Alternative Fuels

We urgently need to develop alternative fuel sources that reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The only other imperative that competes with this urgency is the emergency of global warming. A few alternative fuels are serious contenders for alleviating the fossil fuel crisis including ethanol, natural gas, propane, hydrogen, and biodiesel. We are in dire need of other alternative fuel developments and discoveries.

Cellulosic Ethanol

Ethanol has been used as fuel in the United States since at least 1908. Touted as a potential aid to the fossil fuel dilemma, cellulosic ethanol is the only alternative energy source that could be produced in enough volume to make a dent in gas usage. Cellulosic ethanol, the biofuel that differs from corn-based ethanol in that it can be made from pretty much any organic matter, is simple to make and has as its source an inexhaustible resource - municipal waste. Cellulose (C6H10O5)n is a long-chain polymer forming the primary structural component of green plants. Cellulose ethanol exhibits a net energy content three times higher than corn ethanol and emits a low net level of greenhouse gases.

Cellulosic ethanol showed greenhouse gas emission reductions of about 80% compared to fossil fuels. Research is being funded in an effort to make us free from non-domestic fuel by more efficient synthesis of domestically produced biofuel. Resources of biomass that can be converted to cellulosic ethanol in many instances are negative cost feedstock. They are more expensive to dispose of than to process into fuel.

A bacterial culture digests organic matter and produces ethanol as a byproduct, at a fourth the retail cost of a gallon of gas.

Entrepreneurs are using their venture capital to build processing plants that will become operational in the next 18 to 24 months. Cellulosic ethanol is on the radar screen of big business and can be a substantial help relieving our gasoline crisis.

The Cellulose Fermentation Process

In biomass, Glucose C6 sugar is bound to cellulose, and Xylose (C5) is locked in hemicellulose. Since normal yeast can't ferment Xylose, genetically engineered E. coli bacteria is used in an alternate reaction path to turn almost all the Xylose into ethanol. The cellulose in Fermentable Biomass is broken into Xylose sugar (gray bar). Then the Xylose is separated from the remaining cellulose (blue bar). The Xylose is fermented with E. coli (top yellow), and the cellulose it broken down into normal glucose (red) which is fermented the normal way (bottom yellow).

Finally all the ethanol is distilled (the water and lignin byproducts removed). The lignin is burned in the the still's boilers. Lignin forms the woody cell walls of plants and the "cement" between them.

Natural Gas

Natural gas offers several advantages short term in that the product, its pipelines, storage,  and dispensing stations are already in the infrastructure for mass transit worldwide. There are over 1,300 natural gas vehicle (NGV) fueling stations in the U.S. - over half are available for public use. Low emissions.

With a cost approximately one third less than gasoline, natural gas vehicles most economically run fleet vehicles. NGVs are most practical for fleets because fleets generally operate a number of vehicles that are centrally maintained and fueled, and travel more miles daily than the average personal use vehicle.

Examples

* taxi cabs * transit buses * school buses * airport shuttles * over-the-road trucks * refuse haulers * delivery vehicles * forklifts

Propane

Another popular alternative fuel choice for vehicles is propane

(LPG) with an infrastructure of pipelines, processing facilities, and storage already in service. Propane is produced as a by-product crude oil refining. With about 200,000 propane vehicles in the United States and about 9 million worldwide, stepping up consumption of this fuel over gasoline could limit emissions and global warming.

Biodiesel

Autos powered by recycled vegetable oil from restaurants and fast-food joints is an idea that is under some serious scrutiny by environmental groups. Although this alternative fuel may be cheap and clean, there simply isn't enough of it to make a big dent in our gas consumption.

The conversion to cooking oil is easy and inexpensive. It costs about $800 to convert a car using a diesel engine to run on vegetable oil. What is needed is an extra fuel tank which contains a heating element inside. The oil needs to be kept hot to burn. Also needed are fuel lines up to the engine, filters, valves, and toggle switches so the driver can choose between running on vegetable oil or on conventional diesel fuel.

On the downside are the facts that no infrastructure is currently in place to make the cooking oil fuel available commercially. One currently needs to make arrangements with local restaurants to obtain the oil, often given freely. One must also filter the cooking oil for solids left over from the frying process. With limited cooking oil resources available, there is little likelihood that commerce will be motivated to develop the necessary widespread infrastructure to make the fuel more readily available. Vegetable oil fuel for autos may gain at the grass roots level, and may eventually become more widespread, especially if fuel prices increase.

About the author: Thank you for choosing Carseek.com as your one stop resource for Free Car Price Quotes and the most up to date auto information.

To have a better understanding of what ethanol distillation is, let's get into the basics of ethanol.

