The Toshiba 4S is real. But it seems to be taking longer than I had thought, and it's also bigger. And the cost doesn't seem to include the startup cost. It's design is more for providing power where other solutions might not be feasible.
Man Made Global Warming is a Media Made Myth
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The Toshiba 4S is real. But it seems to be taking longer than I had thought, and it's also bigger. And the cost doesn't seem to include the startup cost. It's design is more for providing power where other solutions might not be feasible.
Merkinball: it's tough to specifically talk about 'pollution'. Sometimes we care about total pollution, sometimes we care about local pollution. There are some diesel trucks in my city that have a lot of gross stuff coming out of the tailpipe, and it would be much better for my city if those tailpipes had much cleaner emissions. Now, the entire lifecycle of a vehicle can have a pollution footprint as well.
There has to be a balance. If an EtOH engine has a larger total footprint, but a smaller city footprint, then it might be more desirable than gasoline. The 'total footprint' can be concentrated somewhere that we're more okay with polluting. Again, of course, balance.
I can't find a good source stating that tailpipe emissions for EtOH is better than gasoline, only a bunch of suspect sites. OTOH, the EPA is saying what we've already agreed on: corn isn't going to help anyone.
I imagine that creating electric cars is going to have pollution concerns, especially where the batteries are produced. I hope that we're smart enough to concentrated and dispose of such pollution wisely.
There has to be a balance. If an EtOH engine has a larger total footprint, but a smaller city footprint, then it might be more desirable than gasoline. The 'total footprint' can be concentrated somewhere that we're more okay with polluting. Again, of course, balance.
I can't find a good source stating that tailpipe emissions for EtOH is better than gasoline, only a bunch of suspect sites. OTOH, the EPA is saying what we've already agreed on: corn isn't going to help anyone.
I imagine that creating electric cars is going to have pollution concerns, especially where the batteries are produced. I hope that we're smart enough to concentrated and dispose of such pollution wisely.
Simple Simon
Simpleton
on that note, it must be added that most calculations omit, for practicability, a detailed assessment of how such pollution centers from production could be optimized for minimal amount and impact.
For example, if you have a process that requires very high amounts of energy, it may be smart to place it where such energy is available in CO2 neutral form. E.g. the Sahara, or the Mojave, where you can use solar power. If, however, it also involves massive amounts of raw materials, it may mean high transport costs, both financially and in pollution. Thus, it may be better to use coal or oil based electricity instead, but save on transportation fuel.
In fact, batteries may be such a case where production in a solar power region could pay off.
For example, if you have a process that requires very high amounts of energy, it may be smart to place it where such energy is available in CO2 neutral form. E.g. the Sahara, or the Mojave, where you can use solar power. If, however, it also involves massive amounts of raw materials, it may mean high transport costs, both financially and in pollution. Thus, it may be better to use coal or oil based electricity instead, but save on transportation fuel.
In fact, batteries may be such a case where production in a solar power region could pay off.
Merkinball
Deity
I'm not the biggest fan of solar, although I have seen some pretty interesting research studies done it. I think I remember reading something that a group has managed to beat the effeciency of photosynthesis when creating electricity. It'll have scaling issues though. The one plus to solar is that in most cases you can just set it and forget it. Solar arrays are pretty much maintenance free once you get them set up. The main downside to solar is the cost though.
My big ole fancy dream is to set up solar array's in global deserts and use it for electrolosis to produce hydrogen. It'd be expensive to set up, but once you got it going it would last for a hundred years at least...
Back to Ethanol:
Ethanol is kind of funny. Because it really depends on how you use it. Depending on the grade, it effects everything. For instance, it's pretty much been concluded that you can use E15 without additional engine wear, and with little difference in emissions. But once you get up to E85 you get all kinds of problems everywhere. Now, if you are running E85 or above, you can tune your engine so that it fires at a higher compression ratio and you will get about the same power as a normally aspirated gasoline engine running between 11 and 13 to one. Ethanol maximizes at 18 to one. But if you run ethanol on a normal gas engine you'll only get about 76% of the efficiency of gasoline, and when you cut down the efficiency, you implicitly increase the rate of emmissions. From what I understand, most flex-fuel cars automatically detect the amount of ethanol in the exhaust and are able to adjust the compression ratio depending on the fuel used. Another big draw back to ethanol is that it attracts water and really increases engine wear. This is particularly true with higher blends and pure ethanol. They're trying to mitigate the issues, but it's difficult and very expensive. The wear issues are extremely substantial in life time analysis.
Cellulose ethanol is just around the corner. The company that my facility is contracting through is getting ready to start implementing a decentralized cellulose ethanol production program. The results from our studies are impressive. We're able to generate 8 times more ethanol per acre than with corn, and the cost from seed to ethanol is essentially half of corn ethanol. The idea is to generate sweetwater at the farm. Farmers get high protein feed and sell the sweetwater to ethanol producers. The producers then simply take the sweetwater the rest of the way and produce ethanol.
