Water demand for ethanol production causes concern
Eyebrows definitely rose when city planners in Illinois and Iowa realized that approximately 300 million gallons of water would be needed in the production of 100 million gallons of ethanol yearly. Both states are major producers of the alternative fuel at No. 2 and No. 1 respectively.But scientists reassured state and city governments that while the demand is high, neither will affect state supplies. They point to Chicago, which uses 500 million gallons daily from Lake Michigan. The Illinois cities of Champaign and Urbana, where a nearby ethanol plant is proposed, use 23 million gallons of water daily. The Mahomet Aquifer in Illinois is estimated to contain 13 trillion gallons, more than enough to meet the demands of proposed ethanol plants as well as the needs of the various farms, homes, and industries. Ethanol supporters state corn shortages are more likely to decrease ethanol production than lack of water. Still, ethanol producers acquiesced to do more studies on aquifer supplies to continue the construction of ethanol plants in the cities.
[Source: Associated Press via Detroit News]
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Prof.Hans-Jürgen Franke 10:04PM (9/19/2008)
ETHANOL-PRODUCTION WITH BLUE-GREEN-ALGAE
A SOLUTION AFTER PEAK-OIL AND OIL-CRASH
University of Hawai'i Professor Pengchen "Patrick" Fu developed an innovative technology, to produce high amounts of ethanol with modified cyanobacterias, as a new feedstock for ethanol, without entering in conflict with the food and feed-production .
Fu has developed strains of cyanobacteria — one of the components of pond scum — that feed on atmospheric carbon dioxide, and produce ethanol as a waste product.
He has done it both in his laboratory under fluorescent light and with sunlight on the roof of his building. Sunlight works better, he said.
It has a lot of appeal and potential. Turning waste into something useful is a good thing. And the blue-green-algae needs only sun and wast- recycled from the sugar-cane-industry, to grow and to produce directly more and more ethanol. With this solution, the sugarcane-based ethanol-industry in Brazil and other tropical regions will get a second way, to produce more biocombustible for the worldmarket.
The technique may need adjusting to increase how much ethanol it yields, but it may be a new technology-challenge in the near future.
The process was patented by Fu and UH in January, but there's still plenty of work to do to bring it to a commercial level. The team of Fu foundet just the start-up LA WAHIE BIOTECH INC. with headquarter in Hawaii and branch-office in Brazil.
PLAN FOR AN EXPERIMENTAL ETHANOL PLANT
Fu figures his team is two to three years from being able to build a full-scale
ethanol plant, and they are looking for investors or industry-partners (jointventure).
He is fine-tuning his research to find different strains of blue-green algae that will produce even more ethanol, and that are more tolerant of high levels of ethanol. The system permits, to "harvest" continuously ethanol – using a membrane-system- and to pump than the blue-green-algae-solution in the Photo-Bio-Reactor again.
Fu started out in chemical engineering, and then began the study of biology. He has studied in China, Australia, Japan and the United States, and came to UH in 2002 after a stint as scientist for a private company in California.
He is working also with NASA on the potential of cyanobacteria in future lunar and Mars colonization, and is also proceeding to take his ethanol technology into the marketplace. A business plan using his system, under the name La Wahie Biotech, won third place — and a $5,000 award — in the Business Plan Competition at UH's Shidler College of Business.
Daniel Dean and Donavan Kealoha, both UH law and business students, are Fu's partners. So they are in the process of turning the business plan into an operating business.
The production of ethanol for fuel is one of the nation's and the world's major initiatives, partly because its production takes as much carbon out of the atmosphere as it dumps into the atmosphere. That's different from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which take stored carbon out of the ground and release it into the atmosphere, for a net increase in greenhouse gas.
Most current and planned ethanol production methods depend on farming, and in the case of corn and sugar, take food crops and divert them into energy.
Fu said crop-based ethanol production is slow and resource-costly. He decided to work with cyanobacteria, some of which convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into their own food and release oxygen as a waste product.
Other scientists also are researching using cyanobacteria to make ethanol, using different strains, but Fu's technique is unique, he said. He inserted genetic material into one type of freshwater cyanobacterium, causing it to produce ethanol as its waste product. It works, and is an amazingly efficient system.
The technology is fairly simple. It involves a photobioreactor, which is a
fancy term for a clear glass or plastic container full of something alive, in which light promotes a biological reaction. Carbon dioxide gas is bubbled through the green mixture of water and cyanobacteria. The liquid is then passed through a specialized membrane that removes the
ethanol, allowing the water, nutrients and cyanobacteria to return to the
photobioreactor.
Solar energy drives the conversion of the carbon dioxide into ethanol. The partner of Prof. Fu in Brazil in the branch-office of La Wahie Biotech Inc. in Aracaju - Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke - is developing a low-cost photo-bio-reactor-system. Prof. Franke want´s soon creat a pilot-project with Prof. Fu in Brazil.
The benefit over other techniques of producing ethanol is that this is simple and quick—taking days rather than the months required to grow crops that can be converted to ethanol.
La Wahie Biotech Inc. believes it can be done for significantly less than the cost of gasoline and also less than the cost of ethanol produced through conventional methods.
