Making Ethanol
Post Fiend
Joined: Aug 2002
Posts: 5,324
Likes: 1
From: Denton,TX
The problem with making alcohol to run in your vehicle is that it takes more units of energy than you get in return. Biodiesel, however, takes about 3 untis of energy to produce about 10 units of product.
Senior User
Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 253
Likes: 0
From: topeka
Yeah, i've read that too Johnsdeisel. It seems to be a point of contention or of some debate. People seem to argue about how the accounting gets done, what all gets included in the energy used to make the ethanol.
Part of that debate was one guy posing the question, "Do you think ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) uses ethanol to make their ethanol?" I got the distinct feeling he was a proponent of nuclear energy. Hey how 'bout that? Wanna drive my nukin' ford?
Anyway, It would be rather redundant to use Ethanol to make more ethanol, so ADM probably does use natural gas. It's been relatively cheap for the last 20 years. My heating bill has not gone up until the year before last. And wouldn't corn be the real fuel of choice for ADM to use, to heat the sourmash? (I guess not, see website below)
Gettin on a soap box for a minute, some where i read that something will happen in the computer world that will make Microsoft and it's OS irrelevant. It will lose it's power. If would be nice if something would happen to make OPEC irrelevant.
An off the cuff idea, Load all that corn they grow in the midwest on mile long trains, ship it to the sunny southwest, cook it in solar stills for ethanol. Ship the distillers dried grains back and then feed it to livestock.
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from mike browns website http://www.mikebrownsolutions.com/ethanol.htm
How difficult and time-consuming would this be?
Let me use one example. Let’s say we had to replace one-third of our domestic gasoline consumption with alcohol as quickly as possible.
The time for a simple farmer to set up 100 55-gallon drums to produce 250 gallons of alcohol with a pipe full of rocks as a fractionating column to produce 190 proof (95%) alcohol is one day.
The time to ferment is three days.
The time to distill is one day.
That is, we could drop our dependence on gasoline by one-third in one week. In three years, we could end our dependence on petroleum forever.
Sound good to me.
Part of that debate was one guy posing the question, "Do you think ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) uses ethanol to make their ethanol?" I got the distinct feeling he was a proponent of nuclear energy. Hey how 'bout that? Wanna drive my nukin' ford?
Anyway, It would be rather redundant to use Ethanol to make more ethanol, so ADM probably does use natural gas. It's been relatively cheap for the last 20 years. My heating bill has not gone up until the year before last. And wouldn't corn be the real fuel of choice for ADM to use, to heat the sourmash? (I guess not, see website below)
Gettin on a soap box for a minute, some where i read that something will happen in the computer world that will make Microsoft and it's OS irrelevant. It will lose it's power. If would be nice if something would happen to make OPEC irrelevant.
An off the cuff idea, Load all that corn they grow in the midwest on mile long trains, ship it to the sunny southwest, cook it in solar stills for ethanol. Ship the distillers dried grains back and then feed it to livestock.
************************************************** ****
from mike browns website http://www.mikebrownsolutions.com/ethanol.htm
How difficult and time-consuming would this be?
Let me use one example. Let’s say we had to replace one-third of our domestic gasoline consumption with alcohol as quickly as possible.
The time for a simple farmer to set up 100 55-gallon drums to produce 250 gallons of alcohol with a pipe full of rocks as a fractionating column to produce 190 proof (95%) alcohol is one day.
The time to ferment is three days.
The time to distill is one day.
That is, we could drop our dependence on gasoline by one-third in one week. In three years, we could end our dependence on petroleum forever.
Sound good to me.
Last edited by shaggymane; May 16, 2004 at 09:39 AM.
