Ethanol requirement

tinfoil said:
Thanks for the really good post, Mott. Many of the points you made have shifted my perspective a bit.
Click to expand...
Yea a lot of people get hung up on the alternative fuel aspect of adding ethanol into gasoline where as it's primarily about pollution prevention. Gasoline has some really nasty shit in it.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Don't they have to azeotrope alcohol with benzene to remove water?
Click to expand...
No. Conventionally molecular sieves are used to remove water from azeotropic compounds like ethanol. Some interesting research has come out of Purdue university where they used tapioca pearls to dehydrate ethanol. Apparently tapioca pearls have a similiar size, diameter and porosity as molecular sieve media.

Tapioca pearls have some significant advantages. Namely that it can be dried out and reused multiple times, where as when molecular sieve media wears out it can't be used and is disposed of as a waste. Tapioca pearls can used multiple times before they wear out but when they do wear out.....they can be reused as a feed material for producing ethanol. Since molecular sieve media is primarily inorganic, it has to go to a landfill.
 
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I invest in something I use it until it can no longer be used. My riding lawn mower is 17 years old, my chainsaw is over 20 years old and my weed eater is 12 years old. My truck is a '97 model (I run ethanol fuel in it) and the Tahoe is an '04. I have no plans to replace them in the near future. I have a couple of boats whose motors and fuel lines are over 20 years old or right there at it. While I don't mind putting ethanol laced fuel in my vehicles that I drive often, I am not too keen on putting it in my boats and small engines. I drive 30 miles or more out of my way and pay a few more cents per gallon to get to a gas station that advertises fuel with no ethanol. I can at least be assured that it is better than the 10% stuff they sell at Walmart even if there might be some amount of ethanol in it. I've had that stuff go bad in a gas can between mowings last summer. I'm sorry Mott, I'm going to be dragged kicking and screaming into this era of new fuel.
 
tekkychick said:
I agree that we should stop making ethanol from corn. However, biofuels could become part of our energy equation; perhaps something like sweetgrass.
Click to expand...

we should utilize ethanol whatever waste product it comes from.....in Brazil they used sugar beets because they had an oversupply of sugar beets.....we used corn because we had an oversupply of corn....in Florida they make it from leftover orange rinds.....in the NW they make it from left over wood chips and branches from logging.....sweetgrass is a better success rate than corn but it needs to be grown in entirely different conditions and would detract from wheat production so you don't gain much there......
 
leaningright said:
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I invest in something I use it until it can no longer be used. My riding lawn mower is 17 years old, my chainsaw is over 20 years old and my weed eater is 12 years old. My truck is a '97 model (I run ethanol fuel in it) and the Tahoe is an '04. I have no plans to replace them in the near future. I have a couple of boats whose motors and fuel lines are over 20 years old or right there at it. While I don't mind putting ethanol laced fuel in my vehicles that I drive often, I am not too keen on putting it in my boats and small engines. I drive 30 miles or more out of my way and pay a few more cents per gallon to get to a gas station that advertises fuel with no ethanol. I can at least be assured that it is better than the 10% stuff they sell at Walmart even if there might be some amount of ethanol in it. I've had that stuff go bad in a gas can between mowings last summer. I'm sorry Mott, I'm going to be dragged kicking and screaming into this era of new fuel.
Click to expand...
So the fact that your knowingly jeopardizing people's health/safety and the environment doesn't sway you? That this is less important than old equipment?
 
unfortunately the "competes with food supply" situation has hit even my favorite method of ethanol production....

Bio Gives Up on Seaweed-to-Ethanol Effort in Chile

“Seaweed is worth $1.30 a kilogram without doing anything to it, so why would you harvest it and produce ethanol” which cost 75 cents a kilogram, Lucien said. “The opportunity cost is too great.”
Click to expand...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-15/bio-gives-up-on-seaweed-to-ethanol-effort-in-chile.html

this HAD been Bio's operating plan...
Genetically Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed into Ethanol

A genetically modified strain of common gut bacteria may lead to a new technology for making biofuels that does not compete with food crops for arable acreage.
Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin—a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel.
Click to expand...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetically-engineered-stomach-microbe-turns-seaweed-into-ethanol

instead seaweed as a food crop created competition for their seaweed aquafarms......
 
Last edited:
Mott the Hoople said:
So the fact that your knowingly jeopardizing people's health/safety and the environment doesn't sway you? That this is less important than old equipment?
Click to expand...

And while I don't think we should be a throw-away society, I bet replacing some of that equipment would not only help the environment, it would also reduce the amount of fuel used.

