Ethanol Vs. Methanol

Ethanol and biodiesel are dead, long live methanol! Methanol is the simplest alcohol, with one carbon atom; ethanol has two. Thus, given biomass, it should be cheaper to produce methanol than ethanol. Surely enough, in a comprehensive assessment Stone & Webster performed for the U.S. Department of Energy two decades ago, with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute as an associate, this fact was confirmed.

However, methanol has a few flaws. First, if drunk, you can go blind. But, who drinks gasoline? Second, there was a time when methanol was used as the feedstock to produce MTBE as a gasoline additive. MTBE is carcinogenic. Methanol is not, just don't drink it. Third, methanol can dissolve certain plastics and embrittle a some metals. So change the plastic and metals to avoid this problem.

Methanol has only half the energy content per gallon of gasoline. Ethanol is two-thirds the intensity of gasoline. However, a fuel cell powered vehicle is at least twice the efficiency of an internal combustion engine, so the tank storage problem would be solved with a direct methanol fuel cell. The DMFC for portable electronics is said to soon replace batteries, so the technology is real. Methanol is the only biofuel capable of being directly fed to a fuel cell. Ethanol and gasoline need to first be passed through an expensive reformer.

Plus, and this is difficult to accept, but true: one gallon of methanol has more hydrogen than one gallon of liquid hydrogen. Thus, the infrastructure is already largely in place for a methanol economy. George Olah in his book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, provides all the science and speculation you need.

So why is our country and rest of world enamored over ethanol and biodiesel? In two words, the Farm Lobby. They came up with a politically brilliant scheme to use corn as an answer to imported oil. By so doing, the price of farm commodities recently doubled and more. Farmers are ecstatic! The poor around the world are suffering.

Global food riots occurred, so the Farm Lobby thought, oh, no problem, we'll now, more and more, begin to convert the cellulose into ethanol, for, after all, those tax incentives are already in place. Well, if you have biomass and want a biofuel, you either hydrolyze and ferment it to produce ethanol, or gasify and catalyze it to make methanol. But the current mentality is stuck in an ethanol mode. Before farmers and their partners build fermented ethanol from biomass factories, they need to totally re-think the long term and just change the congressional language to say: ethanol, biodiesel and other renewable biofuels. Methanol does not even need to be mentioned. Otherwise, they will be creating a second herd of white elephants.

With all this logic, won't methanol soon displace ethanol? No. Why? The Farm Lobby is so dominant that they will continue to insure for the continued use of ethanol for another decade because those facilities are already built, and they don't want them to suddenly become obsolete. Okay, fair enough, let those plants profitably phase out. But don't compound the problem by adding that second elephant herd.

I might add that there has been a sudden surge of interest in biofuels from algae. Certainly, as algae can be from two to ten times more efficient in converting sunlight into biomass than any terrestrial crop; grown in the ocean where there is no irrigation problem (and Peak Freshwater looms on the horizon); if fed the cold water effluent from the ocean thermal energy conversion process there will not be a need for fertilizers (deep ocean effluents are high in just the right nutrients--farm fertilizers are manufactured from fossil fuels); and with genetic engineering, who knows where this option can go--this has been my dream for a third of a century. However, the eventual costs are unknown. Yes, do the R&D, but don't expect a magic solution within a decade. Biomethanol is real and immediately available for commercial prospecting.

As no one I know is commercially jumping unto the methanol bandwagon, I will tomorrow publish a hypothetical letter to colleagues to inspire some enterprise. The strategies, then, become available to the readers of the Huffington Post. Also, too, perhaps some partnerships can be stimulated to come up to a better solution than ethanol and biodiesel. Let's do more than share ideas. Let's take action!

Comments

[mergina]

How about NOTHINGANOL. Stop starving the world to bring cheaper fuel to the gas guzzling masses.

[Jacksbloodyface]

You sure missed the point....

[sf94127]

We have many, many options. It is a crime to support corn ethanol or any program that converts good food to fuel.

Options include

biodiesel
ethanol or methanol from NON food sources
safe nuclear energy
shale oil (probably enough here in USA to last 100 years). UNOCAL had such a project and was shut down in mid 90's because crude oil was $15 and cost was $40/barrel
wind energy
geothermal energy
convert natural gas to liquid (Dimethyl-ether or DME)

We have a wealth of short and long term solutions

[Patrick Takahashi - Huffpost Blogger]

Let's be sensible. First, don't use food as a feedstock for energy. Thus, delete corn and sugar from the list. The sooner the better. Yes, those ethanol plants have already been built, so some phasing out depreciative value should be provided.

