an acceleration which is patently nonsense. Can someone at Scientific American check the facts or at the very lease do some editing? I assume that this uses 3.6 kWh per day?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this470 lbs of sugar for 35 gallons of fuel? Who's going to deliver this to my house? Who's going to shovel the sugar into the cooker? I will need about 1 ton (200 gallons?) of sugar ever month to make 140 gallons of fuel?. Where the heck am I going to store 200 gallons of Sugar?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf a trucker is going to deliver 50 gallons of sugar each week and they drive 30 miles to my house and get 5 miles/gal they are going to use 6 gallons of gas and $50 for the trucker salary or about $70 delivery fee at the very least. That's $2/gallon JUST for the delivery of the sugar!
Maybe someone should start a liquid sugar pipeline!
This sure appears to be a scam.
Such alternative still possesses some unconventional factors regarding its maintenance and reliability to average consumers, not to mention the corporate influence towards its promotion. The masses will still be tried to be diverted away from the energy source alternatives that provide the most efficient results, such as the ones mentioned by fireofenergy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this--
Edited by supraquanta at 05/12/2008 3:28 AM
Good comments re the technical problems in the marketing claims.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe high price of gasoline:
The oil companies would have to be stupid not to jack up prices as high as people will tolerate.
And people are tolerating it! Despite the high prices, people aren't driving less. Stupid people.
this makes no sense. it says it takes 14 pounds of sugar to produce a gallon of ethano, and discounted sugar costs 15 to 30 cents per pound. That means one gallon costs $2.10 to $4.20 in discounted sugar alone, not counting the ten grand to buy the machine and the electricity to run it. How can they then say "One of the company's main objectives with the program is to keep the cost of ethanol less than $1 per gallon"? Besides, from a climate change perspective, sugar is a terrible source energy -- it takes tons of petroleum to grow, refine and transport it. If you could get energy by growing your own algae or something, maybe. But this doesn't add up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe cost of sugar:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the NY Times article, one of the two people behind the idea, Michael Quinn, says he can get inedible sugar from Mexico for as little as 2.5 cents per pound. At that price, this gizmo begins to make more economic sense. At 14 pounds of sugar for one gallon of ethanol, that comes to about 35 cents per gallon. (But how will that sugar be distributed? How much will distribution add to the price?)
Then the issue becomes the carbon load in creating the sugar itself. Not all the carbon in the sugar cane becomes sugar, and the process itself requires electricity, fertilizer, transportation, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/technology/27proto.html?ref=science
Glad to help out, SciAm writers!
Back in the thirties, the cans of corn syrup had a caution along the following lines "do not mix the contents of theis can with two gallons of water and a package of yeast. If you do this it will make beer, an alcoholic beverage which would be illegal." we have come a long way on a strange path.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can understand the local paper running a press release without at least a bit of critical inquiry, but SciAm? What does this magical device do that can't be performed on a more controlled industrial scale? If this were truly a money saving process when you include the fermentation wastes, water & electricity consumption, and questionable feed prices they would not be selling it to prospective suburban moonshiners. Rather, the process would be used to quietly produce millions of gallons of fuel in countries like Brazil. And, as several readers pointed out, water is not "ethanol helper".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis product makes no financial sense when all costs are figured, and if they are mildly successful will end up causing the cost of sugar to skyrocket. For about the same amount of money (when you break it down to a monthly cost/payment) I can get my current automobile converted to an electric car, using some of the new Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, and never again need to fuel an internal combustion engine...and with solar-fed electricity this is a WAY MORE environmentally friendly option than ethanol!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJ.G.
