Saturday, June 25, 2011
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Ethanol In Oil Patch
Jennifer Johnson at Wahpeton North Dakota’s Daily News has looked into ethanol smack in the midst of America’s prime oil boom of the Bakken oil field. For all the naysayers, ethanol is here and looks to stay.
Ethanol fuel blends increased by 133 percent in North Dakota in 2010. It seems to be because North Dakota does what no other state seems to be able to get done. They’re putting in the blender pumps at the service station – at least that’s the suggestion from the North Dakota Department of Commerce.
Ethanol Blender Pump Diagram. Click image for the largest view.
The Dakota Plains gas station in Lidgerwood ND has been offering the blend since last March. Weldon Hoesl, the stations general manager, could not pinpoint how much E85 usage has increased this year – the crude oil market drives the price of ethanol, and usage usually follows. He does explain he has noticed more of an interest in blends for older vehicles that can’t use the fuel saying, “People just driving their regular vehicles can use the 20-30 (percent ethanol) without any loss of gas mileage, and the extra ethanol prevents gas line freezing so they don’t have to put in a little jug of antifreeze. Plus, the price is cheaper on a 20 percent blend.”
Well, there’s a real world experience – blowing some reality check on the E-15 argument that has so many in a huff.
Ethanol Blending Pump Showing Octane Ratings. Imagine the compression ratio gains if you could use 105 octane. Click image for the largest view.
Hoesl notes what might be even more relevant, people get to choose – pointing out, “They can choose what they want to burn and what works best for them. We’re supporting ourselves by using the ethanol product that not only helps our farmers, but it uses less gasoline – when you get E85, we’re not dependent on our oil fields to support us.” Actually getting to E-40 almost gets the U.S. independently supplied.
Do you suppose there is a lot of “Support America” sentiment up there?
These results for people, business and for the country as a whole are being led by North Dakota’s Biofuels Blender Pump Program. The program has installed about 117 new blender pumps in 27 communities across the state. The program provides retailers with a $5,000 tax incentive toward installing the pump and the North Dakota Corn Council gives an additional $2,500 per pump.
The program support gives away the motivating parties. Corn is grown way up there, maybe not at the yields seen in Iowa or Illinois, but the value is there to the state and the local growers. More sales supports a higher price that yields more income taxes from the farmers and they’re bright enough to feed the market some supply support.
Keep in mind there are about 22 states in the U.S. where corn is grown. This idea is showing legs, and the legs are giving consumers a choice. One might expect that in a small town newspaper there would be blowback in the comments. Your writer has let this article sit for over a week – and no one has posted a comment – not even one about hard stating, destroyed fuel system components – nothing posted at all. One would expect at least the ethanol opponents would have found the article and pounded the opposing view.
They might now. But it’s to late to be credible.
Ethanol works. In a fuel market replete with market distortions the U.S. has an option and is using it. All the fighting aside, ethanol is closing in on a million barrels a day of oil equivalent, keeping s a huge share of the consumer’s gasoline fuel dollars in the U.S.
It works, in oil patch no less. It can work all across the country and the world as well.
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Is The Battery for Electric Vehicles Really Ready?
Trend Tracker, an automotive research company based in Wiltshire, England says car manufacturers’ expensive scramble to produce electric cars with limited ability would be better spent on long-term research to produce electric cars good enough to compete with regular ones.
The key in that is compete – after the early adopters are sold, the rest of us, the mass market has to be sold. There’s a long way to go on that.
Plugged In Electric Vehicle
Battery only cars aren’t able to meet range and cost demands that would make them popular among buyers without government subsidy, and fuel cells still fail to beat the cost barriers. That leaves a variety of combustion hybrid charging sets until battery capacity and recharge rate times are competitive.
The Nissan Leaf, the first of the new EV or battery-only cars, is on sale now. Range: a claimed 100 miles. The Chevrolet Volt range-extended hybrid electric vehicle is also in showrooms. Range with gas engine backup: at least 350 miles. Toyota’s Prius gas-electric plug-in hybrid will appear next year. Range: about the same. Initial cost: very high.
There are two significant problems. Battery prices need to be shaved at least in half and range needs to be improved by at least 100 percent. Then the problem of battery depreciation rolls in – batteries are unlikely to last much more than eight years, which will destroy the trade in value of the first electric vehicles. It’s a “wait a minute” time for prognosticators.
All that is not to say that pure EV has a place in close up, urban, and short distance use. But very few people can justify the investment in another vehicle for only short range. Hybrids could work, but the emphasis has to go to the series hybrid with less battery and far more combustion efficiency to the wheels.
New Lithium IonTechnology from Korea and Italy. Click image for the largest view.