I've never been one to advocate for decentralizing energy production, but if farmers want to do it and it's cost competetive, more power to this start up.
My big ole fancy dream is to set up solar array's in global deserts and use it for electrolosis to produce hydrogen. It'd be expensive to set up, but once you got it going it would last for a hundred years at least...
Back to Ethanol:
Ethanol is kind of funny. Because it really depends on how you use it. Depending on the grade, it effects everything. For instance, it's pretty much been concluded that you can use E15 without additional engine wear, and with little difference in emissions. But once you get up to E85 you get all kinds of problems everywhere. Now, if you are running E85 or above, you can tune your engine so that it fires at a higher compression ratio and you will get about the same power as a normally aspirated gasoline engine running between 11 and 13 to one. Ethanol maximizes at 18 to one. But if you run ethanol on a normal gas engine you'll only get about 76% of the efficiency of gasoline, and when you cut down the efficiency, you implicitly increase the rate of emmissions. From what I understand, most flex-fuel cars automatically detect the amount of ethanol in the exhaust and are able to adjust the compression ratio depending on the fuel used. Another big draw back to ethanol is that it attracts water and really increases engine wear. This is particularly true with higher blends and pure ethanol. They're trying to mitigate the issues, but it's difficult and very expensive. The wear issues are extremely substantial in life time analysis.
Cellulose ethanol is just around the corner. The company that my facility is contracting through is getting ready to start implementing a decentralized cellulose ethanol production program. The results from our studies are impressive. We're able to generate 8 times more ethanol per acre than with corn, and the cost from seed to ethanol is essentially half of corn ethanol. The idea is to generate sweetwater at the farm. Farmers get high protein feed and sell the sweetwater to ethanol producers. The producers then simply take the sweetwater the rest of the way and produce ethanol.
I've never been one to advocate for decentralizing energy production, but if farmers want to do it and it's cost competetive, more power to this start up.
Merkinball
Deity
Cellulose ethanol from corn doesn't use food. It uses corn stalk and turns it into high protein feed which is better for cows than corn stalk, and is fed to cows anyway.
I also know that it's possible to use the leftovers and residues from forestry activities. If there's a way to use the leftovers of other productions to produce ethanol, then alright.
EDIT: That being said, there ARE currently crops being grown exclusively for ethanol... I'm just not that into this. Unless it's marginal land.
Merkinball
Deity
I'm not into that either. Corn Kernal ethanol is complete and total fraud.
Simple Simon
Simpleton
Würth is producing some pretty cheap stuff there. 1 sqm modules, standardized, thus easy to mount, replace etc.
Wow, you and me fully agree on an important issue....
I have seen it work well enough with bio-gas (from cow dung) for small villages in Bavaria. I guess it really depends on what you call 'decentralized'.
I think decentralization is the way to go. In the industrial era, centralization was important for economies of scale and cheap transportation made it easy. Nowadays, we can miniaturize even processes and use relatively low cost solutions. Why blend coke syrup in one place and spend so much energy shipping watered down syrup all across across the country when we can mix it (possibly make it, if precautions are made to preserve the secrets of the recipe) and can it in different places around the country?
I think I get what you mean, but my concerns are a bit different. EtOH contains less energy, so you need to burn a larger volume to get the same work. You'll get more emissions, but you shouldn't get more pollution. EtOH has fewer high-energy bonds per Carbon, but the number of CO2 molecules emitted should be similar per mile travelled.
When I talk of polluting emissions, though, I'm more referring to all those elements of exhaust that you don't want being spilled into your city air. I don't care if cars release H2O or CO2 into my city air
It sounds like you're able to get a digestable product for the cattle, too, outside of the corn? Is this process increasing feed (i.e., gaining an edible product from the husks)? Or is it extracting some pre-EtOH from the corn while turning the corn into something more digestable for the cattle?
Either way, I think that having a way of value-adding to the corn (even if it's to produce EtOH fuel) is good economic sense. If they're making a way to make cheap EtOH, the local community can use it to make their E15 fuel cheaper. For me, it's all about the $/mile, and I'd mix in EtOH at E15, if it brought down the price. It doesn't matter if the fuel is only 76% as energy-dense as gasoline if it's 50% the price.
Haha, if cars released H20 (as a hydrogen car would) then you wouldn't even know a car had driven by. Those noxious fumes of gasoline combustion cars are from NO2 and components of incomplete combustion of the complex hydrocarbons in gasoline.
