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THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 31 May 2015, 08:25:48

What kind of progress would we make if the Government wasn't so bloated that it gets in its own way? Not just in alternate liquid fuels, in wind power, nuclear power, pretty much anything you name in the energy sector.
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Pops » Sun 31 May 2015, 16:02:06

The problem with the EFS is basically that .gov bought into the cellulosic hype and set a minimum that couldn't be met, probably read too many of G's P2RPR postings.
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Graeme » Mon 01 Jun 2015, 18:54:38

The Obama administration has found an unlikely ally in OPEC

The Obama administration has found an unlikely ally in its efforts to keep pushing more biofuel into the nation’s gasoline supply: OPEC.

The lowest oil prices in over six years have fuelled a resurgence in U.S. gasoline use in recent months as more Americans take to the road.

Demand is expected to climb 1.5 per cent this year to nearly 139 billion gallons (526 billion litres) according to the government’s most recent forecasts, enough to easily accommodate small increases in ethanol quotas without breaching the so-called “blend wall” that refiners say puts a cap on blending at around 10 per cent of total gasoline and diesel supply.

It may be even higher, based on data from the first quarter, when gasoline use surged by more than 3 per cent, the fastest in over a decade.

Those calculations help explain why biofuel backers are up in arms over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed renewable fuel goals unveiled on Friday, which reaffirmed the agency’s stance that ethanol use in fuel has hit a saturation point until more infrastructure and equipment is installed.


businessinsider

USDA to invest up to $100M to boost infrastructure for renewable fuel use; seeks to double number of higher blend ethanol fuel pumps
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Graeme » Wed 03 Jun 2015, 19:07:32

Revolutionary microbe for biofuel production developed

Biofuels pioneer Mascoma LLC and the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center have developed a revolutionary strain of yeast that could help significantly accelerate the development of biofuels from nonfood plant matter.

The approach could provide a pathway to eventual expansion of biofuels production beyond the current output limited to ethanol derived from corn.

C5 FUEL™, engineered by researchers at Mascoma and BESC, features fermentation and ethanol yields that set a new standard for conversion of biomass sugars from pretreated corn stover -- the non-edible portion of corn crops such as the stalk -- converting up to 97 percent of the plant sugars into fuel.

Researchers announced that while conventional yeast leaves more than one-third of the biomass sugars unused in the form of xylose, Mascoma's C5 FUEL™ efficiently converts this xylose into ethanol, and it accomplishes this feat in less than 48 hours. The finding was presented today at the 31st International Fuel Ethanol Workshop in Minneapolis.


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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby isgota » Fri 05 Jun 2015, 05:10:53

pstarr wrote:Cellulosic continues to be a diversion. All the schemes depend on the invention of genetically modified super-organism that will magically expel a super-enzyme to break apart the lignin glue and long-chain cellulose molecules . . . at no or little energy cost. Don't you think the paper industry would be interested? The liquor industry?


I don't think they'll be interested.

If you put that super-enzyme in cellulose you'll convert all to glucose, no cellulose, no paper, bad idea. And liquors depend a lot of the feedstock source for public acceptance, I don't think corn stover whiskey will have much appeal for consumers.
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby isgota » Fri 05 Jun 2015, 05:40:55

pstarr wrote:
wiki wrote:Cellulosic ethanol commercialization is the process of building an industry out of methods of turning cellulose-containing organic matter into fuel. Companies such as Iogen, POET, and Abengoa are building refineries that can process biomass and turn it into ethanol, while companies such as DuPont, Diversa, Novozymes, and Dyadic are producing enzymes which could enable a cellulosic ethanol future. The shift from food crop feedstocks to waste residues and native grasses offers significant opportunities for a range of players, from farmers to biotechnology firms, and from project developers to investors.[91]

I doubt any of these companies exists anymore or is involved in the production of cellulose fuel. The damn scam tanked (pun intended) years ago.


Actually, all of them have or are finishing building cellulosic ethanol plants at comercial scale with the exception perhaps of Diversa (now Verenium) that don't look very active in biofuels lately.
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby isgota » Fri 05 Jun 2015, 05:51:40

pstarr wrote:
Tanada wrote:Pretending something does not exist does not make it cease to exist.

I never said cellulosic doesn't exist.
The French chemist, Henri Braconnot, was the first to discover that cellulose could be hydrolyzed into sugars by treatment with sulfuric acid in 1819. The hydrolyzed sugar could then be processed to form ethanol through fermentation. The first commercialized ethanol production began in Germany in 1898, where acid was used to hydrolyze cellulose.