Scientists Yang-Kook Sun and Ki-Soo Lee at World Class University, Department of Energy Engineering, Hanyang University in South Korea and Bruno Scrosati at the Department of Chemistry, University of Rome in Italy are reporting development of an advanced lithium-ion battery that is ideal for powering the electric vehicles now making their way into dealer showrooms. The new battery can store large amounts of energy in a small space and has a high rate capacity, meaning it can provide current even in extreme temperatures.
The paper appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The scientists developed a high capacity, nanostructured, tin-carbon anode, or positive electrode, and a high-voltage, lithium-ion cathode, the negative electrode. When the two parts are put together, the result is a high-performance battery with a high energy density and rate capacity. “On the basis of the performance demonstrated here, this battery is a top candidate for powering sustainable vehicles,” the researchers say.
The team has shown on the anode side that the “volume stress issue can be efficiently solved by developing suitable electrode morphologies, such as M−C nanocomposites. They’ve demonstrated that a Sn−C composite may operate in lithium cells with several hundred cycles, without capacity decay and with discharge (lithium-alloying)−charge (lithium dealloying) efficiency approaching 100%.” Now if that can get to market the battery depreciation matter would be minimized significantly.
The Sn−C electrode has been also upgraded in terms of charge discharge rate capability. Improvement in the morphology, i.e., assuring a uniform distribution of the nanometric tin particles in the amorphous carbon matrix and avoiding any aggregation, allowed the electrode to operate under high current rates. That could be a great help for those long charge times.
FESEM Image of the Korea and Italy Lithium Ion Technology. Click image for more info.
On the cathode side the team is doping LiMn2O4 spinels with Ni and Co and, at the same time, by preparing the resulting Li[Ni0.45Co0.1Mn1.45]O4 cathode with particles at micrometric size (in order to avoid electrolyte decomposition) and using a metal ratio, that is expected to provide high working voltage and high rate capability.
The team’s work is built on material testing. The tests show that the practical working voltage of the battery ranges between 3.9 V and 4.7 V while the specific capacity, related to the cathode mass, is of the order of 125 mAh g−1. In addition, the battery can cycle at 1C with a very stable capacity delivery. Taking an average voltage of 4.2 a top specific energy density value of 500 Wh kg−1 is obtained. Assuming a 1/3 reduction factor associated with the weight of the electrolyte, current collector, and aluminum case in a pouch configuration, the team obtained a 170 Wh kg−1 value that still exceeds that offered by conventional lithium ion batteries chemistry.
So far a lithium ion battery having this unique electrode combination hasn’t been reported. The charge cycles, temperature range and capacity are going to help. The design deserves some prototype and real world testing.
Is this kind of progress going to be enough? Its clear most everyone is going to want to bail on even cars with good fuel consumption numbers as oil prices swing ever higher over the coming years.
The Stone Age didn’t run out of stone, the Bronze Age out of copper or zinc, the Iron Age out of iron and the Oil Age won’t run out of oil. All of these ages ended from better choices, something more competitive. There’s energy a plenty, handy and cheaply stored energy in a fuel or an electron store that not cheap at all. The question will be when the fuel vs. electron storage exchange economic places.
We will each get to decide with our money if the battery above or the ones to come are good enough. The price of oil will determine when we have to choose. Batteries are getting closer, but are they close enough yet?
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Algae Based Butanol Production Gains Working Processes
This week two new algae process paths made it out into view. One deals with algae directly producing butanol and the other is a growth process for algae that exploits an already concentrated algae growth medium with innovative processing.
First and simplest, and likely most easily adoptable is from a team of chemical engineers at the University of Arkansas led by Jamie Hestekin, assistant professor and leader of the project.
Fiber Membranes and Raceway for Algae Production. Click image for the largest view. Image Credit: University of Arkansas.
Hestekin and his research team of undergraduates from the Honors College and several graduate students, including a doctoral student who has discovered a more efficient and technologically superior fermentation method, grow algae on “raceways,” which are long troughs – usually 2 feet wide and ranging from 5-feet to 80-feet long, depending on the scale of the operation. The troughs are made with screens or carpet, although Hestekin said algae would grow on almost any surface.
The clever innovation is the raceways are fed runoff or wastewater rich in nitrogen and phosphorous the algae need to prosper. They enhance this growth by delivering high concentrations of carbon dioxide through hollow fiber membranes that look like long strands of spaghetti. With natural sunlight the algae in the nutrient rich water produce well. It also recovers the lost phosphorus and nitrogen cleaning up the water used and getting a second use from the nutrients.
