Correct me if I'm wrong but rather than aiming at finished product from a small refinery, wouldn't it be better to have the many small refineries reducing the bulk of the biomass (pyrolysis?) to something easily transported to larger refineries for finishing?

Depending on the desired product biometabolic pathways may be more efficient then pyrolysis and gasification. Small scale turn-key plants could provide the optimal arena for finding the most efficient means to produce specific products: instead of focusing on a few techniques with larger biorefineries this focuses on experimenting on a much larger variety of techniques with smaller more modifiable biorefineries.

Hey, whatever works the best wins. Good old competition sounds fine to me as long as all viable options get more than adequately funded. 1% of the $500 billion that we have spent so far on war ought to do the trick.

SJC I very much like your comparison of money spend on promoting home made fuels to the US military spending in Iraq. The Iraqi military spending is now $150 billion a year. For comparison the ethanol subsidy is $0,5 per gallon and current annual production capacity is 5,9 billion gallon. That makes $2,95 billion for subsidising ethanol.

Seriously the US should consider raising the ethanol subsidy to $1 per gallon. With such a subsidy it would likely increase the annual capacity to 60 billion gallons of ethanol (from all kinds of feedstock) in less than 10 years from now. It would cost $60 billion a year in 2018 but it will make the US practically independent of foreign oil and it would save $150 billion a year in Iraq (not to mention the savings of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers).

I say we should raise that ethanol subsidy to $1 per gallon ASAP not only in the US but worldwide. This world is heading for more chaos in the Middle East and it will ultimately diminish the amount of crude oil it is possible to export from that region.

The ability to convert the lignin is a big plus for gasification.

Conceivably, the lignin could be gasified even if the cellulose (+ hemicellulose) is processed by some other means.

Gasification also has significant entropy production; I'd like to see a less brute force approach, such as direct hydrogenation of lignin to produce light hydrocarbons.

Engineer-Poet:

Regarding your point 1). We can make much more ethanol from corn than the US currently makes. First you get 2,8 gallon of ethanol per bushel of corn (not 2,66). This year the corn fields will be expanded by 15% in the US. Higher corn prices mean subsequently increased production. With a $1 subsidy on ethanol we should expect corn production to rise quickly to 18 billion bushels (only three years from now if 15% growth pro anno. Use 12 billion bushels for ethanol (and 6 for other uses) and you get 12*2,8= 33,6 billion gallons. The other 30 billion gallons of ethanol should come from cellulose feedstock such as switch grass or forestry. With a $1 subsidy on ethanol, increasing corn prices and gasoline prices, the first cellulose ethanol will be produced in 2 or 3 years from now and thereafter production will explode because the production cost will go down and feedstock will not be plentiful enough for prices to stay low.

Regarding your point 2). You are right that ethanol producers currently use a lot of natural gas to produce ethanol but they use very little oil/diesel. In fact, the US department of agriculture made an analysis saying that, I quote “Every 1 Btu of petroleum fuel used to produce ethanol generates 13.2 Btus, thereby greatly enhancing U.S. energy security.” In other words, if the trucks used ethanol instead of diesel it would only decrease ethanol production available for non-ethanol related transportation by 7,6%. The natural gal is used because it currently is cheap. It will increase in price with increasing ethanol production and as a result new sources of stationary energy will be used. Electricity from the next generation 5MW wind turbines (4 years from now) will be able to produce at 4 c/kWh cheaper than coal and nuclear power. Use that instead of natural gas.

Regarding your point 3). I know that the energy content in ethanol is lower than gasoline but that is not all that matters for fuel economy. I have read somewhere that when the engine is adjusted to run primarily on ethanol and not gasoline the engine can take advantage of the characteristics of ethanol, (high octane, and high combustion point?) to produce almost the same torque as gasoline does. In other words, with adjusted flex fuel cars the 60 billion of ethanol could replace almost 60 billion of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline. The US can produce another 50 billion gallons by its own oil and the rest can be imported from Canada and Mexico.

The point is that it does not pay at all to spend $150 billion a year to protect oil in the Middle East when a $60 billion ethanol subsidy could insure (I repeat insure) the US from the disaster of not being able to import energy from a Middle East. That area is on a highway to total chaos and it seems that not even a $150 billion in military spending on Iraq is able to prevent this disaster anyway. The US would do much better by getting out of there and use the saved money to become self-sufficient on energy.

Henrik,

All of which suggests the reasons for Iraq are not entirely petroleum driven.

As always people INSANELY see 1 reason for everything...

fuels... wars...