So it is a simple process that has not changed in almost 200 years. Problem is; it is a very energy-intensive process that will always cost more than petroleum. Always. Like duh. :razz:


Yeah, because sulfuric acid and modern enzymes have a lot in common :roll:

Just an example, take a look of the evolution in Novozymes since 2009:

Image

In hemicellulose as well:

Image
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 13 Jun 2015, 23:44:54

Stumbled across something interesting while researching home Kefir brewing. One of the strains of yeast that make up the complex set of yeasts and bacteria used in Kefir brewing specializes in converting Lactose/Galactose into Ethanol. Most yeasts can only digest single sugar compounds (Glucose, Fructose, Galactose) but not disaccharides like Sucrose or Lactose made up from them. The yeast strain Kluyveromyces marxianus however specializes in breaking down the Galactose half of Lactose freeing up the Glucose half for energy and releasing an Ethanol molecule from the broken down Galactose.

Lactose is the sugar that naturally occurs in Milk and millions of gallons of Whey byproduct produced in the process of making cheese average 4.5% Lactose dissolved in the liquid. Testing in 2013 with Kluyveromyces marxianus demonstrated a high efficiency at converting Lactose in Whey byproduct into Ethanol. The resulting material contained 8.64 g/L Ethanol and 3.122 g/L Lactose residue after just 16 hours of fermentation. For comparison 4.0 Beer sold in the USA has about 32 g/L ethanol so the resulting liquid is about 1 percent Ethanol.

Conclusions
The yeast was able to metabolize most of the
lactose within 16 h to give 8.64 g/L ethanol, 4.43
g/L biomass, and remain the 3.122 g/L residual
lactose


http://www.researchgate.net/profile/H_H ... 000000.pdf
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Tue 27 Sep 2016, 11:19:04

Speaking of US LNG that isn't being exported to Europe: old news from last March but just stumbled on to it. It wasn't "natural gas" that was exported...IOW not methane but ethane. Might not sound much different but ethane, as a component of manufacturing processes, is more valuable then methane. Thus the theory that METHANE exported from the US shale plays is going to keep our cousins warm (and less dependent on Russian methane imports) didn't actually start out as such:

"The INEOS Intrepid today left the Marcus Hook terminal near Philadelphia bound for Rafnes in Norway carrying 27,500m3 of US shale gas ethane. This is the first time that US shale gas (no...shale ethane) has ever been shipped to Europe and represents the culmination of a long-term investment by INEOS. Jim Ratcliffe, chairman and founder of INEOS, says, “This is an important day for INEOS and Europe. We know that shale gas economics revitalised US manufacturing and for the first time Europe can access this important energy and raw material source too”

This is the first time that US shale gas has ever been imported into Europe and finally gives the continent the chance to benefit from US shale gas economics which did so much to revitalise manufacturing in the USA."

BTW the US has been exporting increasing amounts of ETHANE to other countries since late 2014. The shipment from Marcus Hook is not the first exports of ethane or LNG to anyone as one might assume from the headlines.

IOW we shipped LPG and not LNG across the Big Pond. That one different letter makes a huge difference in the market and end use: "With the recently completed Enterprise’s terminal expansion, total US LPG export capacity is at 1.045 million b/d. With strong production growth in the US and flat demand in Europe and the Americas, US LPG is increasingly reaching distant markets like Asia. Additionally, US ethane will also fulfill global demand as the first cargo of US ethane is set to leave this March from Sunoco’s Marcus Hook export facility in Pennsylvania. Sunoco’s 70,000 b/d Marcus Hook terminal in Pennsylvania and Enterprise’s 200,000 b/d Morgan’s Point terminal in Texas will serve to satisfy export demand, currently contracted to Europe and India."
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It’s Final — Corn Ethanol Is Of No Use

Unread postby AdamB » Sat 16 Dec 2017, 13:43:07


OK, can we please stop pretending biofuel made from corn is helping the planet and the environment? The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released two of its Working Group reports at the end of last month (WGI and WGIII), and their short discussion of biofuels has ignited a fierce debate as to whether they’re of any environmental benefit at all. The IPCC was quite diplomatic in its discussion, saying “Biofuels have direct, fuel‐cycle GHG emissions that are typically 30–90% lower than those for gasoline or diesel fuels. However, since for some biofuels indirect emissions—including from land use change—can lead to greater total emissions than when using petroleum products, policy support needs to be considered on a case by case basis” (IPCC 2014 Chapter 8). In 2013 the U.S. used 4.7 billion bushels of corn (40% of the harvest) to produce over


It’s Final — Corn Ethanol Is Of No Use
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 25 Dec 2017, 14:20:11

DuPont Industrial Biosciences has announced the launch of Synerxia Thrive Fermentation System, the newest innovation in the company’s synergistic fermentation system technologies. The new fermentation system will deliver higher ethanol yields, incomparable robustness during thermal excursions and improved performance.

