08-08-05 on Ethanol
It takes approximately the same energy to produce ethanol, as you get out of
using ethanol. There are quibbles about how much gain or loss, but the
major use of energy, is from the distillation process to make ethanol
usable. The distillation process is the major loss of energy.
See: http://www.journeytoforever.org/ethanol_energy.html on current ethanol
energy efficiency.
So, what kind of engineering would solve this challenge? One way is to use
the sugar cane residue, like in Brasil, for the energy to distill the
ethanol. Another is to use the residue to make even more ethanol to
distill. Neither of these makes enough of an order of magnitude increase in
energy, but they help. The largest gain I can see now is to engineer the
use of solar energy to evaporate the ethanol so that the ethanol can be
condensed by the cooling available in the ground.
Using the ground to cool and or derive the cooling to condense is a low tech
and low cost way that over time can become higher tech. The same is true of
solar designs. Cost effectivity is our driver for our designs.
My vision is for a World Wide Web Online Project, to design several
alternative solar/ground ethanol distillation designs, through an open
source process. This is a way for farms to become self sufficient all our
our world and to sell us the excess ethanol for fuel, just like with food.
E-Mail me at address on my card when you are interested in contributing your
design and other talents.
See http://RecoveryByDiscovery.com/Ethanol.htm
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