Butanol production breakthrough at University of California

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GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Okay Kite. Lets see your evidence that force feeding butanol into gasoline engines has no deleterious effects.

Waiting. . .and waiting. . .and waiting. . .

. . .despite this issue is MINOR LEAGUE compared to the real issues involved as I've explained.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

When wikipedia is back up you can look it up yourself. It isn't hard. Go to wikipedia. In the search slot type in butanol and click search. Good stuff.

B aint' E.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

"Not an answer" is "not an answer".

I'll never be in favor of burning hydrocarbons as a satisfying alternative.

We can do better. The Chevy Volt does better.

How many here live in smog areas, or areas that are regularly judged as "unhealthy to breathe the air"?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Gandalf
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Post by Gandalf »

GIThruster wrote:"Not an answer" is "not an answer".

I'll never be in favor of burning hydrocarbons as a satisfying alternative.

We can do better. The Chevy Volt does better.

How many here live in smog areas, or areas that are regularly judged as "unhealthy to breathe the air"?
You've painted yourself as a true believer with "I'll never be in favor ... as a satisfying alternative". Rational debate, or even education, is highly unlikely at this point.

Perhaps you could provide some technical reasons why burning a hydrocarbon, even if it's production and consumption is carbon neutral, is somehow not as good as electricity from a coal fired power plant (to charge your Volt), or (less likely in the US) a nuclear reactor? Hint: you'll have to go beyond aerosols, er, particulates.

You also stated in response to D. Tibbets:
GIThruster wrote: It does matter. Your testimony on this merely indicates these people whom you say exist (I've never met one) can't tell when their engines aren't running right. Generally, when the octane is too low for all the fuel to burn, your carb might inject more fuel, but what you'll get is very high hydrocarbons (unburnt fuel) out the tailpipe that ruin your emissions and can ignite in the exhaust system, on occasion with whimsical results.

To know if an engine is running properly, you really need to analyze the exhaust and put it on a dynamometer. When someone tells you their engine runs just as well on fuel with 10% less energy, tell him to dyno the engine.
Please read the wiki page on avgas, especially the part where "acetone is converted into a blend of isopentane and mesitylene to make the final fuel" - and then put into an engine originally designed for gasoline. These other fuels are delivering equal or _better_ performance in un-modified engines, except for some cases where seal materials deteriorate in fuel pumps, much like biodiesel eats older fuel lines. This is a minor problem, and apparently from anecdotal evidence, not so much of a problem for butanol. Extensive testing is done, including dyno testing, to verify overall performance.

You might also find this statement from the biobutanol wiki page interesting: "Because its longer hydrocarbon chain causes it to be fairly non-polar, it is more similar to gasoline than it is to ethanol."

In short, the technical hurdles of burning butanol in an internal combustion engine originally designed for gasoline do seem trivial. The fact that butanol seems to be compatible with existing infrastructure, and that it might be possible to produce and consume butanol in an environmentally sustainable fashion is intriguing. I am highly skeptical of the economics, but curious enough to not dismiss it out of hand. For others who refuse to accept such possibilities, we have the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, Fiskar Karma, Tesla Roadster, or Doble steam car.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

GIThruster wrote: "Not an answer" is "not an answer".
Give a man an answer and you inform him on one topic. Teach a man to FIND answers...
GIThruster wrote: I'll never be in favor of burning hydrocarbons as a satisfying alternative.
Which is a totally different argument than you have been making.

You seem to have a philosophical objection to burning hydro-carbons. Fine. But you hamper your point by making silly statements about butanol. People who know better stop listening to you, or worse, label all your other points as idiotic.
GIThruster wrote: We can do better. The Chevy Volt does better.

How many here live in smog areas, or areas that are regularly judged as "unhealthy to breathe the air"?
Places like that (mostly not in the US except maybe LA during an inversion) are typically also places with so many OTHER problems that a little smog is preferable to not getting enough food or water.

Personally, I would like to see a PRT system with self drive taxi / city-car type vehicles (and maybe Segways too) in the downtown regions. Drive your Volt to the PRT side-station near your house, hop onto the PRT and scoot directly to the side-station nearest your destination. Debark and hop into a city-car and drive to your final destination. Or walk or Segway if it is close enough. Leave your "ShareCar" at a designated drop-off spot. Since you will probably NOT have to waste time in traffic and trying to find a parking spoit, total commute time should be less than typical current commutes of the same distance.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

I have never challenged the notion that butanol is a better alternative to ethanol. My original three points however all still stand.

1) Butanol is NOT a replacement for gasoline. Like ethanol, it can be blended with gasoline, and the results are better, but it is not a replacement. It cannot be put into gasoline engines by itself without the expectation the engine will be damaged. BP and Dupont are recommending a 16% blend after extensive testing.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_interne ... _jun06.pdf

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/02 ... -bp-p.html

2) Like ethanol, butanol is synthetically cheap because gasoline is taxed and biofuels, as trendy items; are subsidized. If you look at the real costs of biofuels as compared to fossil fuels, you immediately find that fossil fuels are more cost effective. This has been common knowledge in the environmental science community for more than two decades. Advances in the process of turning food into fuel like the one at the top of this thread will drive the cost of biofuels down, but they cannot ever drive it as low as the cost of fossil fuel for the reasons I've already noted. It will always be cheaper to gather existing resources than it is to grow them.