The war was about several things.

1 Slime congressmen outed our spies in the region meaning no one with ANY aence spies for us there UNLESS the are a double agent...
2 As a result we went to wat based on what we DIDNT know.

3 We also had only 1 more year before we COULD NOT EVER invade iraq... we litteraly would never EVER be able to do so again..
4 Saddam was printing over 1 BILLION a tear in funny money and giving billions to terrorists to try to buy his way into herodome...

5 We lost track of some rather scarry thngs.. and saddam was top on the list of buyers.
6 Saddam was OUR fault in the first place WE MADE HIM. We were the only ones who could take him before he went over the edge.

So we went in... didnt hurt that we needed to test our new army setup and soo many untested deadly toys... also didnt hurt that we are SURE to face a REAL war in same conditions soon... having some vets around for such a war is more valuable then all the tanks ad stealth bombers we have...

And it keeps suiciders bussy over THERE.

As for fuels... because we have 1000s of different goals we have people woking on thousands of different fuels... we dont have to worry wich will work out as long as enough do... But just as in the war we realy need to yjik on ALL the reasons for these fuels.. or we might be unpleasantly suprised by what the future brings.

Engineer poet to repeat what you presumably missed “In fact, the US department of agriculture made an analysis saying that, I quote “Every 1 Btu of petroleum fuel used to produce ethanol generates 13.2 Btus, thereby greatly enhancing U.S. energy security.” In other words, if the trucks used ethanol instead of diesel it would only decrease ethanol production available for non-ethanol related transportation by 7,6%.”
That is, produce 60 billion gallons of ethanol gross and you get 60 - 60*0,076=55,44 billion gallons of ethanol net of the ethanol needed to grow and transport the corn and do all the distribution of the ethanol.

You are also grossly wrong when equating the struggle of developing commercial cellulose ethanol with the struggle to develop commercial fusion energy. I wonder were you got your degree Engineer-poet.

Henrik attempts to obfuscate:

“Every 1 Btu of petroleum fuel used to produce ethanol generates 13.2 Btus, thereby greatly enhancing U.S. energy security.”

I wonder were you got your degree Engineer-poet.

Ep so you now acknowledge that petroleum motor fuel is only a fraction of the energy input for ethanol production. That is progress.

The world is running out of all fossil fuels.  Localities which have coal or natural gas have the advantage for some industries (because those fuels do not travel well), but a system which requires 750 kJ of fossil fuels to produce 1 MJ of "biofuel" is a failure in the long run, whether economists recognize it or not.  The division between motor fuel and other fuels is ultimately unimportant.

My point ... is all energy forms that are not important for the national security because it may come from other sources than crude oil that are plentiful and that can even be green e.g. using wind turbines.

If you cannot give me even one example, admit to me that these things DO NOT EXIST and may require too much invested energy to ever be worthwhile.  Distilleries are driven by heat, and the heat required to distill ethanol can be half or more of its chemical energy (more for dilute starting liquors).

Current stand-alone distilleries in the US mostly use natural gas or propane, both of which are perfectly good motor fuels themselves.  I suggested that the use of those fuels in distilleries be banned, and that the distilleries be relocated to the grounds of steam-turbine powerplants.  The distilleries could buy low-pressure steam to run their processes, and the fermentation gases with their troublesome odors could be used as a diluent gas in the boilers where the organic compounds would burn off.  The efficiency penalty at the powerplant is much smaller than the fuel ethanol yield.  If someone has a way to treat the distillery wastewater (perhaps convert the unrecovered ethanol to acetic acid with Acetobacter, then anaerobically digest the remaining organics to methane), this might address most of the objections to ethanol production.

It still wouldn't be sustainable; it would depend on depleting fossil fuels.  But it would be far better than anything out there today.

My PhD is in economics. A seminarian? Absolutely not. You know I am probably less superstitious than the average engineer.

Michael we who share the privilege of being part of the free and democratic part of the world should keep fighting for that privilege. It is worth dying for at any time. If I am called for service I will fulfil my duty. I do not questing our obligation to fight for our own freedom or to assist our neighbours struggle for their freedom. But I do question the strategy to fulfil that obligation.

Firstly, I believe it is a strategy failure of grand scale that we the past 10 years have become increasingly dependent on crude oil from areas that by far and large do not share our passion for freedom and democracy. Instead, a massive effort (at least $100 billion a year for the US and a similar amount for the rest of the free world) should be launched to get means of transportation such as bio fuels, PHEVs and EVs that does not rely on crude oil imports. In the long run we can’t afford not to have that kind of insurance because eventually there will be war (wars have come and they will continue to come).

