Bioethanol fuel cells

[SolarJack]

[SIZE=-1]Bioethanol is well suited for being used in fuel cells.
Their high operating efficiency even at low load... can be its achievement.
Why not?...




[/SIZE]

 

[billwald]

Probably takes more energy to make alcohol than it produces. Also uses much water.

More money in growing fuel than growing food. The price of food is going sky high.

If trash plants are used for alcohol production then they will not be composted into the dirt. If nothing is plowed back the soil becomes depleated.

 

[SolarJack]

Bioethanol production would help a lot of poor nations...
They would can buy us crops for bioethanol crops via economy or swap.

 

[ScMay]

While a good idea at first there is one major snag in its use, its agricultural needs are enormous. To meet current energy needs vast areas of land and amounts of water have to be re-assigned to growing fuel rather than food, too much too be a viable solution in the long run. That is unless some fancy genetic engineering gets done - I remember reading in New Scientist that there is an idea to engineer algae to produce hydrogen through modified photosynthesis, the only problem is current technology is not up to the task of making them.

 

[SolarJack]

While a good idea at first there is one major snag in its use, its agricultural needs are enormous. To meet current energy needs vast areas of land and amounts of water have to be re-assigned to growing fuel rather than food, too much too be a viable solution in the long run. That is unless some fancy genetic engineering gets done - I remember reading in New Scientist that there is an idea to engineer algae to produce hydrogen through modified photosynthesis, the only problem is current technology is not up to the task of making them.

Sugar cane and sweat sorghum produce 5-7 t/ha of bioethanol + residues...
Brazil surface/8 = 1.000.000 kmq = 100.000.000 ha that can produce 500-700 million tonnes of not irrigated bioethanol !
It depends only on our ability...
It's equivalent to around 1 billion tonnes of oil if fuel cells are used.

 

[ScMay]

Sugar cane and sweat sorghum produce 5-7 t/ha of bioethanol + residues...
Brazil surface/8 = 1.000.000 kmq = 100.000.000 ha that can produce 500-700 million tonnes of not irrigated bioethanol !
It depends only on our ability...
It's equivalent to around 1 billion tonnes of oil if fuel cells are used.

I'd like to see the sources you are using to determine these values, I would also like to point out that the conversion of the cane to bioethanol itself requires energy which thus reduces the efficiency of the process (i.e. you produce 7t of fuel but te process requires 3t meaning the real output is only 4t)
I do know from the articles that I have read that the percentage of agricultural land required to meet our needs is too large, I don't remember the numbers but if I can be bothered I could try and look them up. So unless you are advocating massive deforestation to grow cane, which I doubt would add enough land and would screw the ecology and climate anyway, I don't think its going to solve our energy needs. I'm not sure how much the fuel cell would reduce our requirements though.

I'm not saying that bioethanol won't help I am saying that it alone will not be able to replace our current addiction to oil.

 

[Angel of God]

It seems incredible!..
1 billion tonnes of equivalent oil in Brazil?
Brazil surface is around 8E6 kmq.
It's only 12.5% of brazilian lands!
It's surely achievable on the paper...

Bagasse(sugar cane waste) produce 7500 kj/kg of heat.
Almost all the energy that bioethanol production needs is distillation heat that is completely produced from bagasse heat...

 

[PastorMikeJ]

but right now it takes a gal. and a half of fossil fuel to produce a gal of ethanol...

 

[SolarJack]

but right now it takes a gal. and a half of fossil fuel to produce a gal of ethanol...

Energy conversion is 1:8 that is 1 fossil fuel input to 8 sugar cane bioethanol output...
This information comes from "The Oil Drum"... etc...
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/4/27/22501/5241

 

[ScMay]

Ethanol Bust Makes Losers of Bush, Gates, D.E. Shaw

Looks like ethanol wasn't such a good idea after all.

Also I realised that SolarJacks calculations do not include the rate of production, simply a volume making it a useless number. Is it 500-700million t per day, month or year? The USA alone consumes 3.2 billion litres of oil a day, I'm not sure how many litres a tonne of ethanol is equivalent to but that is a LOT of ethanol you need to produce to meet the demands of just one country.

 

[Angel of God]

Ethanol Bust Makes Losers of Bush, Gates, D.E. Shaw

Looks like ethanol wasn't such a good idea after all.

Also I realised that SolarJacks calculations do not include the rate of production, simply a volume making it a useless number. Is it 500-700million t per day, month or year? The USA alone consumes 3.2 billion litres of oil a day, I'm not sure how many litres a tonne of ethanol is equivalent to but that is a LOT of ethanol you need to produce to meet the demands of just one country.

SolarJack gives good informations.
Your link talks about corn bioethanol that is much different.
It's 7 t./ha therefore 500-700 million t. is per vegetative period...
Us oil production is 300 million t. per year.
France cars utilize around 50 million t. of oil per year...

