Dow to Test Algae Ethanol

• Ethanol from Algae This is all fine and well, but what will we do with the ethanol? The article says that Dow plans to use the ethanol in the production of plastics, which is good as it will keep plastics cheap as oil goes out of favor. My concern, however, is that we will try replace gas/oil in the internal combustion engine (ICE). The ICE is far too inefficient and should be replaced by the electric motor. Therefore, I would be a strong advocate of using the ethanol to run turbines to generate electricity. My main fear is that cheap ethanol will interfere with the conversion of our transportation infrastructure from ICEs to electric motors. THIS CAN NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN! Electric motors are far more efficient than the ICE and we should vigorously pursue this conversion! HJ WALDORF, MD

  johnsonha143 07/16/2009 Posts:5 Avg Rating:

  • Re: Ethanol from Algae The engine itself may be more efficient, but everything else in the chain is not - and by a long way. In addition, bio-fuels will be needed for other forms of transportation such as aviation where the weight and energy retention capacity of batteries renders them useless. When things change, we can, as you suggested, burn the artificially produced fuel to create electricity.

    bertibus06 07/16/2009 Posts:1 Avg Rating:

    • Re: Ethanol from Algae The "well-to-wheel" efficiency of electric vehicles is purported to be about 77% by NREL; whereas the same metric for ICEs is about 16%. Electricity is efficiently transported with about 7% losses on average. Even though conversion of chemical energy in coal to electrical energy is only about 35% efficient, production, refinement and distribution of refined gasoline is about the same at 45% efficiency. The huge advantage to electric vehicles is the roughly 90% efficiency of electric motors at producing work from electricity compared to about 20% for ICEs using hydrocarbons. That being said, efficiency matters less when an energy product is abundant. We rarely cared about efficiency when oil stocks were sky high. If this ethanol could be produced cheaply in vast quantities, then it might save us all a lot of effort and expense in converting to electric vehicles. Algae has the "potential" to produce truly vast amounts of diesel and ethanol fuels. It would be impractical to produce electricity from biodiesel or bioethanol, simply because they are already useful - and likely expensive - energy products. Only 35% of the energy would become electricity after much initial energy expenditure. I'd like to see electric vehicles take over as the best way to reduce dependence on oil. Afterall, over 40% of oil has non-highway uses, which will grow another 35% by 2030. If we eliminated oil use for highway transportation, we would still import over 60% of our 2030 oil. Perhaps algal diesel and ethanol can offset industrial, residential and commercial needs (nominally) for oil.

      MakeSense 07/19/2009 Posts:93 Avg Rating:

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