3) The argument for moving to biofuels is predicated upon the notion that "renewable" resources are de facto superior to fossil fuels and this is not true. Growing food in order to power transport has far reaching effects, especially including driving the cost of food up.

Additionally, I made the following observations:

4) Burning butanol makes almost no impact on carbon emissions. Although growing things like sweetgrass in order to produce biofuels does sequester carbon, it sequesters carbon from CO2, not from airborn particulates which are obviously the more serious health problem.

I will go on to note here that much of Northern California routinely has air that is rated as "unhealthy" because of the particulates released into the air by automobiles. Northern California has thousands of square miles that suffer some of the worst smog in the world--smog so bad that there are often huge pile-up accidents on completely straight highways, because the drivers cannot see the cars in front of them. Smog is a very serious problem in many of the nations cities, in broad valley temperature inversion areas, and is a growing problem in places like China and India. This problem will continue to escalate as the numbers of drivers and cars around the world escalates.

Finally I offered my own opinion about the situation in general, which is that burning any hydrocarbon is a less than best solution for transport, because this will always produce harmful particulates. Although the supposed evidence for CO2 being a problem as relates to climate change is questionable, the problem of air pollution from carbon particulates is not in question. It is a severe health hazard that needs a solution. Smog is accredited by some for hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health costs in the US alone, and globally this will be a multi-trillion dollar problem unless we find new transportation solutions involving clean energy. There is no doubt that breathing unhealthy air on a regular basis does indeed create health risks and costs.

http://www.pennenvironment.org/reports/pac/danger-air

When we make a move in our infrastructure, such as to support things like bio-fuels, we in effect eliminate other alternatives. If we subsidize sweetgrass we'll do so at the expense of research into things like better batteries. This is already a problem and it will be worse, if people who don't much understand the real issues, are the ones who make the decisions.

Anyone who has studied this issue of biofuels, understands these points. This breakthrough concerning making butanol competitive with ethanol needs to be taken in its proper context. These are the issues that form that context.
Last edited by GIThruster on Thu Jan 19, 2012 9:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

{removed double post}
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

D Tibbets
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Post by D Tibbets »

GIThruster, concerning your second point- true cost. This link quotes a subsidy of ~ $0.45 per gallon of ethanol (which has ended). With other considerations, this means that the ethanol is probably a little more expensive than gasoline (at ~ $3.10 per gallon) when mileage is factored in. If gasoline goes back up to $4.00 per gallon, the situation will be reversed. The point is that the cost is comparable (at least under a stable tax structure). The important consideration is not the marginal cost differences, but the availability. Petroleum is cost is volatile and of limited availability. Thus it may become very expensive over the next few decades. Alternative fuels to supplement (not totally replace) gasoline makes economic sense, and perhaps greenhouse gas and pollution abatement sense. . If you are most interested in an "ideal" fuel, liquified natural gas or hydrogen is the obvious choices. The problem, as you stress, is that the current infrastructure and engines, etc would have to be replaced. Ethanol and perhaps butanol, biodesil, etc. are alternative partial solutions that require no or minimal changes in the current systems- ie : it is much cheaper, and available on a shorter lead time.

As far as electric cars (just like hydrogen cars) they look attractive if you ignore many related issues- like power plant capacity, coal pollution, battery costs and safety, profound problems with hydrogen production and storage, etc...

[Edit] I forgot the link. Basically it said that there was a ~ 45 cent subsidy which ended this month, which would increase the cost of 10% ethanol gas by ~ 4 cents. This is still slightly less costly than pure gasoline.



Dan Tibbets
Last edited by D Tibbets on Thu Jan 19, 2012 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
To error is human... and I'm very human.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Dan, that's all true. I would note to you though, if you want to do a real economic evaluation, it has to be apples with apples. You didn't look at all the ways that gas is taxed. If you look at the issue carefully, what you find is that fossil is always going to be more economical than bio.

As to availability, well, that's a political issue, isn't it? It has a political solution. The will of the people is for now to pursue bio-fuels because they're "renewable" but if the will of the people was to pursue fossil fuels, they'd certainly get a better deal. There's plenty here in North America. If we went after it, we could eliminate all foreign imports. Instead, Americans have routinely voted to stop drilling anywhere and everywhere they can and purchase oil from overseas. So the availability issue is not quite a red herring, it still matters, but it's a problem of our own creation and it has a very simple solution--drill baby, drill!