 

[ScMay]

SolarJack gives good informations.
Your link talks about corn bioethanol that is much different.

How so? It is different yes but how significantly? How much extra ethanol do you get? Also remember that certain crops can't be grown in certain areas thus limiting the use of your preferred crops.

It's 7 t./ha therefore 500-700 million t. is per vegetative period...

I'm guessing vegetative cycle is 1 year? I'm really ignorant about that aspect of agriculture. All calculations below assume its /yr. Also I will be assuming 1L of petroleum is equivalent to 1L of ethanol, the degree of error resulting from this should not be significant enough to call results into question.

Us oil production is 300 million t. per year. That fact
France cars utilize around 50 million t. of oil per year...

50x10^9kg/yr / 7x10^3kg/(ha.yr) = 7,142,857 ha = ~10% of Frances total land mass and ~30% of their arable land (apparently only 33% of France is arable)

However France is the second largest food exporter of the world and accounts for 1/3 of agricultural land in the EU. Its main crop is wheat and I doubt its climate would be able to grow sugar cane or sorghum effectively so their efficiency would be lower still. If the worlds 2nd largest food exporter has to convert 30% of their arable land to non-food crops just to supply their own needs how on earth are other countries which have food shortages (like Frances customers) going to manage? What happens to all the countries that relly on french food imports?

Lets look at the USA now.... We'll look at consumption since the US has too import most of its oil now anyway so their production is not very relevant.
3.2x10^9 L/day x 0.789kg/L x 365 = 9.22 x 10^11 kg/yr consumed
Therefore required land for self sufficiency is...
9.22x10^11kg/yr / 7x10^3 kg/(ha.yr) = 1.32 x 10^8 ha, 13% of US land but only 20-24% of US land is arable!!!!! So we are talking about more than HALF the USA's agriculture needing to be turned over to fuel production, a country that supplies more than half of world agriculture production.

An added notes: only 5-9% of Brazil's land is actually arable so it wont be able to help! Also even if I got the the vegetative cycle wrong it doesn't matter, you could double, triple or even dectuple the production rate of ethanol and it would not help enough to make it viable (especially with global populations still rising, desertification and pollution removing ever more farm land and droughts and famines rocking countries all over the world). There is just not enough arable land to share with food production (unless you want to deforest a whole lot of areas to make more)

Ethanol was good in theory but it is just not efficient enough to work in real life (as the article I linked earlier pointed out) or even on paper now that we know its limitations.

I obtained all the statistics about countries from Wikipedia as I reasoned that it would be accurate for data such as this (Apparently wiki is only slightly more inaccurate than Britannica anyway).

 

[Angel of God]

Usa and France produce a good wheat!
It wouldn't be good to replace it with corn etc...

The best thing is to swap wheat with sugar cane:

1 ha of wheat <--> 1 ha of sugar cane


Countries like Mozambique and Ivory Coast would solve their problems...

 

[ScMay]

Usa and France produce a good wheat!
It wouldn't be good to replace it with corn etc...

The best thing is to swap wheat with sugar cane:

1 ha of wheat <--> 1 ha of sugar cane

Which is why I used the 7t/ha that was stated earlier to be the production rate of sugar cane, so as to show that using your ideas would not work. Did you ignore all my maths? Even using the most efficient crops stated, ignoring where they are able to grow for arguments sake, the amount of land needed to be turned over for fuel production represents a large percentage of arable land even for the worlds biggest agricultural producers. If the US and France can't produce enough for themselves, when they already produce food for many other countries, how on earth are other countries like China, Japan, Canada, Britain, Italy etc. meant to meet their own large demands? They can't grow it themselves, and other countries need their own farmland to produce food and fuel for themselves too.

I'll repeat myself, if the worlds largest agricultural producers can't meet their own demands without starving people, how is any other country meant to produce enough not just for themselves but also to export?

Countries like Mozambique and Ivory Coast would solve their problems...

GRRRR!!! You are infuriating! I did most of the mental work for you with my maths above, the least you could do is check your facts (it take only a few minutes). I mean seriously! Throwing ideas randomly about like this with no thought as to whether its actually a good idea is really really annoying and makes me wonder whether debating with you is worth my time.