Also, this system is not a net producer of carbon dioxide: Carbon dioxide released into the environment when ethanol is burned has been withdrawn from the environment during ethanol production. To get the carbon dioxide it needs, the system could even pull the gas out of the emissions of power plants or other carbon dioxide producers. That would prevent carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere, where it has been implicated as a
major cause of global warming.
Honolulo – Hawaii/USA and Aracaju – Sergipe/Brasil - 15/09/2008
Prof. Pengcheng Fu – E-Mail: pengchen2008@gmail.com
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – E-Mail: lawahiebiotech.brasil@gmail.com
Tel.: 00-55-79-3243-2209
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Phil L. 12:42PM (6/23/2006)
Very interesting!
So... While I'm sure it's a big simplification to say that you need 3 gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol you want to produce, I had no idea the number would be so large.
But what is all of the water used for? The linked article is pretty vague: "processing the product and cooling equipment". It's possible to configure cooling systems to circulate the same water, much like an automotive engine cooling system, so that use could be static. The term "processing" could cover a whole range of activities. The water doesn't just disappear. How easily can it be cleaned? Are there chemical or contaminant issues that need to be addressed?
I wonder if energy and cost estimates of a 100-million-gallon-a-year ethanol plant include an adjacent 300-million-gallon-a-year water treatment facility.
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Howard Lee Harkness 2:17PM (6/23/2006)
Lots of unanswered questions... Enough so that I'm left wondering why this is such a Big Deal. If by water 'usage', you mean heating it up a bit and then discharging it, I can't really see how the usage is an issue (maybe the heat pollution is, but the water isn't 'used' up in any real sense).
Ethanol is full of problems other than this, so I would consider this a Red Herring anyway. Just the fact that the producers of ethanol use fossil fuels in the production process (it's less expensive than using the ethanol!) is a big "DOH" in my book.
Unless yields can be increased dramatically, and the energy used in production can also be decreased dramatically, ethanol is pretty much just a multi-billion dollar vote-buying scheme with ADM being the primary US beneficiary.
So far, the most promising green fuel that I have seen is algae-derived biodiesel, although what I would really prefer to see is a simpler, cheaper, lighter, and more dependable SVO engine.
--
The Celtic Fiddler
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rg 7:04PM (6/23/2006)
After they process the corn into the corn sugars that ferment, they need to mix it with something. In this case it's water. It's just like making, beer, whisky, rum, etc... You need to mix the corn sugar with something. It can't be fermented in powder form. You need to dilute it down so that the sugars will ferment out to less than 25% total alcohol. There are not many yeasts that are tolerant above this point. If they don't use enough water, the total alcohol potential will be so high that they won't get the yields they could because the yeast would die above a certain point leaving unfermented sugars.
After the yeast has done it's job which can take a couple of days, the resulting fermented brew is distilled. The alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than the water. Most of the available alcohol is ethanol but a small amount of Methanol. The point of distillation is to get as much alcohol out as possible while leaving as much water behind as possible.
After distillation the leftovers are nothing more than more yeast and for the most part water. These yeast can be reused in the next batch and even the water left over can be reused as well. It just needs to be added to. If this were for human consumption you wouldn't want to reuse it but for fuel it doesn't matter.
The big problem with making ethanol is how do you generate the heat for the boilers that do the distilling? There are many critics because some are using coal to fire them. Smaller scale distilling and brewing can be done by using electricity as a heat source and then using either wind or water power as a source of the energy to make electricity. Location in either a windy climate or on a river would make the most sense in this regards.
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ldubya 10:06PM (6/24/2006)
I have yet to see the upside for E85. I was shocked to hear that E10 is already in use in my city. Now that the spot market for ethanol is on the rise when will we see more commodities start to have a ripple effect?
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rg 5:47PM (6/25/2006)
The unfortunate thing is that Ethanol has less energy potential in it than gasoline. The stoichiometer air/fuel ratio for ethanol is somewhere around 9:1 whereas for gasoline it is 14.7:1 or so. Then you consider that ethanol isn't some magical clean burning fuel. It is still dirty and contributes to the same pollutants as gasoline. Ethanol burning gives off less CO2 but actually increases Nitrogen Oxides, Aldehydies, and some other volutile organic compounds. It isn't a pure clean fuel by any means. It helps in one area but is worse in others. Also consider that since you will need to use more of it than gasoline to go just as far, you'll be adding more of these higher level of pullutants into the air. It isn't all that.
The sad thing is that added Ethanol isn't going to make our gas prices and cheaper. This is a myth. In fact in some parts of the country, changing over to ethaol as an additive rather than MTBE has actually raised gas prices. Also consider that our genious lawmakers have realized that we will have to import some of our ethanol to keep up with demand so they have decided to tax any imported ethanol at a rate of $1.55 per gallon. So much for being cheap. The push towards Ethanol is basically a trend that is happening due to pressure from environmentalists. Sadly this isn't making them happy either. Now they complain that the factories that make it are too dirty and cause too much pollution. No matter what fuel system we end up using, the government will find a way to make it expensive and environmentalists will find a way to complain about it. Let's just face it. We aren't going to win on any of these accounts no matter what we do.
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