Algae are harvested every five to eight days by vacuuming or scraping it off the screens. After drying, the algae are crushed and ground into a fine powder as the means to extract the sugar and starch carbohydrates from the plant cells. For this project, Hestekin’s team works with starches. The first stage is to treat the carbohydrates with acid and then heat them to break apart the starches and convert them into simple, natural sugars. They then begin a unique fermentation process in which organisms turn the sugars into organic acids – butyric, lactic and acetic.
The Arkansas team’s second stage of the fermentation process focuses on butyric acid and its conversion into butanol. The researchers use a unique process called electrodeionization, a technique developed by one of Hestekin’s doctoral students. This technique involves the use of a special membrane that rapidly and efficiently separates the acids during the application of electrical charges. By quickly isolating butyric acid, the process increases productivity, which makes the conversion process easier and less expensive.
The team is currently working with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to create biofuel from algae grown at the Rockaway Wastewater Treatment Plant in Queens.
The Arkansas team’s research articles detailing findings from algae-to-fuel project have been submitted to Biotechnology and Bioengineering and Separation Science and Technology. This team is making algae much more practical.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a team led by Michelle C. Y. Chang, assistant professor of chemistry, has constructed a chimeric pathway assembled from three different organisms for the high-level production of normal butanol in E. coli bacteria. The pathway uses an enzymatic chemical reaction mechanism in place of a physical step as a kinetic control element to achieve high yields from the sugar glucose. It’s a straight to fuel product process from sugar.
Various species of the Clostridium bacteria naturally produce a chemical called n-butanol (normal butanol), which is often proposed as a substitute for diesel oil and gasoline. So far most researchers, including a few biofuel companies, have genetically altered Clostridium to boost its ability to produce n-butanol, others have plucked enzymes from the bacteria and inserted them into other microbes, such as yeast, to turn them into n-butanol factories because yeast and E. coli are considered to be easier to grow on an industrial scale.
The problem? The n-butanol production has been limited to little more than half a gram per liter, far below the amounts needed for affordable production and the process leaves most of the precious raw material – sugar, behind. Other researchers who have engineered yeast or E. coli to produce n-butanol have taken the entire enzyme pathway and transplanted it into these microbes. But n-butanol is not produced rapidly in these systems because the native enzymes also can work in reverse to convert butanol back into its starting precursors. Wouldn’t that drive a researcher a bit crazy?
N-Butanol Synthetic Pathway. Click image for more info.
Chang and her colleagues innovation is they’ve stuck the same enzyme pathway into E. coli, but replaced two of the five enzymes with look-alikes from other organisms that avoided the problems other researchers have had: n-butanol being converted back into its chemical precursors by the same enzymes that produce it.
The team’s new genetically altered nearly non reversing E. coli produced nearly five grams of n-butanol per liter, about the same as the native Clostridium and one-third the production of the best genetically altered Clostridium, but about 10 times better than current industrial microbe systems.
Chang is understandably a bit excited saying, “We are in a host that is easier to work with, and we have a chance to make it even better. We are reaching yields where, if we could make two to three times more, we could probably start to think about designing an industrial process around it. We were excited to break through the multi-gram barrier, which was challenging,”
The Berkley work isn’t so simple as it sounds. Chang found the two new enzyme versions in published sequences of microbial genomes, and based on her understanding of the enzyme pathway, substituted the new versions at critical points that would not interfere with the hundreds of other chemical reactions going on in a living E. coli cell. In all, she installed genes from three separate organisms – Clostridium acetobutylicum, Treponema denticola and Ralstonia eutrophus — into the E. coli.
Chang is optimistic that by improving enzyme activity at a few other bottlenecks in the n-butanol synthesis pathway, and by optimizing the host microbe for production of n-butanol, she can boost production two to three times more, that might justify considering scaling up to an industrial process. She also is at work adapting the new synthetic pathway to work in yeast, a workhorse for industrial production of many chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
These two paths, using the starch and the sugar components of algae offer great promise. Taken together butanol would be coming from a large share of the carbohydrates. What proportion or percentage isn’t stated, but for economic reasons these or other ideas are going to have to realistic on the carbon cycle from the CO2 to a fuel – leaving behind raw carbon compounds will be a huge drag on economic potential.
Another point overlooked is the algae oil. The impact on the oil through these processes isn’t known, nor are the proteins and other parts considered. Algae is a pretty rich trove of carbohydrates, oils and proteins that reason would seem to suggest are quite valuable.
Its much more complex when considering the money needed to farm algae production, process out the products, and balance processes to revenue streams. But research is getting there and these two research projects offer quite a lot to process engineers for contemplating plant designs.
Algae are a wonderful way to recapture carbon using sunlight. Getting to products though, with all the value intact at sensible investment and pricing is a very complex matter. It’s getting there.
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