This is why you are wrong, and it would have taken you all of a few minutes to check:
Mozambique total area (including the 2.2% water) = 80,159,000 ha
Ivory coast total area (including the 1.4% water) = 32,246,000 ha
total = 112,405,000 ha
Area needed for the US consumption alone = 132,000,000 ha

The combined area of your 2 example countries is smaller than the requirements of the USA alone, let alone the EU, Japan, China, and the rest of the world (which is requiring more and more as nations develop). Note that this is ignoring the area that is already needed for food and urban area and ignoring area taken up by water. How can they help when their true contribution (when accounting for % arable land, their own fuel needs and their own food needs) would be
barely a drop in the the ocean. If they can't even make a reasonable contribution to just the USA (largest user yes but not the only, and other are fast growing) then how can we expect them to help the rest of the world. This just highlights just how much land would need to be converted for fuel production, it is MASSIVE, far larger than I think you comprehend. These were EXTREMELY poor examples, which would have been evident had you checked up some facts.

Besides turning to other poorer countries for this can have serious side affects. Much of Africa is in famine, even though as a whole it is able to meet its agricultural needs (though some areas can't due to drought etc.). To entice them to grow fuel is dangerous as it exacerbates the already dire situation of large areas of farmland being used to grow "cash crops" for export (i.e. coffee, cotton, cocoa, rubber etc.) rather than the staples that are needed. Thus when instability or drought strikes there is insufficient excess capacity and millions starve like is happening over and over again in Africa.

Ethanol sucks as an alternative fuel source, it simply can't be transferred to large scale production necessary to replace petroleum making it only useful for forestalling the inevitable running out of oil (and not even very good at that). There are better alternative that deserve our time and research $$$, ethanol is a dead end and further focus on it by governments will only push back the day when we can get rid of oil.

 

[Angel of God]

Which is why I used the 7t/ha that was stated earlier to be the production rate of sugar cane, so as to show that using your ideas would not work. Did you ignore all my maths? Even using the most efficient crops stated, ignoring where they are able to grow for arguments sake, the amount of land needed to be turned over for fuel production represents a large percentage of arable land even for the worlds biggest agricultural producers. If the US and France can't produce enough for themselves, when they already produce food for many other countries, how on earth are other countries like China, Japan, Canada, Britain, Italy etc. meant to meet their own large demands? They can't grow it themselves, and other countries need their own farmland to produce food and fuel for themselves too.

I'll repeat myself, if the worlds largest agricultural producers can't meet their own demands without starving people, how is any other country meant to produce enough not just for themselves but also to export?

GRRRR!!! You are infuriating! I did most of the mental work for you with my maths above, the least you could do is check your facts (it take only a few minutes). I mean seriously! Throwing ideas randomly about like this with no thought as to whether its actually a good idea is really really annoying and makes me wonder whether debating with you is worth my time.

This is why you are wrong, and it would have taken you all of a few minutes to check:
Mozambique total area (including the 2.2% water) = 80,159,000 ha
Ivory coast total area (including the 1.4% water) = 32,246,000 ha
total = 112,405,000 ha
Area needed for the US consumption alone = 132,000,000 ha

The combined area of your 2 example countries is smaller than the requirements of the USA alone, let alone the EU, Japan, China, and the rest of the world (which is requiring more and more as nations develop). Note that this is ignoring the area that is already needed for food and urban area and ignoring area taken up by water. How can they help when their true contribution (when accounting for % arable land, their own fuel needs and their own food needs) would be
barely a drop in the the ocean. If they can't even make a reasonable contribution to just the USA (largest user yes but not the only, and other are fast growing) then how can we expect them to help the rest of the world. This just highlights just how much land would need to be converted for fuel production, it is MASSIVE, far larger than I think you comprehend. These were EXTREMELY poor examples, which would have been evident had you checked up some facts.

Besides turning to other poorer countries for this can have serious side affects. Much of Africa is in famine, even though as a whole it is able to meet its agricultural needs (though some areas can't due to drought etc.). To entice them to grow fuel is dangerous as it exacerbates the already dire situation of large areas of farmland being used to grow "cash crops" for export (i.e. coffee, cotton, cocoa, rubber etc.) rather than the staples that are needed. Thus when instability or drought strikes there is insufficient excess capacity and millions starve like is happening over and over again in Africa.

Ethanol sucks as an alternative fuel source, it simply can't be transferred to large scale production necessary to replace petroleum making it only useful for forestalling the inevitable running out of oil (and not even very good at that). There are better alternative that deserve our time and research $$$, ethanol is a dead end and further focus on it by governments will only push back the day when we can get rid of oil.

You would have to have a little imagination/fantasy...
Also You... take a lot of oil from other countries...
Sugar cane would can be considered an industrial product(it's used as an industrial product).


France uses nuclear energy(no emissions) therefore it needs only bioethanol for cars.
It needs only around 50E3 kmq of land for sugar cane...
Infact it's 5E6 ha * 7 t. = 35E6 t. of bioethanol.
If we use fuel cells then it's largely sufficient...


50E3 kmq is around 0.5 % of brazilian lands,
5 % of Mozambique lands etc...
It's not much!

