Real Alternative Energy

by Adrian Vance 

        The favorite phrase of the greens and their ignorant friends is "alternative energy," but it has been a myth.  Hydrogen, ethanol, electricity, wind power, wave energy, fuel cells and nuclear  have all been mentioned as if their energy were free.  All cost much more than petroleum and most would require a new infrastructure for the transmission of the energy.

           In terms of implementation, the most successful alternative energy source proposed has been ethanol.  One-eighth of the corn crop is now converted to ethanol for motor fuel.  Ethanol is not an ideal motor fuel.  It produces less energy that it takes to make instead offering the lever of petroleum. Depending on ethanol to get us out of an energy problem is like diving an aircraft to make it go faster so you get to your destination quicker.  You can do that only so long before the crash.  Petroleum has a range of "levers" as it varies from "Light, sweet" crude to the ashphalt-like tar sands of every kind and viscosity.

        The thicker the source material the more expensive the product, but the worst of the petroleum materials is far better than ethanol. And, diversion of one-eighth of the corn crop has caused the price to increase by 300%, which is greater than expected and not justifiable, but commodity markets are emotional.

           The great embarrassment of the ethanol answer is that we have known from the beginning that the entire corn crop could not supply more than one-third of the motor fuel needed.  And, where ethanol is miscible with water, which means if you put 50 milliliters each of  water and ethanol  you get 95 milliliters of solution.  They are very hard to separate and even on distillation at 78 Celsius degrees the ethanol will carry 5% water with it.  This water rusts pipelines, fouls pumps and fuel lines as well as causing problems in combustion.  It is about the worst molecule we could use for fuel of any we could find, but it has had enormous political power behind it and is contributing to our economic problems.

         A far better molecule on which to create an alternative fuel industry is butanol.  It comes in three forms, but the most common is the n-butanol which is the straight chained version with the "OH" at one end.  

        The other two forms are "2-butanol" and "tetra-butanol."  2-butanol has the "OH" group on the second from the end carbon atom in the four carbon butanol straight-line string.  There is no "3-butanol" as turning the molecule end-for-end makes the "3" a "2" and according to the rules by which molecules are named it is then called "2-butanol."  

        n-butanol is easier to form so it is by far the most common in any synthesis or production of the molecule.  It is not miscible with water.  If you mix 50 milliliters each of butanol and water you get 100 millilters of solution that separate if the mixture is chilled to 0 Celsius degrees.

       Butanol is made by the bacteria Clostridia acetobutylicum using any cellulosic waste from corn cobs and stalks to sawdust.  Unlike a yeast fermantation, which produces only 15% product this process produces 35% product before the butanol poisons the process.  At that point the fermantation mixture, or "must," can be dumped to underground tanks and cooled free to 10 Celsius degrees from where it can be cheaply cooled to 0 Celsius degrees where 93% of the butanol rises to the top from where it can be decanted and it is a finished product!  

         Butanol produces as much energy as octane, the prototype gasoline molecule.  It is rated at 100 octane in terms of knocking.  It will work in any internal combustion engine or gas turbine.The energy we need, over and above sunlight, to make butanol is about 3% that which we get from it.  It is actually a cheaper fuel in than term than most of the petroleum we now refine as no refining is needed.

        If making butanol from waste materials is exciting, making it from algae is amazing.  The US Department of Agriculture estimates that where one acre of corn will make 129 gallons of ethanol it would make 30,000 gallons of butanol in a season.  This figure was thought so outrageous the UCSD scientists investigating algae culture for fuel production cut it to "3,000" gallons per growing season for an analysis done by B. Greg Mitchell and Stephen Mayfield of Scripps Institute at UCSD.

        Algae in sunlight will at least double its mass every day.  If it is supplemented with CO2 as in SCAF technology it will grow even faster as CO2 is the limiting factor.  But, just doubling alone from a 5 pound batch of "seed algae" would give 7.52 X 10^83 pounds of product in 120 days.  This is a ridiculous amount of product and what it means is that from a properly fed algae farm we will get all the feed stock we could ever want to ferment into engine-ready motor fuel.