Ethanol fast Facts

*Systematic Name: Ethanol *Other Names: Ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, hydroxyethane, EtOH *Molecular Formula: E2H6O *Physically, ethanol may be described as a colorless, flammable, slightly toxic chemical compound that has a distinctive perfume-like smell. *It is produced from sugar cane and used as automotive fuel in Brazil. Ethanol made out of corn, on the other hand, is being used widely as a gasoline additive and direct fuel in the United States. Straw, meanwhile, is being used to manufacture ethanol as well. *Ethanol is currently the leading biofuel provider in Europe.

Ethanol Distillation

Most of us already have an idea on how distillation happens.

Let's have the production of distilled water as an example. When water is subjected to heat, it is expected that steam would conduct away from a tube. A tube looped and oriented downward and allowed to cool would yield condensed vapor and eventually, water.

For ethanol, simple distillation will not be enough. Fractional distillation would be the best choice. The latter is used for separating mixtures of liquids with varying boiling points - like water and alcohol.

To start the distillation of ethanol, consider the following steps:

1.Prepare a small beaker and/or a simple glass half-filled with the rather miscible mixture of water and alcohol.

2.Cover the beaker or the simple glass jug with a funnel or something similar, so that a balloon can be placed to suck air out of the beaker.

3.After some time, the alcohol vapor and the steam in the mixture just above the liquid in the beaker or glass will reach a state of equilibrium. This should be relative of temperature and even pressure of the environment.

4.With regard to equilibrium, change can no longer be observed in the vapor to liquid ratio in the water to alcohol ratio within either the vapor or liquid mixture.

5.However, because of alcohol's higher volatility, the ratio of water to alcohol in the vapor state is greater than that of the ratio in liquid state.

6.The occurrence of liquid-against-vapor-states permits the distillation from an escalating concentration of alcohol from the water and alcohol mixture.

And finally, by having sequences of repeated evaporation as well as condensation, a higher alcohol concentration is achieved from the re-condensation of recent vapor state.

This is since the alcohol inside the vapor mixture is at a greater concentration than it was from the liquid mixture from which it was changed into a vapor state.

About the author: Anyone who is interested in the future of fuel, fuel prices and cleaner and alternative fuel resource should know something about Ethanol Distillation, visit the Ethanol pages.

Biofuel - News of Interest

If Corn Is Biofuels King, Tropical Maize May Be Emperor

Glomalin: A Key to Switchgrass Ethanol Success

Iowa State University Engineers Hope to Build Better Roads By Using Cellulosic Ethanol Co-Products

What is the easiest way to divert organic waste away from landfill, and close a lot of landfills for good?

The answer to this is composting. Composting is the natural way to bring left-over organic material back into the nutrient cycle. It also replaces chemical fertilizers and improves the quality of the soil, reducing crop pests, and retaining more moisture in the soil which then means that less watering is needed.

So composting is a good way to divert waste from landfill, but is there real demand for the huge quantities that could be made from the very large proportion of our municipal solid waste which is organic?

No, there are good reasons for concluding that there will never be a large enough demand for it from farmers and gardeners, because there is a huge amount of organic waste in our rubbish from potato peelings to newspapers, cardboard, and even our old non-synthetic clothes.

Composting can also be the first stage toward more sophisticated waste processing technologies such as Anaerobic Digestion, and take us toward a much more sustainable carbon economy which many see as the intermediate step civilization needs to go through before entering the age of the hydrogen economy.

The vision of a carbon economy leads us toward a need to increase methane production. This is because there will be a demand to produce a lot of methane which can then be processed further into biofuel such as biomethanol and biodiesel - away from dependency on oil as our fuel source - and toward a marvelous new freedom from fossil fuels.

However, just as in most scientific and commercial advances, they work best through evolution rather than revolution, and so it will be with composting. Many nations including the UK, are now composting very successfully, but we appreciate that composting alone will not bring us to the point where we become sustainable.

We realize that we need sustainable renewable fuels very urgently to stop using fossil fuels and reduce the rate of climate change. By building on our success with household green waste and by beginning to compost commercial waste, and food wastes too, we are developing a culture which begins to accept organic waste processing, and not land filling as the norm. Many successful new businesses have been created to process compost in the UK, and those businesses will naturally seek to develop and diversify.

Composting requires energy, it is a net carbon emitter and it is still not very sustainable for Municipal Solid Wastes. It is not the best use of waste organic matter which can contain a lot of contaminating materials.

So, how can we adapt composting to be a net carbon emissions reducer, or "Carbon Negative" and allow these new business to expand their hard won skills in biowaste processing?

The answer is Anaerobic Digestion for all the organic waste feedstocks suitable for it.

The process of anaerobic digestion (composting without air (oxygen)) uses organic waste materials to produce methane gas.

The methane gas produced is a sustainable fuel for direct burning for power generation.

Doing this is carbon positive, it uses only renewable resources, it replaces fossil fuel use. It will reduce climate change.

Put this all together and you have real sustainability. A way of living without climate change, and without jeopardizing the lives of later generations from global warming.

About the author: To buy sustainable (peat free) compost visit the compost for sale web site and also see this anaerobic digestion web site for more information about AD.