 

[SolarJack]

Infact it's an industrial product...
It's scientifically solar energy for cars..
Also cotton can be considered a renowable industrial raw material...
We need a new theory...

 

[ScMay]

You would have to have a little imagination/fantasy...

That's obvious, what's not obvious is why you don't test your imagination with rationality to see if the idea is worth more attention.

Also You... take a lot of oil from other countries...

I don't follow, isn't that what is hapenning now? We take oil from the middle east? We can't do that for as easily for ethanol because land efficiency is not high enough for a few countries to meet everyone demands.

Sugar cane would can be considered an industrial product(it's used as an industrial product).

Not relevant. Who cares what you classify it as what matters is how much we can produce.

France uses nuclear energy(no emissions) therefore it needs only bioethanol for cars.

And trucks, ships, planes. But that doesn't matter anyway since that is already factored into Frances current oil consumption, we need to replace most of their current usage of oil with ethanol nuclear wont help since they've already made it their primary electricity source. So whats this got to do with how much ethanol we need to produce?

It needs only around 50E3 kmq of land for sugar cane...
Infact it's 5E6 ha * 7 t. = 35E6 t. of bioethanol.
If we use fuel cells then it's largely sufficient...

Huh? Did you read any of my post that showed the mathematics of how much land you need (based on your own statistic of 7t/ha and 50 million t of oil for cars). Where on earth did you pull that number from? Regardless while it is a little lower than mine (71E3 km2) you have completely ignored that:
A. Your number is still 7.4% of Frances area, 25% of their arable land
B. It is a major exporter of food already
C. There are a lot of other countries that use a lot of oil to (some of which like china are increasing their usage rather rapidly)

50E3 kmq is around 0.5 % of brazilian lands,
5 % of Mozambique lands etc...

Only 7% of brazil is currently arable, further expansion would require further environmental damage and deforestation. Contrary to international beliefs Brazil is avtually not very fertile for crops. So while it is only 0.5% of area it is 7% of their arable land, when they still have to make food and fuel for themselves, and for several other countries like the USA according to you. Famines are not a good thing you know?

Its also actually 6.2 % of Mozambiques area but only 5-9% of Mozambique is arable anyway! When will you understand that just because you have land doesn't mean you are able to farm it. You don't realise that you are asking Mozambique to turn over ALL of its agricultural land, not to produce food and fuel for itself but to produce fuel for a foreign country. As the saying goes "you can't eat money"

 

[Angel of God]

 

[Angel of God]

I am talking about cars because there are other renewable fuels as ammonia that can be good for ships, trucks...
Etc...(metallic sodium can be a renewable fuel also...)
Also intelligent city cars can run with compressed air...



I am an engeneer so you understand that I usually trust to the paper...
If 1 ha of sugar cane can produce 7 t. then 100E6 ha can produce 700E6 t.!!!
If we use fuel cells then our cars can have at disposal more than 1 billion t. of equivalent oil.

The only problem is its applicability.
Maybe you don't know that ethanol production from sugar cane needs only.. heat(around 80%)
Biomass can completely remedy to this problem...


This is written on the paper:
Us oil production = 300E6 t. per year
4% of brazilian lands can produce 300E6 t. of equivalent oil for cars...

infact it's 32E6 ha * 5-7 t. per year!!!

 

[ScMay]

This is written on the paper:
Us oil production = 300E6 t. per year
4% of brazilian lands can produce 300E6 t. of equivalent oil for cars...

infact it's 32E6 ha * 5-7 t. per year!!!

Did you not read my whole post or what? I KNOW that Brazil only a 'small' percentage of land for supplying one western countries ethanol needs , I specifically replied to your previous claim that France only needed 0.5% of their land. Wow only 4.5% of their land for only 2 large western countries... But wait a minute... Only about 7% of Brazilian land is arable, which coincidentally calculates that about 7% of their arable land is need for JUST France and means that around 57% for just the USA - forgetting completely Brazil's own fuel needs and forgetting completely the food needs of Brazil and all the countries they export food to.

Just so you don't miss it again I will point out a very important fact again by quoting my last post:

Its also actually 6.2 % of Mozambiques area but only 5-9% of Mozambique is arable anyway! When will you understand that just because you have land doesn't mean you are able to farm it. You don't realise that you are asking Mozambique to turn over ALL of its agricultural land, not to produce food and fuel for itself but to produce fuel for a foreign country. As the saying goes "you can't eat money"

Area of land =/= arable land. All you nice little calculations for % of land area need mean nothing because it ignores the hard reality that not all land is available for farming and almost all of what is available is already being used. So unless we want to make more by deforestation and ecological destruction or you are able to increase agricultural efficiency overnight around the world then we don't have enough land for everyone's fuel and everyone's food.

All your other comments are irrelevant until this is solved since it alone can and is stopping ethanol from being viable.