Why not make oil rather than alcohol from biomass?

Answer 1

Actually making ethanol/alcohol is only one form of biofuel and it is far from the most efficient. It uses a huge amount of energy to make per gallon due to the distillation requirement.

Ethanol or "drinking alcohol" is only one form of alcohol, methanol is another one.

The wikipedia entry on biofuels is way out of date and distorted as is often the case with their entries.

Any organic material that can be eaten or burned can be more efficiently used to make methane, which has the further benefit of preserving the organic composition in a way that creates good quality fertilizer. Even sewage and animal waste can be used safely.

Many forms of biomass do produce oil, vegetable oil, and this can be used to create biodiesel while the rest of the plant can be used to create methane (as in natural gas), or methanol and nitromethane, both very usable liquid fuels.

Answer 2

Many more people make biomass oil fuels (e.g. biodiesel) than biomass ethanol. However the people who make ethanol make a LOT of it.

The simple problem is that diesel automobile popularity is at an all-time low in America. There's a reason for that. Diesels have never been great... they COULD be great, but for a number of years the automakers have been "holding their breath" waiting for the EPA to finally come out with smog rules for diesels. Until that happened there was no point designing an engine. Well, they finally did :) and automakers are jumping on this with many new engines and models that are looking quite nice! Hybrid diesels are coming too!

Answer 3

As ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel) becomes widespread, and diesel particulate filters are present on new vehicles, we will see more diesel vehicles starting to be sold from companies besides Mercedes and Volkswagen.

The fears most people have were from images of the '80's of hard to start, noisy, deathly slow, obnoxiously smoky, teeth rattling vehicles. And they were. Not any more. Higher injection pump pressures have made it so it is almost difficult to recognize a new diesel. Except that it goes 50% further on a gallon of fuel.

Nissan and Honda are already planning on releasing diesel vehicles in the next 2 years. Then as demand for medium weight distillates increases, we will see exactly what you are talking about.

Answer 4

If you tried to get oil out of biomass, then after it is refined you could only use it in diesel cars.

Alcohol can be used with gasoline powered cars. They are the majority of what's on the road.

Answer 5

WELL,
WELL,
WELL...

The solution at our finger tips, you say.

Let's take a look at the recent price of CORN which is now used to make Ethanol. Did it stay the same or did it go up in price?

Our food stuffs made from corn or produced using corn as a meal ingredient for livestock: has the price stayed the same since introduction of Ethanol as an added fuel? Or have foods stayed the same price?

As soon as you name the source of a new fuel, that commodity goes up in price. Now, we have driven up the price of all foods for human consumption. Smart move - RIGHT?

Wouldn't it be better to keep the gas and oil from the Alaska Pipeline here in the USA and not ship it all over the globe while importing oil from foreign countries at the same time?

Wouldn't it be smarter to keep small oil wells here in the USA pumping oil instead of paying them NOT TO PUMP? What is the deal here? Oh, there is not some kind of plan to drive fuel up to $5 per gallon? Come on...Who are you kidding?

Answer 6

That's a good idea but selling it to the mass population would be very difficult. Alcoholic beverage producers would object to the mere thought of trading alcohol for something else. If this is a strong thought then talk to the government. Sign a petition or just try to talk to the federal officials around your neighborhood.

Answer 7

Actually, you can and it is probably a more viable alternative than fermentation to make alcohols or transesterification to make FAME. The process itself is quite old and well understood.

Answer 8

Here are some things to ponder...

http://members.tripod.com/mrpaine/biomass.html

What is Biomass?

The term biomass generally really applies to a fuel source rather than a specific generation technology. Biomass fuels are combustible organic materials which can vary dramatically in form. For example, agricultural by products such as wood chips, almond shell, and municipal solid waste are examples of materials which could be combusted with little processing to generate electricity. Cogeneration can utilize biomass fuels, or the material may be combusted directly in a boiler.

Biomass as a fuel source also includes "biogas' fuels. For example, methane recovered from landfills can be combusted to produce electricity. This technology reduces fugitive methane releases (a major greenhouse gas) and produces a useful commodity. Another source of biogas are farms; dairy waste products (manure and other material) can be placed into a "digester" where microbacterial decomposition produces combustible gases. This technique can also be applied at waste water treatment facilities.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_fuel


Biofuel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For articles on specific fuels used in vehicles, see Biogas, Bioethanol, Biobutanol, Biodiesel, and Straight vegetable oil
Sugar cane can be used as a biofuel.
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Biofuel is derived from biomass — recently living organisms or their metabolic byproducts, such as feces from cows. It is a renewable energy source, unlike other natural resources such as petroleum, coal, and nuclear fuels. Agricultural products specifically grown for use as biofuels include corn and soybeans, primarily in the United States; flaxseed and rapeseed, primarily in Europe; sugar cane in Brazil; palm oil in South-East Asia; and jatropha (though not an agricultural product) in India. Biodegradable outputs from industry, agriculture, forestry and households can be used; examples include straw, timber, manure, rice husks, sewage, biodegradable waste, and food leftovers; they can be converted to biogas through anaerobic digestion. Biomass used as fuel often consists of underutilized types, like chaff and animal waste. The quality of timber or grassy biomass does not have a direct impact on its value as an energy-source.

Biofuels are currently significantly less carbon neutral than other forms of renewable energy due to the high use of fossil fuels in the production of biofuels. The combustion of biofuels produce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The carbon in biofuels is often taken to have been recently extracted from atmospheric carbon dioxide by plants as they have grown. The potential for biofuels to be considered to be "carbon neutral" depends upon the carbon that is emitted being reused by further plant growth. Clearly however, cutting down trees in forests that have grown for hundreds, or thousands of years for use as a biofuel, without the replacement of this biomass would not have a carbon neutral effect. Many people believe that a way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is to use biofuels to replace non-renewable sources of energy.

Much research is being done about the use of microalgae as an energy source, with applications for biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, methane, and even hydrogen.[citation needed] The production of biofuels to replace oil and natural gas is in active development, focusing on the use of cheap organic matter (usually cellulose, agricultural and sewage waste) in the efficient production of liquid and gas biofuels which yield high net energy gain. One advantage of biofuel over most other fuel types is that it is biodegradable, and so relatively harmless to the environment if spilled.[1][2]