Ethyl alcohol blended gasoline should be a good bet now

[Karlin]

Ethyl alcohol blended gasoline should be a good bet now, but its not and we could wonder why. We are paying a high price at the pumps, so why are we not using blended gas now that the prices are advantageous?

Mohawk mixes in 10% Ethyl Alcohol to its gasoline.
This portion is independant of the price of crude, and so 10% of Mohawks gas price should be too?


nope, they say, "the cost of producing a litre of alcohol is more than the cost of producing a litre of gasoline".

But thats not allways true. This year the price of methanol dropped to just 25cents!!
Crude went from $30 to $60 over the past couple years, methanol dropped as sources came onstream.

example:
now, gas at $1[I paid 97cents today]
add in 25cents/liter methanol at a 10% blend , and you get a Mohawk liter that could cost 90c+2.5c{90%normal gas from crude, with 10% of each liter being methanol at 2.5cents-per-a-tenth-of-a-liter = 92.5cents per liter.
Someone check my figures, but I think that makes sense. {it makes 7.5 cents actually.

This should really catch on. 7.5c/l adds up to a lot of money for anyone who puts methanol in their gas. It works the same, no problems with Mohawk's gas. And it could easily be a 30% blend [21cents per liter savings], they tested fleets on 85% blends.

In a real world, or as it seems to be, Mohawk is raking in a spare 7.5c/l on blended gas, or if they offered us savings they would sell a lot of gas, and get a lot of publicity in the morning news gas price reports. But something is stopping it from catching on. Its all quiet on the biggest issues anymore.

Investor Fear of the prices going up might stop a move to using more methanol, but with crude forecast for $100/bbl its time to move on blended gasoline, if only to give the public a break. Regulations are at play now, so change as needed.


What to do? lets protest for lower gas by blending it. Put up the processing and refineries if need be, let government do it if nobody else will. PetroCan, where are you now that we need you??


also:
Advertisements for the fuel claim that up to 40% fewer emissions can be obtained by using this fuel.

Karlin

 

[LeftCoast]

RE: Ethyl alcohol blended

You are confusing Ethanol and Methanol - they sound similar, and burn similar but are produced quite differently.

Ethanol (CH3-CH2-OH) is basically grain alchohol. It is most commonly produced by fermenting and distilling corn mash. Unfortunately, because corn is an annual grain it must be replanted each year and requires copious amounts of water and fertilizer to grow it. Fertilizer BTW is generally produced from Natural Gas (CH3). Combining Hydrogen (from steam reformation of natural gas) and nitrogen from the air produces ammonia NH3 - the source of Nitrogen in most fertilizers. Add to these energy imputs the gasoline and diesel fuel needed to plant, plow, till, transport and convert the corn - it adds up to more energy than the fuel contains.

Methanol (CH3-OH) is the simplest alchohol. It is produced naturally by some bateria, or from the pyrolisis of wood pulp, but commercially it is produced by steam refromation of natural gas. Methanol is basically converted natural gas.


Both methanol and ethanol can be blended with gasoline to make it burn cleaner - and either (with some work) could be used to directly fuel a car. When mixed 85/15 with gasoline methanol is marketed as M85. Ethanol when blended with gasoline in the same ratio is called E85. Either on its own burns much cleaner than gasoline, but both evaporate too easily and (i believe) have lower energy densities.

You can drink ethanol - don't try it with methanol.

 

[Reverend Blair]

RE: Ethyl alcohol blended

Just a bit more to that...there was a new enzyme produced a couple of years ago that allows ethanol to be made from corn stalks and straw instead of grain. That reduces the energy needed to produce it a lot because waste material from crops grown for other uses provides the base material.

It also saves energy in feed production because the left-overs can be fed to livestock.

During the actual production, passive solar can be used to get the stuff closer to the necessary temperature to cook it, as well, meaning that less energy is needed in the production process.

 

[Karlin]

ya , sorry about the confusion. I googled and googled to get it straight so we would not be sidetracked on technical stuff. Shit.
Mohawk mixes in 10% Ethyl Alcohol to its gasoline.
Methyl alcohol is not so usefull as fuels. Okay?

-------------

The point is - we would be well served by using more of it now,
esp.now that the pricing arguement is gone with lower ethyl prices.

And NOW that the processes are better, like Rev's note there.[ty!]

Supply is overlarge now. They are just not using it. Any gas retailer would do 10% better by adding it in as a blend.

Q: is there No processing required? If you could buy it as cheap as they can in bulk, could you just dump it in your gastank yourself, at 25cents per liter? Lets do it!! Lets buy it in bulk and sell it then. How do we get started? We could make money here boys!!

 

[Jay]

http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_manual/manual_ToC.html

 

[TenPenny]

I think it's a great idea; maybe like in the US, the Canadian gov't can pay farmers huge amounts of money to grow corn, preferrably some gmo belonging to Monsanto, and then the gov't can then pay ADM, Cargill, and Monsanto to make the alcohol.

Maybe when Harper is elected, that'll happen; is Mulroney still on the board of ADM?

 

[Jo Canadian]

Can't Hemp be used to create a type of fuel also? It's practically a weed (no pun intended) and rotates with crops quite well, you could get 4 harvests out of a single growing season compared to the 1 harvest/season with corn.

