Australian Politics Forum - Would you use ethanol in your car?

Amadd

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Mo

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Would you use ethanol in your car?
Oct 23^rd, 2008 at 7:01pm

Going by the model that Brazil is using atm, there has been no adverse effects to cars by using up to 50% ethanol (or alcohol) as a fuel. The bowser price is significantly lower, maybe 30% or more at current prices.

The downside is that it has caused extra land clearing for sugar-cane crops.

Given that we, in Australia, have better access to farmable land for cane crops and can most probably improve on the current technologies, we should be able to do as good or better than Brazil is doing using this type of fuel.

Would you use it?

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muso

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #1 - Oct 24^th, 2008 at 7:51am

I wouldn't use 100% ethanol or 80% ethanol at the moment because the manufacturer recommends a maximum of 10% Ethanol (E10). If the car was modified so that all the internals were more compatible with the more polar solvent, then I'd certainly swap.

You have to realise that you get less bang for your buck with ethanol. Even with E10, you need a 6 cents per litre differential with ULP to make economic sense. If you buy E10 in most places, you're paying for a warm fuzzy feeling, but it won't necessarily be borne out in the mileage.

It's useful to convert all energy sources into common units to do a comparison. I did that on another forum. Here's what I said:

Quote:

I thought it would be interesting to compare Energy costs worldwide, including petrol (gasoline) and diesel.

I'm not sure what the best way to do this would be. I'm used to kWh (Units) here in Australia (Queensland).

Our Electricity costs 19c per unit for the first portion, then 9c per unit after. Since the $US and the $AU are pretty close, that would be about the same in $US terms.

Our 91 Octane petrol costs $1.59/Litre (US$1.53) today, although it's going up all the time. Diesel is a horrendous $1.82/Litre (US$1.75). E10 is $1.57/L.

Converting using energy values of Standard 91 octane petrol is 31.9 MJ/L. Multiply by 0.278 and you get 9.4 kWh/L (Units/L). With petrol at $1.59 per litre($US1.51), that's 17.9 cents /Unit.

Ethanol has an energy value of 21.2 MJ/L, so for E10, that gives us 18.2c/Unit. So it costs us more to choose the more environmentally friendly option right now.

Automotive Diesel at 35.6 MJ/L gives us a per unit cost of 20.49 x 35.6/31.9 = 22.9c/Unit

I don't know what energy units you use in the US (is it BTU?). Let me know if you want to change the fuel names too.

So in tabular form and converting everything to $US:

Energy Source c(US)/Unit

Mains Electricity 18.3

" "- Discounted 8.7

Petrol(Gasoline) 17.2

E10 17.5

Diesel 22.1

Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. Octane ratings are not standard worldwide:

Quote:

"In Australia, "regular" unleaded fuel is RON 91, "premium" unleaded with RON 95 is widely available, and RON 98 fuel is also reasonably common. ...

It should be noted that this higher rating seen in Europe is an artifact of a different underlying measuring procedure. In most countries (including all of Europe and Australia) the "headline" octane that would be shown on the pump is the RON, but in the United States, Canada and some other countries the headline number is the average of the RON and the MON, sometimes called the Anti-Knock Index (AKI), Road Octane Number (RdON), Pump Octane Number (PON), or (R+M)/2. Because of the 8 to 10 point difference noted above, this means that the octane in the United States will be about 4 to 5 points lower than the same fuel elsewhere: 87 octane fuel, the "regular" gasoline in the US and Canada, would be 91-92 in Europe. ...."

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muso

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #2 - Oct 24^th, 2008 at 8:02am

Another point which may be relevant is that we just don't produce enough ethanol domestically in Australia to feed our demand for E10. This has not yet burst on to the national press, but a large proportion of the ethanol consumed in Australia is purchased on the spot market from overseas.

Ethanol is ethanol - right? Well chemically yes, provenance, no. If ethanol is manufactured from natural gas that obviously does a squat load of good for the environment. So all these happy smiling kids with balloons are promoting the use of fossil fuel (petrol) dosed with ethanol derived from natural gas (a fossil fuel).

Just what hope do we have? (Trust me, I'm a gas company executive - yeah, right)

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-18035158.html

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freediver

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #3 - Oct 24^th, 2008 at 10:16am

I use the 10% ethanol blends. There's a sticker on my fuel cap that says the car can handle it.

Brazil is a tropical country with ideal conditions for growing biofuels. Australia is mostly desert. We should obviously use some, but there is not enough to for everyone to use 100%, or even 50%. The price will drive this.

Note that ethanol is only about 90% as powerful as regualr petrol, on a per volume basis. So a 10% blend should cost at least 1% less for it to be a good deal.

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muso

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #4 - Oct 25^th, 2008 at 8:30am

freediver wrote on Oct 24^th, 2008 at 10:16am:

Note that ethanol is only about 90% as powerful as regualr petrol, on a per volume basis. So a 10% blend should cost at least 1% less for it to be a good deal.

It's actually a bit less than 90% as powerful, FD. If you read my quoted post above, ULP is 31.9 MJ/L and Ethanol is 21.2MJ/L.

That translates to about 67% as powerful on pure energy terms, however ethanol burns more efficiently than petrol in a typical internal combustion engine*, so it's around 75% as powerful as a rule of thumb. The 31.9MJ/L is variable, and depends on the exact mix from the refinery. The 21.2 is absolute, as Ethanol is a pure substance.

The addition of ethanol to fuel lifts the Motor Octane Number (MON) by around 4 units. So ULP has a typical MON of 81, whereas the same fuel blended with 10% ethanol has a MON of about 85.

Of course a lot depends on which car you are driving, what it's tuned for, what sort of driving you do mainly etc etc. With my Prius, the economy advantage of using ULP over E10 is around 2.5%.

