OT: The value of Ethanol

Somehow, that doesn't make any sense. Maybe a gallon of oil can REFINE multiple gallons of gas?

No way Jose! If we could get politics out of energy I think we would be much better off (a dream, I know).

Why corn? Washington corn lobbyists?

Why not cellulose or grass? Too bad their is no money in yard clippings! Or maybe their will be, one day.

Another ethanol from grass article I just dug up (published yesterday) from Chemical and Engineering News (a darn good rag!).

Pimentel uses some very questionable assumptions in including a very low yield number on ethanol/bushel feed material that has been refuted in several studies. The last DOE study I saw was 1.6 iirc, but it includes some waste byproducts (dry distillers grains) used in that figure.

That would indeed be a neat trick, but I'm pretty sure even the oil companies haven't repealed the Second Law...

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You might suspect that, but you would be wrong. Adding refinery capacity would help potentially, but that doesn't address why oil futures have touched $100 -- making more refining capacity available will not do a thing to quell demand nor settle the political situation in the oil-rich regions of the world.

Granted ethanol is _not_ the panacea but can be beneficial in filling in supplies and will continue to be less costly w/ time as both genetics and processing technologies improve combined w/ sufficient infrastructure to handle it more efficiently than at present.

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"Leon" wrote... [snip]

This is a nice trick. Refining 1 gallon of crude results in *more* than 1 gallon of gas even though gasoline is only 1 of many products in the crude oil.

Who is doing the math here? Enron? Fact: 1 barrel of oil = 42 gallons. $75/bbl / 42 = $1.79 just for the crude oil. Add to this the yield (1 gal of oil nets less than 1 gal of gas); and the costs of transportation and refining (I don't know what these are but they're certainly greater than zero).

Completely invalid assumptions.

What does this have to do with entropy? :^)

I think you meant the Law of Conservation of Mass.

Everthing else so far discussed aside, keep in mind that ethanol is an alcohol (i.e. "oxegenated hydrocarbon"), the use of which in gasoline is primarily designed to decrease greenhouse emmisons (ie.carbon dioxide). It is NOT supposed to replace the BTU value of the other stuff (i.e. alkanes, alkenes, etc) of gasoline, especially as a cost-effective measure, no matter what stupid f*ck-head 'dubya has to say.

-Zz

PS: I know this industry

Still that is a poor ratio when compaired to oil.

Oil futures have reached $100 per barrel because we have been deceived that gasoline has to sell for almost $3.00 per gallon. When you sell gasoline for $3.00 per gallon you are not so pickey with what you pay for the raw materials to produce that gasoline. Even those sellling the oil when it was $70 per barrel indicated that that price was absurdly high. Building more refineries would increase the supply of gasoline and drive down the proice. There is no shortage of oil, only the ability to turn it into gasoline and I am not so sure that is true either. I have not seen any gasoline lines like we had in the 70's.

Sorry, I mixed metaphors...I don't know the DOE number for the estimated oil consumption; while reading I was thinking of the Btu out/Btu in net energy gain that Pimentel has also been ranting on since forever...that is the 1.6 number the the DOE analysis produced. It's improved since the date of that report as well...

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Might tell that to the Brazilians.

Ethanal was about 20% less than spot gasoline market last time I looked...

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Correct, I was only addressing gasoline however.

My neighbor who was the cost engineer in charge of revamping a refinery in California last year.

Yes

That is true if 1 gallon of Oil only produces 1 gallon of gasoline. The yield is much higher.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Has to do with splitting heavy molecules into lighter ones, a process called "cracking" in the industry. A pound of CH3 takes up more volume than a pound of C2H6.

Does that mean that liquor's gonna get cheaper?

Well, now we know that you know as much about chemistry as you do about Israel.

As an aside:

Ethonal, aka "grain alcohol", is the stuff in wine, beer, whiskey, vodka, all kinda' booze, &tc. Its the stuff that gets us drunk, or tipsy, &tc. To transport said product from Kansas, Nebraska (aka "Gateway to Kansas"), to refineries in places, east, south, and west, they either have to pay the licquor tax, or de-nature the product so it can't be used as drink.

Guess waht the use to denare the ethanol for bulk shipments.

-ZZ

Methanol (wood alcohol). It gets metabolized to formaldehyde in your system. It's the formaldehyde that makes you sick.

Now exactly how many is a Brazilian? ;~) I could not help that.

Gasoline?

SNIP

I don't know all the facts but crude oil is a mix of many different hydrocarbons. Gas is a mix of a certain select hydrocarbons. Since larger chain hydrocarbons can be cracked into smaller chains, by repeated refining and cracking cycles it may be possible to get more gas by volumn than the volumn of crude oil started with. It depends on the densities of the various products. Of course you can't create more hydrogen or carbon than you start with.

ron