 

[Reverend Blair]

Can't Hemp be used to create a type of fuel also? It's practically a weed (no pun intended) and rotates with crops quite well, you could get 4 harvests out of a single growing season compared to the 1 harvest/season with corn.

Yes. Hemp is so versatile that it almost seems magical. It is an oilseed (kind of like canola) so it can be used to make fuel and light lubricants. It is a fibre crop like flax or cotton or trees (cloth and paper). It is an animal feed (hay). Some strains are a pharmaceutical.


There isn't a lot of corporate profit in growing weeds though...In killing weeds, yeah. In destroying the human spirit, certainly. Not much in growing a useful weed though...at least not if anybody can do it.

 

[Jay]

There are hemp fields in Ontario...you could grow it if you had the permit.

 

[Reverend Blair]

RE: Ethyl alcohol blended

Yup. But you can't sell it into the US...the cotton and oil lobbies use the drug laws to keep you from doing that.

Canadian textile and oil concerns are run out of the US.

That pretty much relegates what should be a major cash crop to being a cottage industry, Jay.

 

[Jay]

You might find this interesting.

http://www.hempreport.com/

 

[Reverend Blair]

RE: Ethyl alcohol blended

It is interesting, Jay. It will fail, but it's interesting.

 

[Jay]

A link that was on that site.

http://www.saskhemp.com/

 

[Reverend Blair]

RE: Ethyl alcohol blended

Yup...that's a link that's been on my computer for a long time too.

A stat that was on that site...we grew 1000 hectares of hemp in Saskatchewan in 2004. That's about 2500 acres...a little less, actually. An acre, for those of you who aren't sure, is the area of land that one man with one horse can work with a single-share plough in one day.

To put it another way, my grandfather owns 1000 acres and my uncle owned a little over 800. Those are small places these days. Toss in the neighbour's place and you have enough land for all of Saskatchewan's hemp crop. I haven't looked it up, but a decent rule of thumb is that if you double Saskatchewan's acreage, you get what the rest of the country seeded for that crop that year.

5,000 acres for all of Canada...in a market that has had farmers looking for alternate crops for 20 years . Keep in mind that hemp doesn't require special equipment either. All you have to buy is the seed.

Think there might be an issue that keeps them from planting it?

 

[Extrafire]

Well, the US has recently passed a bill that will require gasoline suppliers to add 8 billion gallons of ethanol per year to their gas by the year 2012 in order to reduce their dependance of foreign oil. This will result in more than19 million acres of farm land dedicated to producing nothing but corn for ethanol. (Think Cargil) That amount of ethanol will only meet their demand for fossil fuel for one half of one day, minus the fuel required to grow and process it. Not that good an idea, really.

 

[Reverend Blair]

RE: Ethyl alcohol blended

That comes from corn grown specifically for the purpose though, Extrafire. It's really nothing more than a farm subsidy and uses more energy than it produces.

 

[Karlin]

Re: UPDATEs

There are several ways that we could REDUCE FOSSIL FUEL use,and if the major car makers refuse to help, WE WILL BLOODY WELL DO IT OURSELVES.

NYC taxis are modifying their HYBRIDS so they can be plugged in overnight and run ALL DAY ON BATTERIES. The carmakers could EASILY do this, and for much less money than the taxi owners are paying for a retro-fit.

The fact that this movement exists proves that the majors are fighting any changes away from fossil fuels.

This article also mentions the ETHANOL 'added to the tank' idea, and they see 80% ethanol blends as acceptable, not just 10%. {hey, nobody answered why Mohawk's prices for 10% blend are not undercutting all the others,which would dramtically increase sales, plus terrific advertising...]

They are playing with the global weather , there is no greater threat to our way of life and the future of so many species.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/070505EC.shtml

 

[Aitrus]

I read an article yesterday about hydrogen-fuel celled motorcycles being produced by a European company (British IIRC).

http://www.rubbermag.com/news/050315_04n.html

Not the same article I read, but same topic.

This was a really cool thing to see, as to me it demonstrates that the hydrogen economy is not so far off and that we might not be completely doomed as oil supplies falter and prices skyrocket. Not sure what's involved in making the fuel for this thing, but I understand its based on organic material, it might even have been like corn-stalks or something.

Pretty cool stuff to be sure.

 

[stratochief]

Extrafire.

Well said. I'm a bit of an econut and the biggest ecological disaster has not been our forests but our natural grasslands. Literally torn out of the earth. The disaster is not as much of an eyesore as a clearcut but much harder to reverse.

Ethanol from crops? shudder. A false economy of subsidies will start with ecological consequences. We had this in the 60's and 70's with huge grain sales to China and the USSR. We subsidized farming to produce a grain economy that destroyed our own grassland environment.

I'm quite happy to see forests left uncut and fields left unploughed.

 

[Wetcoast40]

RE: Ethyl alcohol blended

A companion activity to adding Ethanol would be to clean up our gasoline and diesel fuels as we produce them in Canada. Currenly, we have almost no standards for impurities in our fuel stocks and so they are 'dirty fuel' by international standards (at least Europe and parts of the U.S.). Legislation to set proper standards for these contaminates (see Calif.) would be a good start and then introduce the ethanol. Otherwise, we wouldn't accomplish much.