Introduction
Ethanol is a type of alcohol popularly known for its usage in flex fuel vehicles and race cars. This fuel is used in gasoline, and although ethanol gets lower miles per gallon (mpg) and produces less energy it is very high in octane. What this means is that it can be mixed with gasoline that has an 88 octane rating to form gasoline with a 91 octane rating. Ethanol burns cooler than gasoline, but it burns faster meaning less fuel mileage. Gasoline is superior to ethanol in cars that run on the road due to costs and efficiency.
Problems With Ethanol
Although it can be used in gasoline to raise the octane rating, it cannot match the power and efficiency of gasoline. The problems with ethanol go far beyond the engine; it includes production and transportation of the fuel too. To produce ethanol massive amounts of corn are needed, and even if all of the corn in the United States was turned into ethanol it would only meet 12% of America's gasoline demand. Ethanol production consumes large amounts of water. To pump the water to the processing plants and farms hundreds of miles away from cities requires huge amounts of electricity. Ethanol also becomes diluted by water vapor because it is more hydrophilic than hydrophobic (will bond with water rather than not mix with water). Below is John Stossel's ethanol report:
Corn ethanol will not work and people who process and sell ethanol are trying to develop another way of creating it using carbon dioxide, algae, the Sun, and water.
Ethanol From Algae
Corn ethanol does not work, but would algal based ethanol? Well the answer is the same here, no it will not work, still it is way too costly and consumes way too much energy. One of the main reasons is that these farms want to use tanks of algae to produce ethanol, algae absorbs carbon dioxide. What is planned to do is to pump the carbon dioxide emissions of coal and natural gas plants to these farms where it will be used in the tanks to grow the algae. The problem is that it takes about 40%-60% of a power plants energy to sequester the emissions; imagine how much more energy it will take to pump the emissions to tanks that are located miles away from the plant. Also as with corn ethanol algal based ethanol also only gets 68% of the amount of energy in gasoline. The argument against this is that the algae doubles in size every five hours so we will always have enough. Figure this; the amount of ethanol that an algae farm will produce is about 5000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year. A farm that is 1000 acres will produce 5,000,000 gallons every year or 13,600 per day. The United States consumes 390,000,000 gallons of gasoline every day; figure how many of these 1000 acre farms we would need to meet demand, considering one farm only creates 13,600 gallons a day (5,000,000 per year). Establishing enough of these algae plants to provide 390,000,000 gallons of fuel each day would require a section of land the size of the state of Pennsylvania. The cost of one farm is about $850,000,000.