Secondly, I believe it is a strategy failure of grand scale to fight the war like we do now in Iraq. There are many issues to address and it would not be possible to get into the details in this forum. However, here is a few: 1) You can’t help somebody if they don’t wish to be helped. Unfortunately, I see only a few groups in Iraq that have asked for foreign help notably the Kurds. Let us help those groups and forget about the rest. Most of Europe and even a large part of the Germans were begging for the US to come and help them fight Hitler. 2) Our soldiers should not lead the fight since it is ultimately not their war. We should train the local people until they can lead themselves. They could get air support from a few heavily fortified air bases that covered all of Iraq. 3) It should be considered to build these support airbases on top of an Iraqi oil field so that they could drill and refine the gas needed for their own operation. Then they could fly everything else in and out thereby exposing our troops minimally to attacks from the enemy. This strategy would require far less soldiers and it would cost a fraction (perhaps 1/3) of the current $150 billion annual spending in Iraq. More importantly, we would decimate the losses of life among the coalition forces. Such an operation could carry on for as many years or decades as needed to prevent the country from becoming a safe haven for terrorists.

I do not want to sound arrogant but as an economist I am trained to pay attention to the resources spend and its payoff. There is no doubt in my mind that we could promote and secure our freedom and democracy far better by going for a low cost operation in Iraq and use the saved money to get serious with green energy such as bio fuels, PHEVs, EVs, wind and solar. With that strategy we would be much better prepared if a serious war with hundred of thousands of dead should break out (the clash of civilisations or something else). Furthermore, and even more important we could at the same time solve then problem of global warming and prevent mass extinction of species.

Michael you are right on about me not having a soul. I don’t believe in that. We are sophisticated chemistry. That is all. But I do believe in moralising and in caring deeply about others. My feelings in this regard are not limited to humans, but cover the survival and well being of all spices.

Ep the seminarian thing was me trying to be funny. I failed, you understood it literally. I completely agree with you that “a system which requires 750 kJ of fossil fuels to produce 1 MJ of "biofuel" is a failure in the long run”. Fortunately, wind is a growing part of the US electricity supply and as such it ends up in electricity used for ethanol production. To repeat, wind power could in a not so far future deliver the bulk of the necessary energy for bio fuel production. Let us take that discussion in another post on wind energy. As an engineer, it is your duty to worry about the low energy conversion rate from turning some energy forms into transportation fuel. As an economics I worry mostly about whether it pays or not and ethanol is actually good business. I am sure that you engineers will make it an even better business by improving the future conversion rate.

Henrik and EP:
If we want to make a realistic comparison between both the economic (dollar) costs and the energy costs (KJ or BTU) of biomass-based hydrocarbon fuels and petroleum-based hydrocarbon fuels, we have to put both in the same context. This is a fundamental point which is usually lacking in discussions of the 'cost of ethanol'.

It would require an entire study to do it correctly, but consider the variations in the cost of imported oil from Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria - three of our major suppliers. There's the mining, the transport across the globe, the desulfurization, the refining, the transport to market - all quite variable, depending on whether it's heavy or light petroleum, with or without sulfur - etc. There are also the 'indirect costs' of toxic pollution, military conflict and political instability, as well as the effect on net fossil CO2 emissions.

To make a comparison to ethanol costs, you'd have to include the same factors: agricultural costs of biomass production (water, fertilizer, tractor fuel, labor) must be treated the same way as the costs of mining petroleum; the 'biorefinery process' must be treated the same as the oil refinery process - and yet this has to my knowledge never been done. Every study seems to skew the results in the favor of one side or the other.

The very fact that people attempt to assign a single 'energy cost' to ethanol production is evidence of a certain level of ignorance on the topic. Every energy use estimate should produce a RANGE of costs, depending on the efficiencies along every step of the path, whether you are dealing with petroleum or agricultural products.

For example: If you can drill a hole under your house and hit a well of pure kerosene, that's a bit different from extracting sulfurous oil from the desert, processing it in three different refineries, and shipping it halfway around the world. Your energy costs would be very different in those two cases! Similar issues apply to agricultural ethanol production.

In thermodynamic terms, this is a path-dependent function, NOT a state function. The efficiencies are the dominant factor: one can build a gasoline or ethanol powered car that gets 10 mpg, or you can build one that gets 100 mpg - the energy density of the fuel (i.e. the state function) is a minor factor.

Is anyone selling E100-electric hybrids? The first one was patented in 1903, you know.