Add a Comment
Email This
Statistics
RE: Don't Get Carried Away
Back to the "food vs. fuel" argument the other poster brought up, that's where cellulostic ethanol comes in.
Cellulosic Ethanol still has some of the same problems that Corn does--notably the use of herbicides/pesticides and more severely fertilizers. As an avid angler, the overuse of chemicals on crops concerns me. Pesticides are broad-based; they kill not only what they are supposed to kill, but every other species as well. Many of the insects they kill off are food insects for other animal populations. One thing we have noted in our local organizations is a lack of certain insects during a hatch period in waterway areas bordered by farms. This affects the populations of many creatures in the waterway ecosystem. Add to that the use of broadband herbicides, and the farm runoff causes a kill-off of beneficial waterway plants.
By far the worst offender in this trio are the fertilizers. These cause massive algae blooms, which in turn wreaks severe havoc on the populations of the creatures in the waterway ecosystem. Not only that, but most algae blooms cause odor and taste problems that are not addressable in the water treatment process.
I am stiil trying to find the original article I cited some time ago. This actually linked back to a Berkley study that confirms much of what UCS claims about fuel economy vs oil consumption.
Finally, I agree with your comments about butanol/ethanol. I also looked at this article about using mutated algae to produce hydrogen. Now if we could only get the transport-vs-efficiency level higher than 55%.
BTW..this is ldsudduth--I tried to login, but kept getting a 500 Server Error.
RE: Don't Get Carried Away
A couple of things puzzled me though. I don't get where they can claim that it's "corrosive to engines". Ethanol requires different fuel tanks and seals throughout the fuel system because Ethanol is a solvent to some of the compounds which are resistant to gasoline. No big deal.
Perhaps I misspoke. You need to replace all of the rubber/plastic hoses and fittings with metal ones before they are "eaten through" by the ethanol. At least in higher percentage blends.
Other than that, the only difference between a regular car and your E85 "FlexFuel" is a chip which adjusts the fuel injector flow to keep the fuel/air mixture tuned for the amount of ethanol/gas ratio with air as your current chip tunes gas and air alone now because of the slightly different burning characteristics.
Correct - there is some good reading in the technical documentation of the MegaSquirt community developed ECU which outlines what alterations you need to make to the programming to get an "efficient" burn of ethanol. The changes range from fuel injector timing (for the ratios), ignition timing and how to treat O2 sensor input for trim levels.
RE: Don't Get Carried Away
Ah..I found the article in Fly Rod and Reel that I referenced some time ago, it can be found here.
Some quotes on the cost/environmental issues:
All told, you and I are spending at least $3 per gallon on ethanol subsidies for a total of $6 billion per year. Without all this gravy train, Pimentel has calculated that the cost for 1.33 gallons of ethanol (the equivalent in energy yield to a gallon of gasoline) would be $7.12.
no crop grown in the United States consumes and pollutes more water than corn. No method of agriculture uses more insecticides, more herbicides, more nitrogen fertilizer. Needed for the production of one gallon of ethanol are 1,700 gallons of water, mostly in the form of irrigation taken from streams either directly or by snatching the water table out from underneath them. And each gallon of ethanol produces 12 gallons of sewage-like effluent.
Ethanol plants are gross polluters of air and water, and because of the exorbitant price of natural gas some of the new ones will be coal-fired, adding to the already dangerous mercury content of fish. The response of the Bush administration has been a proposal to relax pollution standards for ethanol production. Under the conservation programs of the 1985 Farm Bill and its successors, some farmers are bootstrapping their way toward sustainable agriculture, but corn production still erodes topsoil about 10 times faster than it can accrete.
On Being Corrosive to Engines:
How will ethanol affect your fishing, apart from possibly ruining your outboard motor? (Ethanol does this in lots of ways. Just ask David Blinken, the famous Montauk fly-fishing guide, who recently spent $25,000 pulling his deck, replacing his fuel lines and tank, extracting aluminum-oxide gum from his carburetors and basically rebuilding his twin 100-horse Yamahas.)
We need to be cautious about ethanol--and more cautious about corn ethanol.
RSS
Don't Get Carried Away
I read the same Economist article, and have heard the same "food vs. fuel" argument the other poster made for about a year now. A couple of things puzzled me though. I don't get where they can claim that it's "corrosive to engines". Ethanol requires different fuel tanks and seals throughout the fuel system because Ethanol is a solvent to some of the compounds which are resistant to gasoline. No big deal. Other than that, the only difference between a regular car and your E85 "FlexFuel" is a chip which adjusts the fuel injector flow to keep the fuel/air mixture tuned for the amount of ethanol/gas ratio with air as your current chip tunes gas and air alone now because of the slightly different burning characteristics. But corrosive to...what, your valves? I really doubt that.
Secondly, ethanol does have a lower energy content, but it also has a much higher octane. So what you say? Your current E85 model is basically a run-of-the-mill gas engine with the aformentioned tweaks to the fuel system. E85 has 104 Octane if I recall correctly. Your regular gas engine is designed to use 87 Octane. This means that an engine designed to take advantage of ethanol's octane could have a much higher compression ratio and get a lot better efficiency than "your fathers Oldsmobile". 87 Octane limits you to something like an 8:1 to perhaps 10:1 (with the latest, modern engines with all kinds of anti-knock sensors). You could get a lot better compression ratio with ethanol, meaning you'd get better efficiency because you have a longer power stroke rather than let the burned hot gas fly out the exhaust valve when it still has usable energy content. But even without the higher compression ratio and the standard engine with "FlexFuel" I only lose 15% of my mpg using E85.
Back to the "food vs. fuel" argument the other poster brought up, that's where cellulostic ethanol comes in. A lot of people argue that corn ethanol was just to get the infrastructure and the ball rolling. I think the only ones who are happy with corn ethanol are the farmers. I also am a little skeptical about the food vs. fuel argument for another reason--we've had these huge surpluses sitting around for decades and lots of fallow land the government paid farmers not to use. Maybe the huge surpluses kept the price down to make corn more affordable on the world market, but we weren't selling all of it and we weren't giving much of it away for free. Besides, there was a good article on how our cheap agricultural products and our tendency to use US based food for relief actually hurt farmers in the developing world.
All of this said, I'm much more in favor of butanol, and far more favorable toward algal-based bio-diesel, but I think ethanol has a role in getting us moving in the right direction. We get over 59% of our oil from countries which score "NOT FREE" on FreedomHouse's scale (calculated from EIA data), so every little bit helps keep us from funding our potential enemies. I know some people argue that it takes energy to make ethanol, but the vast majority of that energy comes from domestic sources anyway (natural gas or coal for fertilizer and pesticides, or natural gas for the distillation process). I was a little disappointed that the article didn't mention a company which came up with a process for butanol way before DuPont, named ButylFuel LLC.
If you really want to read some in depth arguments against ethanol, go see our old friend Rob Rapier over at his blog. He's got loads of experience in the petroleum industry, and writes quite frequently about ethanol.
View Full Discussion