“With the new DuPont Synerxia Thirve Fermentation System, ethanol producers can now expect up to 4 percent higher ethanol yields in dry grind fuel alcohol facilities, when compared to conventional systems,” said Joseph DeSalvo, North America regional industry leader, DuPont Industrial Biosciences. “Synerxia Thrive is the result of a multiyear investment in yeast technologies focused on improving performance in ethanol fermentation to deliver increased value to our customers.”

DuPont Synerxia Thrive Fermentation System consists of a new active dry yeast (ADY), Synerxia Thrive ADY and Synerxia Thrive LC, a glucoamylase liquid complement. The new system blends the right combination of yeast and enzymes to deliver up to 4 percent additional ethanol versus a conventional yeast and glucoamylase combination.

Synerxia Thrive ADY incorporates a patent pending, carbon-efficient pathway that redirects a portion of the carbon that would go into CO2 and glycerol into ethanol production. In lab and plant results, the Synerxia Thrive Fermentation System outperformed conventional yeasts during thermal excursions and demonstrated increased robustness in the presence of organic acids.

“The launch of Synerxia Thrive Fermentation System gives ethanol producers the opportunity to integrate an unparalleled fermentation system into their business,” DeSalvo added. “We are thrilled to bring the technology to commercial scale to revolutionize the industry with our current and future partners.”


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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby GHung » Mon 25 Dec 2017, 14:36:14

“Synerxia Thrive is the result of a multiyear investment in yeast technologies focused on improving performance in ethanol fermentation to deliver increased value to our customers.”


Probably something like this:

http://aem.asm.org/content/64/5/1852.full
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Tanada » Thu 10 Sep 2020, 14:21:33

Reuters wrote: Trump administration to deny pending retroactive U.S. biofuel waivers

Stephanie Kelly and Jeff Mason and Jarrett Renshaw

Sep 09, 2020 • Last Updated 1 day ago • 2 minute read
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump has instructed that dozens of oil refiner requests for retroactive waivers from U.S. biofuel laws be denied amid concerns the issue could cut into his support in the Farm Belt, three sources familiar with the decision said.

The move, in the form of a direction to the Environmental Protection Agency, marks the end of an effort by the refining industry to come into compliance with a January court decision that said the Trump administration should not have given out some waivers in previous years.

The waivers have been a battleground for the influential oil and corn lobbies, both major constituencies for Trump as he seeks re-election in November.

The people familiar with Trump’s direction to the EPA wished to remain anonymous so they could speak candidly about the decision.

The EPA did not immediately comment.

Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), oil refiners must blend billions of gallons of biofuels into their products, or buy credits from those that do. But refiners may also seek an exemption from those obligations if they prove the requirements would cause them financial harm.

Biofuel advocates say the waivers hurt demand for corn-based ethanol. The oil industry says the obligations are too pricey.

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U.S. renewable fuel credits for 2020 rose on Wednesday to their highest since March 2018. Creditstraded at 55 cents each, up nearly 18% from the previous session.

The Trump administration has quadrupled the number of exemptions have given out to refiners, causing outrage in farm states, such as Iowa.

In January, though, an appeals court ruled that waivers granted to small refineries after 2010 could only be approved as extensions of pre-existing waivers. Most recipients of waivers in recent years have not continuously received them, and refiners sent in waiver applications to come into compliance with that court ruling.

In Iowa the federal administration’s expansion of the waiver program has complicated Republican Senator Joni Ernst’s reelection bid.

In recent weeks, Iowa officials argued that without action, Ernst – and perhaps Trump – could be in trouble come November.

Ernst has been a staunch defender of Trump but has been working behind the scenes to argue that his administration should deny the pending retroactive waivers, according to one of the people familiar with Trump’s direction to the EPA.

The biofuel industry welcomed the news. “Now, more than ever, our nation’s farmers and ethanol producers are counting on the RFS to provide market stability and certainty during an incredibly difficult and tumultuous time,” said a coalition that included the Renewable Fuels Association and the National Corn Growers Association. (Reporting by Stephanie Kelly, Jeff Mason and Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Tom Hogue, Kenneth Maxwell and Steve Orlofsky)


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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Subjectivist » Mon 21 Dec 2020, 00:52:29

I saw in one of the linked articles recently that DME is an isomer of Ethanol with the exact same number of the exact same component atoms just arranged in a different structure.

