Ethanol Is Undead?
The Latest Fresh News blog has a story about “A New Way To Make Ethanol”. Looks like good news compared to the er, “growing” idea that biofuels are worse than petroleum.
Quoting from Zeachem’s Technology Overview:
The ZeaChem technology will produce fifty percent more ethanol per ton of feed than the current best-in-class technology. Our higher yield dramatically improves process economics, allowing farmers to get more ethanol out of each acre of biomass crop.
Because the yield is so much higher and because energy integration is tighter, the ZeaChem process is friendlier to the environment. Ethanol produced by corn dry milling in the US has a net energy ratio of under 1.6, meaning that fewer than 1.6 units of renewable energy are produced for each unit of fossil energy used in the production the crops and conversion of the crops into fuel ethanol.
In contrast, the ZeaChem technology enables a net energy ratio of 10-12. Such high values fundamentally change the nature of any policy debate on the environmental aspects of ethanol as a liquid transportation fuel.
Zeachem is also in the news with a supply deal for their process using poplar trees grown efficiently from Greenwood, reported in the latest issue of Ethanol Producer. So maybe this is real and ethanol is not dead.