Land devoted to coffee and cannabis could be used for biofuel crops.Dig up vinyards and golf courses so we can keep driving.Start rendering sardines for fuel.Cremation is a waste to the motoring public.Soylent Green is diesel...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Jacobson critique of ethanol finds that smog production may be slightly greater than that produced by gasoline, but only in L.A., not in Atlanta, for curious reason: ethanol emissions are lower in NOx than gasoline, and when smog is high, increase in NOx REDUCES smog. Ethanol doesn't produce ENOUGH NOx!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisif it take 14lbs of feedstock to make 1 gallon of ethanol, and we're paying .30 a lb ...that looks like $4.20 a gallon to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisasdf
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat's wrong with this picture? If it takes 14lbs of sugar to make 1 gallon of ethanol, and 1lb of sugar = 30 cents, then that comes to $4.20 a gallon??? Where is the savings??????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt 2.5 cents a pound; Mexican suger is very Atractive. Thats 455 lbs of suger for 35 gal of E-fuel or 7.5 X 60 Lbs bags a week, thats 33 cents a galion. Add shiping and Water and the cost of power in your area. This could be $1.00 a gal. Assuming you use 35 gal a week for 52 weeks with gas at $4.00 you can save $5460.00 a year. It will sill take 2 years to pay for the Efuel 100 Pump and a little work, but does any one think that the price of gas is going down. For me this is worth thinking about, but I still think that Hygergen is the holy grail and Electric Cars Will be the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi am sure if we went back to horse and buggy transport ... the inputs exceed the outputs... the carbon tax would be prohibitive... lets just eliminate the couch potato analysts, politicians, lawyers, bankers, tax collectors, marketing and associated activities, accountants, the real non-producers of this world... perhaps we can get to an energy balance when these people actually produce something of value.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am sure that if we went back to horse and buggies that the inputs exceed the outputs... perhaps we should do away with lawyers, politicians, marketing and associated advertising and packaging costs, lobbyists, couch potato anaylsts, tax collectors, wall street bankers, accountants, hollywood, professional sports, fast food joints, and at least 75% of government jobs... and get these people to actually produce something of value,... perhaps we could start to see the horizon through the manure and obtain some sort of energy balance. Too many non-producers sapping off the worker bees.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissee: http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisif you want the facts about ethanol
see: http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfor the facts about ethanol
Theres no quote on the cost of changing your vehicles over to alcohol,and thats because it costs to much, it would only work in E85 ready cars and trucks.The reason for this is that alcohol dissolves rubber seals in the non E85 fuel systems,and a new engine control computer is needed as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOkay I will be the first to say that gasoline has been great. We as Americans consume nearly 50% of the fuel burned on this planet, most of which is imported. The middle east has so much money that they don't know what to do with it. Multiple entities have profitted by trading petroleum on the open market and playing the system, which has caused a severe increase in gas prices. Its a billion dollar per year industry with few people making loads of cash. However petroleum does not have an infinite supply. If we keep comsuming it, it will run out. When it does we will need a renewable energy to take its place. One that hopefully is green, as well as efficient. So why delay the inevitable? Why not start experimenting with these other fuels and trying to get as much energy as we can out of them? Lets take a look at Ethanol. Some will say that ethanol has a much lower energy yeild when compared to gasoline. However, ethanol can be compressed to much higher levels than gasoline without detonation. Contrary to popular belief, water can be introduced to an engine pre-combustion to lower intake temperature which results in higher density air charge(research methanol/water injection if you don't believe me). So why not increase the compression ratio on a given motor, increase the injector flow rate, mist the intake charge lightly with water/methanol and tune it properly. Then you will get more power, better fuel economy and a cleaner engine with less carbon build up which translates to engine longevity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThink bout it like this, if you were driving down the highway and you knew your tires were going flat. Would you stop and try to do something about it, or just keep driving until they left you stranded?
Actually, adding a little water to ethanol will make it combust in a more favorable way to do work, since it increases the ratio of expansion of the combusted fuel. Arguments that ethanol has less energy than gasoline are misleading, and are based on the idea that gasoline releases more heat when burned. This heat is a significant problem in a combustion engine, and an entire coolant system must be built into the engine to deal with it. ethanol typically doesn't need cooling, which makes the car lighter and more energy-efficient.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis product does look stupid, though. If it ran on lawn clippings, I'd buy one. Having it run on sugar is not going to work out economically or ethically.
That would be very easy to do in an authoritarian country, and would go a long way toward making the US into one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this