Does that mean with the proper enzyme we could cheaply convert Ethanol into DME and vice versa? If so I see a lot of possibilities for Ethanol as a DME source I had never thought of.
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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 15 Aug 2022, 16:57:37

Corn Ethanol Investors Poised to Profit From Inflation Reduction Act



The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which recently cleared the Senate and is set to pass the House later this week, dramatically increases existing subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), in a boost to a controversial cluster of emerging technologies that have so far failed to scale up. Climate activists have long argued that carbon capture is a ploy to extend the life span of dirty energy.

Multiple industries could draw on the expanded 45Q tax credit, which would be raised from $50 to $85 per ton of sequestered carbon, provided a project meets certain labor standards. The least contentious form of carbon capture would go to manufacturers in heavy industries such as steel, cement, and glass—sectors which account for a quarter of U.S. emissions but have made little progress toward decarbonization.

The subsidies would also be available to the power sector, including coal-fired plants, which have tried and failed for years to deploy carbon capture. (Power-sector CCS has been weakened since it appeared in the now-defunct Build Back Better legislation, which required plants to capture 75 percent of emissions. The language in IRA says they only need to install equipment with a “capture design capacity” of that amount—in other words, plant operators are only asked to make an earnest effort.)

The IRA also bets on promising new technology to suck carbon directly out of the air. Along with CCS for sectors that are tougher to decarbonize, direct air capture could be necessary to lower emissions at the pace recommended by scientists.

More from Lee Harris

But the hefty tax credit, designed to help jump-start technologies that remain prohibitively expensive, is likely to also flow to a sector where CCS is already financially viable and has been commercially deployed. Corn ethanol, an industry that exists due to a government mandate to blend biofuel into gas, is poised to capture outsize profits.

The lucrative subsidy is set to reward corn ethanol investors, including the asset manager BlackRock and a private equity venture led by the son of USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, which are proposing to build thousands of miles of new carbon pipelines through the Midwest conveying carbon from bioethanol refineries into underground fields.

Building out this new infrastructure could extend the life of an industry that has decimated the environment, raised the global price of food, and driven the Midwest into monocropping. And it could sink corn grain farmers deeper into subsidies that are not just ecologically hazardous but also financially unsustainable.

THE BIOFUELS INDUSTRY, which uses huge swaths of Midwestern farmland to produce corn grain, was once billed as environmentally sound. During the Obama administration, Secretary Vilsack argued that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which set required levels of biofuel to be blended with gasoline, would reduce dependence on foreign oil while producing “clean, renewable energy.”

The RFS mandate helped the corn industry take off. The new consumer market increased the price of corn by around 30 percent, putting more cropland and fertilizer into use. Roughly 40 percent of corn grown in the U.S. goes into ethanol production. But it had disastrous environmental consequences. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that corn ethanol is at least 24 percent more carbon-intensive than gasoline—and that study only looked at domestic emissions.

The lucrative subsidy is set to reward corn ethanol investors, including the asset manager BlackRock and a private equity venture led by the son of USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Some of the biggest environmental impacts of the RFS have come from direct and indirect land use changes. With more U.S. cropland going to corn production, other food production shifted overseas. As biodiesel production surged, the food industry replaced soy oil with palm oil imported from Malaysia and Indonesia, at devastating cost to tropical rain forests and peatlands, which keep much of the Earth’s carbon trapped in the soil.

Now, the industry is proposing to address one node in this long chain of emissions: pollution at biorefineries, where corn is fermented into fuel. It’s been done before. With the Department of Energy shouldering most of the financing cost, the commodities firm Archer-Daniels-Midland opened a plant in Illinois that captured carbon from ethanol production and injected it into underground sandstone.

Compared with other sources of emissions, it is relatively cheap and easy to capture CO2 at biofuel refineries, since the stream of CO2 they emit is highly concentrated. In fact, the carbon capture component of CCS was economically viable even before the latest, more generous version of 45Q, said Emily Grubert, an energy policy professor at Notre Dame. “An increase to the subsidy would be theoretically entirely profit for ethanol,” she said.

But while capture is straightforward, transport and storage is tougher. Captured carbon needs to be stored in a “sink,” typically an underground storage site. During the ethanol boom, ethanol refineries sprouted up across the Great Plains states, but they were not deliberately clustered or sited near underground carbon storage sites. The availability of storage has likely limited the ethanol carbon capture rollout. As Grubert said, “The incentive to get the storage or other issues worked out certainly increases with the credit.”

It’s hard for project developers to pitch billion-dollar pipelines at breakeven cost. Investors want to be sure they will make money through fluctuations in fuel prices, like the volatility in gas markets currently on display. So while ethanol pipeline producers would have turned a profit under the old tax credit, this greater cushion could push investment to take off.