But if that chain saw is only used once or twice a year, I don't blame him for not replacing it if it's still working. Things that are rarely used don't put all that much pollutant into the air.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
So the fact that your knowingly jeopardizing people's health/safety and the environment doesn't sway you? That this is less important than old equipment?
Click to expand...

I don't buy it...that emissions from fuel produced nowadays are that great a danger to the environment or that ethanol makes them any better outside of the oxygenating process. And I don't have the thousands of dollars to replace the equipment that I do have. So no, I am really not swayed.

This is one of the problems I have with the "go green" type of movements. "You stop doing things the way you always have done them because it's bad..." or "You change and you change now and if you don't we're going to force you (usually by jacking the prices out of the range of normal folks) to one way or another" seems to be their game. Such attitudes make me even more of an angry conservative. "Buy our electric car ... you're gonna pay through the nose and it might be iffy to drive to work and back but hey, you're saving the environment." I could go on and on with this sort of thing that's the way I see it. I was talking to a guy about this the other day complaining about having to use that worthless E-fuel in my boat because I really can't afford to buy an new boat every time they decide to change the fuel. His response - "Maybe you'll have to fish from the bank." I rarely have violent thoughts but I really wanted to kick him right in the seat of the pants.
 
leaningright said:
I don't buy it...that emissions from fuel produced nowadays are that great a danger to the environment or that ethanol makes them any better outside of the oxygenating process. And I don't have the thousands of dollars to replace the equipment that I do have. So no, I am really not swayed.

This is one of the problems I have with the "go green" type of movements. "You stop doing things the way you always have done them because it's bad..." or "You change and you change now and if you don't we're going to force you (usually by jacking the prices out of the range of normal folks) to one way or another" seems to be their game. Such attitudes make me even more of an angry conservative. "Buy our electric car ... you're gonna pay through the nose and it might be iffy to drive to work and back but hey, you're saving the environment." I could go on and on with this sort of thing that's the way I see it. I was talking to a guy about this the other day complaining about having to use that worthless E-fuel in my boat because I really can't afford to buy an new boat every time they decide to change the fuel. His response - "Maybe you'll have to fish from the bank." I rarely have violent thoughts but I really wanted to kick him right in the seat of the pants.
Click to expand...

Meanwhile the world's tankers and merchant ships merrily ply their trade using Bunker Fuel Oil which is the last thing to come out of a fractional distillation tower apart from tar. The stuff is so viscous it has to preheated to even flow properly, needless to say it is highly polluting.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
He essentially is. It many seem like nothing when it's just LR......but when you multiply LR a few million times........

Besides, it doesn't take much benzene to have a significant environmental impact.
Click to expand...

The bolded is the important part. And even w/ that, it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference when you consider what's happening worldwide.

Your statement was alarmist BS. Nothing LR is doing is putting anyone's life in jeopardy. If that's the case, you've been endangering people your entire life.
 
leaningright said:
I literally laughed out loud when I read this.
Click to expand...
Yes....but take you and multiply it a few million times and you have a serious problem. That's how we get back to your argument that this is an invasion of your rights by the government when it's really the other way around and the reason why we have a government with federal powers. Your actions are an invasion of our right to not be exposed to harmful levels of hazardous air pollutants.

Your argument was wrong when they were removing tetraethyl lead from gasoline and it's wrong now.
 
Last edited:
Mott the Hoople said:
Yes....but take you and multiply it a few million times and you have a serious problem. That's how we get back to your argument that this is an invasion of your rights by the government when it's really the other way around and the reason why we have a government with federal powers. Your actions are an invasion of our right to not be exposed to harmful levels of hazardous air pollutants.

Your argument was wrong when they were putting tetraethyl lead into gasoline and it's wrong now.
Click to expand...

It's the old problem of the commons. We don't pay for the air we pollute; so it benefits us to keep our 20 yr old chain saw (or whatever) and pollute the air, even though for society overall it's a bad thing. Yep, that's why we have laws.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Come on, that's just a tad melodramatic and OTT.
Click to expand...
Not really, no. Is it ok for one person to dump a little bit of toxic pollution into the air I breath? How about 100 people? How about 100,000 people? How about 10,000,000 people?

That's why we have these sort of environmental regulations.

LR's using the same argument that was used when tetraethyl lead was prohibited. It was wrong then and it's wrong now.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Meanwhile the world's tankers and merchant ships merrily ply their trade using Bunker Fuel Oil which is the last thing to come out of a fractional distillation tower apart from tar. The stuff is so viscous it has to preheated to even flow properly, needless to say it is highly polluting.
Click to expand...
Yes....that's a problem....particularly in port areas. These sort of laws do seem to fall apart at the international level, don't they?
 
Food or Fuel?

QumMIJ_pT4KQ0EJl1ALnKg.jpeg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top