Merkinball
Deity
Let's not get too caught up in this. We have a bunch of hydrogen ICE engines at our facility. You put your hand down at the exhaust and it is pretty wild on the surface. It emits steam, and it's basically at 25 degrees C, which is wicked cool when compared to normal ICE combustion. But when you get down and you smell it...it is NOT plain old simple steam. And I have pressed the manager of that program to do an actual study as to what is in that stuff. Given what is in the exhaust system, the oil in the combustion chamber (from motor oil) there could easily be CYANIDE in that exhaust that everybody is willfully ignoring.
Not necessarily. You can get the same energy if you raise the compression ratio.
There are a lot of ways at looking at these efficiencies. My general premise is like this. A coal fired power plant generally operates at about 33% efficiency. An Solid Oxide Fuel Cell can use syn-gas from coal and operate about 50% efficiency. A combined heating and power molten carbonate fuel cell system can operate at about 80% efficiency. They can all use the same volume of hydro-carbons to get the job done. But since the MCFC plant is so much more efficient, it inherently releases less pollution. Once a mole of the fuel is burned in EITHER of the three cases, it releases the same amount of carbon regardless of how it was combusted.
You're kind of right in how you approach it, but there are other variables as to how you get that energy out of the molecules. Such as compression ratios. Harnessing the energy is just as important. Corn ethanol on a standard engine does not measure up to gasoline in any way shape or form. To travel one mile, it simply pollutes more than gas.
This process uses corn silage. Basically all the stuff that is not kernals of corn. It produces a sweet tabacco smelling silage afterwards that can be fed to the cows.
Point blank. Decentralization makes no sense on any level from an energy or cost perspective. Decentralization will only take place if it is profitable to do so.
The energy footprint of a centralized ethanol production facility is way, way, way smaller than what this firm is proposing. It's being proposed because it will make farmers money and give them better feed. It's not being proposed to cut down on energy footprint, and if anybody does a bulk energy analysis on this scheme, they'll get torn limb from limb.
These systems require two water heaters, two additional heat exchangers, an auger press, and numerous large scale pumps. There is simply no way for smallish systems to compete with a massive commercialized facility. They're looking to do a couple hundred to a couple thousand gallons of sweetwater a day. Right now a few dozen ethanol plants in America are producing 10 billion gallons of ethanol per year. Farmers are going to be heating this stuff up with electricity from the grid. How on earth can a few thousand small systems all heating and cooling sweetwater be as efficient as a small number of massive facilities doing the same thing? Answer? They can't. When it comes to energy use, the bigger, the better.
The same will hold true when we finally get rid of the Obama administration and start really going after a hydrogen economy. But as we've learned so often from this administration, it's really just about friends and politics.
Lord Malbeth
Emperor
I've enjoyed reading what Michael Crichton has to say about Global Warming.
Hey, it may be true, it may not be true, but the media is playing it up a tad (Understatement of hte year)... just like the swine flu...
Hey, it may be true, it may not be true, but the media is playing it up a tad (Understatement of hte year)... just like the swine flu...
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Difference between reality and the media portrayal of stuff:
In reality AGW could be a serious problem.
In the Media, AGW is Armageddon.
In reality AGW could be a serious problem.
In the Media, AGW is Armageddon.
I think we might be not talking about the same thing. Ethanol has about 2/3 the calories per litre that gasoline does, iirc. A litre of EtOH just shouldn't go as far as a litre of gasoline. Even if gasoline engines capture less of the energy, I'd hope.
Silage is pretty heavy, though. So, producing the EtOH locally might make sense, even with smaller-scale factories, might be better than shipping trucks of silage to a central processing site. If the corn -> fuel-use loop is short, you can get energy efficiencies on that front.
Death_Machine
Slaytanic Warrior
It would depend on how much capital it takes to make the facility work. Would a mega facility cost less to build, maintain, & run the business than several smaller facilities? While I agree with what you are saying in principle, it might not be economically feasible.
I like how we basically said the same thing. "Big, small? That's a function of local economics!"
The idea of shipping stuff bugs me (especially bottled water!). However, the cost of centralized manufacture + shipping versus the cost of distributed manufacture is probably negligible. The real expenses are marketing. And the cost is determined by how much people will pay, not based on anything economic.
It's almost cheaper to buy orange juice than canned soda. 144 oz of canned soda can go as high as $5 when not on sale, while 64 oz of Orange juice is consistently $3. Not quite there yet, but I consider Orange juice to be a much higher quality beverage.
It's almost cheaper to buy orange juice than canned soda. 144 oz of canned soda can go as high as $5 when not on sale, while 64 oz of Orange juice is consistently $3. Not quite there yet, but I consider Orange juice to be a much higher quality beverage.
BasketCase
Username sez it all
If distributed manufacture was the cheapest way to sell stuff, all the Evil Corporations would already be doing it.
But, a lot of the time, they don't. No dice, Mylon, chalk me up in the "disagree" column.
But, a lot of the time, they don't. No dice, Mylon, chalk me up in the "disagree" column.