Investors were already waiting in the wings for these credits following the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which gave the Department of Energy a multibillion-dollar loan authority for CO2 pipelines. Now, the Inflation Reduction Act’s additional outlays sweeten the deal.

THREE PIPELINES ARE CURRENTLY seeking approval before the Iowa Utilities Board. Wolf Carbon Solutions, which built a pipeline in Alberta sourcing CO2 from a fertilizer plant for enhanced oil recovery, is proposing a line in partnership with Archer-Daniels-Midland. BlackRock’s Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund is backing another line, the “Heartland Greenway” project, with Navigator Energy Services.

And Summit Carbon Solutions, a new private equity arm of a private agricultural conglomerate, is proposing a 2,000-mile pipeline, the “Midwest Carbon Express,” that would run through Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa to bury CO2 underground in North Dakota. Former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who served as President Trump’s ambassador to China, is selling the proposal to Iowans on TV as an “adviser” to the project. And the general counsel is Jess Vilsack, the son of USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Farmers and homeowners in the projected path of the pipelines are irate. Dan Tronchetti, 66, a soy and corn farmer in Paton, Iowa, has been battling Summit’s proposal to run a six-inch line of pressurized carbon through half a mile of his prime farmland. Tronchetti is passionately “pro-ethanol.” He grows and sells corn grain to ethanol plants, owns cars that run on E85 fuel, and told the Prospect that “during the recent gas price surge, I was burning E15 whenever I could.”

But Tronchetti has become a staunch opponent of the pipeline, despite the private equity firm’s claim that it will help his industry stay afloat. He thinks it will damage local cropland and worries about a rupture that could put his family and local ecology at risk. (Forty-nine people were hospitalized in 2020 following a carbon pipeline rupture in Mississippi.) Most of all, Tronchetti thinks the whole venture is based on a misbegotten premise: the continued viability of the corn ethanol industry.

“The only reason these pipelines have been proposed is so they can collect the 45Q federal income tax credits,” Tronchetti told the Prospect in an interview. He thinks that in the long run, ethanol is on its way out, but he is also skeptical of the need for the subsidies, he said: “I also don’t think ethanol’s going to close their doors if we don’t get CO2 pipelines. It’s all public relations spin.”

Along with farmers who own land in the path of the pipelines, county farm bureaus have mobilized. The Linn County Farm Bureau submitted an objection to the Navigator pipeline. But the state farm bureau in Iowa has remained largely silent, said Jess Mazour, a Sierra Club organizer who has been working with local farm groups.

Meanwhile, on top of the 45Q update in the Inflation Reduction Act, another factor could further boost the corn ethanol CCS market. A new rule from the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is set to strengthen the credit market for the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, paying as much as $200 per ton of CO2. That’s “even more generous than 45Q, and you better believe the industry knows that,” said Danny Cullenward, a climate economist who tracks the carbon credits market. “There’s a huge sugar rush.”

California’s friendliness to the growing carbon capture sector is linked to the growing lobby for biofuels, reporting from the Energy and Policy Institute’s Joe Smyth has shown. A national lab overseen by the Department of Energy wrote a report in favor of carbon capture, and then heavily promoted that report to influence the scoping plan of CARB, with funding from a utility that owns biomass power plants in California. Until March 2021, Virgil Welch, the executive director of the California Carbon Capture Coalition, was chief adviser to CARB Chair Mary Nichols. Welch’s consulting firm, Caliber Strategies, also lobbied CARB on behalf of POET LLC, the world’s largest producer of biofuels.

At the Iowa Utilities Board, which is considering the pipeline proposals, hundreds of Iowans have submitted comments opposing the projects. “Our state already overproduces corn to produce ethanol when we should be developing actual solutions that won’t destroy farmland and risk our health,” wrote one commenter from Ankeny, Iowa.

“Iowa is an ag state and when pipelines go in, productivity goes down. The only reason is because there is ‘free’ government money for this unproven technology,” wrote another commenter in Huxley. “This is almost a casebook example of a boondoggle.”


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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby careinke » Mon 15 Aug 2022, 19:14:12

Biofuels is one of the worst things ever conceived. It has hurt the environment, raised the price of food, shortened the lifespan of ICE's, and empowered the state.

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Re: THE Ethanol Thread pt 3

Unread postby Doly » Tue 16 Aug 2022, 15:42:53

Does that mean with the proper enzyme we could cheaply convert Ethanol into DME and vice versa?


It seems it's been looked into:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 6120301528
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