*That advantage doesn't necessarily apply to rotary engines.

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« Last Edit: Oct 25^th, 2008 at 8:40am by muso »

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Amadd

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #5 - Oct 25^th, 2008 at 10:14am

Quote:

Another point which may be relevant is that we just don't produce enough ethanol domestically in Australia to feed our demand for E10.

There's nothing too complicated about putting together an ethanol production plant, you could make one in your own garage.

The U.S. primarily uses corn crops for their ethanol production, which would also be suitable for many areas in Australia, but our cane farmers are raring to go, all they need is the green light.

Quote:

I use the 10% ethanol blends. There's a sticker on my fuel cap that says the car can handle it.

An average car will handle much more than this without compromising efficiency to any noticable degree.
Some states in the U.S. are considering raising this limit to 20%.

As for the power produced, it's plenty powerful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgcK7nSa86Y

Maybe it will be purely a "price driven" factor that sees cleaner fuels eventually taking over, but the one thing that you can pretty certain about, is that oil companies will keep us on the brink of viability for as long as possible.

http://www.ethanolfacts.com/index.php

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muso

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #6 - Oct 25^th, 2008 at 1:44pm

Ethanol from sugar cane is by far the more efficient, but it would be good to see ethanol from biomass, because that uses an otherwise useless by product. Ethanol from sweet sorghum is another good option for arid parts of Australia. You can get an ethanol home producer's licence in the US, but so far nothing like that here.

I'm glad somebody else shares my suspicion of the oil companies.

FAME (Fatty Acid Methyl Ester) type biodiesel is another good option, especially when produced from crops like Jatropha, which will grow just about anywhere, including arid regions where practically nothing else will grow. It has become a backyard industry in parts of Europe.

Caution: if they don't extract the methanol properly, your engine could explode.

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freediver

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #7 - Oct 25^th, 2008 at 8:15pm

Biomass is never wasted. It makes a good fertiliser. It returns carbon to the ground. Biofuels are nto necessarily carbon neutral because their use can significantly reduce the carbon content of topsoil, which is a huge store of carbon. In fact some of the proposals for capturing CO2 is by letting scrub grow and the topsoil build back up again. Biofuel can effectively 'mine' the topsoil for carbon, similar to mining coal, and release it into the atmosphere.

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muso

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #8 - Oct 29^th, 2008 at 11:21am

freediver wrote on Oct 25^th, 2008 at 8:15pm:

Biomass is never wasted. It makes a good fertiliser. It returns carbon to the ground. Biofuels are nto necessarily carbon neutral because their use can significantly reduce the carbon content of topsoil, which is a huge store of carbon. In fact some of the proposals for capturing CO2 is by letting scrub grow and the topsoil build back up again. Biofuel can effectively 'mine' the topsoil for carbon, similar to mining coal, and release it into the atmosphere.

What you say is correct. We need a balanced sustainable approach to biofuel production. Any Biofuel production needs to come under scrutiny to ensure that it is 'environmentally profitable', otherwise we'll have token gestures like Exxon importing natural gas derived ethanol into Australia under the guise of being environmentally friendly.

Biofuel power generation has the potential to be carbon extracting if you incorporate carbon capture.

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« Last Edit: Oct 29^th, 2008 at 11:40am by muso »

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Amadd

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #9 - Oct 29^th, 2008 at 5:53pm

Yes it would be a mistake to move from one form of exploitation to another.
We've got plenty of our own natural gas, which is nevertheless more eco-friendly than petrolium.

Quote:

Biofuel power generation has the potential to be carbon extracting if you incorporate carbon capture.

Do you have a quick summary or a link to explain how this works?

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freediver Gold Member Offline www.ozpolitic.com Posts: 53324 At my desk.	Re: Would you use ethanol in your car? Reply #10 - Oct 29^th, 2008 at 6:22pm The problem wtih biofuels: http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1169519086
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Amadd

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #11 - Oct 29^th, 2008 at 6:50pm

I understand what you're saying in your link FD. We wouldn't want everybody rummaging through the forests for every potential new piece of topsoil and therefore hindering new growth.

But I think I am understanding what musu was saying about carbon capturing.
If we produce more of the matter which breathes carbon to survive, then we can produce a net gain.

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muso

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Re: Would you use ethanol in your car?
Reply #12 - Oct 30^th, 2008 at 9:46am

IPCC Working Group 3 did a lot of work on mitigation strategies for agriculture.

We shouldn't just dismiss biofuels as too hard. There are certainly problems inherent in their use, but there are many ways in which they can be produced and used successfully.

Carbon capture and sequestration from Coal Fired Power Plants has been in the news lately. They have the capability of being operated close to carbon neutral. The same technique can be used for biofuel production (this is quite a potentially lucrative area when carbon trading comes in in 2010 because it's carbon negative), but of course other techniques are available, including strategies to incorporate waste biomass in agricultural soils, as FD pointed out. Actually in some areas of agriculture, a great deal of waste biomass is wasted, usually by burning off. If we stop the burning practices alone, it will save a fortune in carbon credits.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg3.htm

Read through chapter 8 and you'll see a wide range of strategies there.

"Emissions from rice production and burning of biomass
were heavily concentrated in the group of developing countries,
with 97% and 92% of world totals, respectively. While CH4
emissions from rice occurred mostly in South and East Asia,
where it is a dominant food source (82% of total emissions),
those from biomass burning originated in Sub-Saharan Africa
and Latin America and the Caribbean (74% of total). Manure
management was the only source for which emissions where
higher in the group of developed regions (52%) than in
developing regions (48%; US-EPA, 2006a)."

More on Carbon Negative biofuel strategies:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5805/1598

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« Last Edit: Oct 30^th, 2008 at 9:58am by muso »

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