But, most of the plant is fiber anyway, so that should be our focus. Any comprehensive analysis today will show that methanol from gasification and catalysis will be cheaper to produce than ethanol from hydrolysis and fermentation. There are now 113 corn to ethanol facilities, with 78 more under construction. The increasing price of corn is changing the economics.

Now, we are heading headlong into developing cellulose to ethanol factories. Not too many are in planning because the concept is flawed. Why don't we just change the congressional language to "ethanol, biodiesel and other renewable biofuels." Then, industry can make the decision of which pathway they might want to take: ethanol or methanol.

Those environmental fear stories about methanol, sure, I wouldn't drink it and would want to keep it out of the ecosystem. However, the same applies to gasoline. Ethanol, I do drink more than my fair share, but that too, can cause problems if allowed to leak in great quantity.

The point I wanted to make was to give other renewable biofuels a chance to succeed. Level the playing field. We need the full range of sustainable options, and it makes no sense to prohibit the consideration of methanol from biomass.

[Ethanol]

Ethanol is not dead....it is part of the current solution...please think twice about blaming ethanol for all of societies ills.....One-fourth of all the oil that America uses comes from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, with one-seventh of it coming from Arab OPEC countries and one-eighth from Persian Gulf countries. In 1972, America spent $4 billion on oil imports, an amount equal to 1.2 percent of our defense budget at that time. In 2006, America paid $260 billion - about half of what America paid for national defense. Over that same period, Saudi Arabia oil revenues have grown in direct parallel, from $2.7 billion in 1972 to $200 billion in 2006. A considerable amount of that money is being used to expand terrorist thought and ideology.


Let's stop fighting over miles per gallon, farmers being subsidized, not enough land and food vs. fuel. These are not the issues at hand; the issues at hand are our own survival. Stop funding our enemies and demand that Congress mandate that all vehicles be flex-fueled vehicles; that is our answer.


Dr. Jeffrey B. Zeiger is the executive director of the Alternative Fuels Institute.

[Wilburrr]

We need to develop a range of options. Ethanol is not part of the solution today, as it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than the ethanol is able to release. Much of this energy is used providing heat for the required distillation process.

Methanol is no panacea. It's toxicity should not be understated as it is, I believe, in this article. Ingestion is only one pathway in which toxins can enter the body. Inhalation and absorption through the skin are major problems with methanol. Methanol causes organ system failure, just as gasoline does. Methanol has a higher vapor pressure than gasoline, so it enters the atmosphere much more readily. Methanol requires distillation, but does not form the tricky azeotrope with water that is so problematic in purifying ethanol.

All of these potential problems have solutions. Methanol could be an important piece to the puzzles final solution, but let's not understate the risks.

[Ethanol]

With all due respect, it does not take more energy to produce ethanol and secondly, methanol pollutes our ground water...E3 Biofuels achieves what’s known as a positive energy balance. For every BTU of energy used to run the ethanol plant, five BTUs are produced. A typical corn ethanol plant produces 1.3 to 1.8 BTUs for every BTU of fossil fuel input, including the energy required to grow the corn. (Gasoline has half the efficiency of corn ethanol, producing 0.8 BTUs for every BTU input.) For the rest of the story please go to www.fieldstofuel.org and get the objective answers. Chees, Dr. Jeff Zeige, Executive Director/A­lternative Fuels Institute

[Wilburrr]

You're not including the energy necessary to raise harvest and process the corn.

[Jetsnet]

Other groups who stand to benefit from pushing corn ethanol are fertilizer and pesticide producers. Corn is a nitrogen intense crop, stripping the soil of nitrogen each crop cycle.

Olah also proposes that down the line methanol can derive its CO2 directly from the air, an idea worth researching further. It would be a real gain if enough people pushed back on these corporations early in the game before we go too far down the oh so familiar path of corporate welfare.

[DrVeruju]

This link gives additional background :

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/16466/?a=f

and includes a number of interesting ideas.

[TakeSake]

The lobby to produce ethanol from corn came out of the low price and over supply of corn from perhaps 15 years ago. Then the hucksters came along and convinced all these towns to help finance construction of ethanol plants. They are going to be idled because they won't be able to afford the corn.

Too much energy is lost in the ethanol process and too much energy goes into growing corn to make it worth while. One can argue about the net energy balance - I happen to think it is positive by some amount, but it isn't worth it once all the other factors are accounted for.

Now, using ethanol as an oxygenator is another matter. Just don't rely on it as the main fuel content.

If one wants energy from corn, burn corn. However, if you want energy from a solid biofuel, burn something else - like hemp that doesn't need all the resources that corn does.