As far as electric goes, the issues you raise should not be neglected, but if we had batteries or capacitors that could yield the same performance as fossil fuels, I think we'd stop burning all fossil fuels pretty quickly. We'd build a lot more nuclear and we'd start focusing on how to use nuclear to eliminate the nuclear waste we already have stored in 38,000 places across the US. We are not going to get there, by focusing on bio-fuels. Rather, what we're going to get are higher fuel and food prices.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

GIThruster wrote: I have never challenged the notion that butanol is a better alternative to ethanol. My original three points however all still stand.

1) Butanol is NOT a replacement for gasoline. Like ethanol, it can be blended with gasoline, and the results are better, but it is not a replacement. It cannot be put into gasoline engines by itself without the expectation the engine will be damaged. BP and Dupont are recommending a 16% blend after extensive testing.
Wow, British PETROLEUM is recommending that you buy 84% gasoline. Hully, gee what a surprise. :roll:

Re 1: Past documented testing says you are wrong, for most engines.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

GIThruster wrote: 2) Like ethanol, butanol is synthetically cheap because gasoline is taxed and biofuels, as trendy items; are subsidized.
What has that got to do with a statement that progress toward a sustainable replacement for gasoline has been made?

I don't believe that I ever suggested that it was CURRENTLY cost competative. Indeed I made a speculation about aditional work needed before it COULD be competative.

And by the way, petroleum is subsidized too, but they have had ~100 years to figure out how to hide that fact.

AcesHigh
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Post by AcesHigh »

can Buthanol be produced from sugarcane?

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Yes, they use sugar cane in Brazil. Anything with the proper carbohydrates, which includes anything producing sugar. The higher the sugar content, the more butanol you will get--same as creating ethanol and methanol. However, commercially it is cheapest to use sweetgrass. If you can write off initial investment somehow such that the necessary infrastructure costs are not at issue, then growing algae between glass plates produces the most carbohydrate per unit sunlight, making it the preferred solution for space applications. Current practice here in the US and in Europe is to produce ethanol from corn, just because the crops have not yet been exchanged to reflect the practice of growing food for fuel.
Last edited by GIThruster on Thu Jan 19, 2012 11:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Dan, here's an example of good cost analysis concerning this issue. This is an old analysis and it is for ethanol, but you can begin to start to understand from it, just why bio-fuels cannot compete with fossil fuels on a even basis.
-------------
David Pimentel, an agricultural scientist at Cornell University and one of the foremost critics of ethanol, has conducted numerous cost analyses on ethanol production. He's made a name for himself mostly by driving the ethanol industry raving mad. From its very beginnings, when hoe enters soil, ethanol production has not changed much since the nineteenth century. Pimentel found that one acre of U.S. corn field yields about 7,110 pounds of corn, which in turn produces 328 gallons of ethanol. Setting aside the environmental implications (which are substantial), the financial costs already begin to mount. To plant, grow, and harvest the corn takes about 140 gallons of fossil fuel and costs about $347 per acre. According to Pimentel's analysis, even before the corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock alone costs $0.69 per gallon of ethanol.

More damning, however, is that converting corn to ethanol requires about 99,119 BTUs to make one gallon, which has 77,000 BTUs of available energy. So about 29 percent more energy is required to produce a gallon of ethanol than is stored in that gallon in the first place. "That helps explain why fossil fuels (not ethanol) are used to produce ethanol," Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. U.S. drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't for government subsidies that artificially lower the price." All told, a gallon of ethanol costs $2.24 to produce, compared to $0.63 for a gallon of gasoline.


and here's a more recent treatment of this issue:

http://cornellsun.com/node/34938
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Robthebob
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Post by Robthebob »

Here are some reasons for using renewable biofuel over harvesting fuels in nature:

-no additional pollution, whatever created the biofuel is simply released back into the system. No acid rain, no additional greenhouse gases. (Not completely positive with the acid rain)

-as far as stable, accessible, and high energy density things, biofuel, well actually chemical based sources of energy, is better than whatever we can make, as far as I know, or we would all just plug our cars into the wall, electric energy is cheaper than gas. (due to this, I dont see combustion fuels ever just going away)

-transform energy from one source to another. The laws of thermodynamics would say this is pretty bad, and it is. But imagine if fusion came to be, which means close to free energy, then there will be like no cost advantage to harvesting to growing. If cost becomes a trivial thing, then we can start worrying about environmental issues, availability, etc (not that we shouldnt worry about those to begin with, people love money.)

Currently, the biofuel growing method I think that's pretty amazing is algae fuel, because of various reasons:

-does not use valuable forms of "waste" as food source. Things like corn husk and other "wastes" often are used by farmers to replenish the land, algae is like farm a bunch of fish, and the poop is the food source.

-does not compete with valuable agriculture land area, does not need clean water. The locations you can put to use as algae farms are actually pretty undesirable shit holes, and that's good. I think every other forms of biofuel requires using competing land area that should other wise be used to grow food and other stuff.

-apparently, dont quote me, algae fuel going from live algae to fuel is very short and sweet. They starve the algae and they die turning into the fuel, end of story. I dont know if any other biofuels need to deal with the problem with conversion, but algae fuel apparently doesnt need to deal with that.
Throwing my life away for this whole Fusion mess.

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