Yet more economist blogging: Fueled by butanol
By Thoreau
In my final piece of Economist blogging today, I’ll note that the Economist has a nice article on biotechnology and biofuels. In a nutshell, ethanol is a popular biofuel because (1) people have known how to make it for a very long time and (2) a common ingredient for it comes from key electoral college battleground states. But it’s hardly the final word on biofuels. They have a nice report on efforts to move beyond ethanol.
I know that they give short shrift to the controversy over energy efficiency and ethanol (in short, are you burning more fuel while growing and processing it than you get in the end?), a point that some like to harp on, but (1) perhaps they wanted to avoid a rather contentious issue (the reported numbers go both ways, depending on whom you ask) and (2) perhaps they wanted to focus on the alternatives rather than write one more article lambasting the incumbent favorite.
Comment by Karen —
September 30, 2007 @ 11:20 am
Excellent article. I would like to note that Reason hero and mine Willie Nelson is backing a biodiesel company here in central Texas. I don’t know anything about it except that lots of people have his company’s bumperstickers. (I vaguely recall that biodiesel is made from used restraurant frying grease. Krispy Kreme will rule the world!)
Comment by stm177 —
September 30, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
Hey, kinda out of left field, but I was wondering if the spread of Corn Stove heaters implies that corn is subsidized too much?
These stoves are increasingly popular in the Midwest, because of high propane and fuel oil prices. Corn is subdized, and it seems odd to me that the federal government would subside something that gets burned up and sent up the chimney. To me, food subsidies should be for things that people actually eat, not for livestock feed or alternative home heating fuel.
Comment by Keifus —
October 1, 2007 @ 9:15 am
Higher alcohols don’t smell very nice. If you’re playing, for whatever reason, with a series of them, then you might observe a stink curve: as molecular weight increases, so does the reekiness, but the vapor pressure also gets lower (so you actually smell them less). The curve hits a maximum at butanol–it’s vile stuff.
(All of which is neither here nor there, I realize.)
One advantage to simpler alcohols, besides the ancient technology, is that you can (almost) make them run in fuel cells, but like the article says, long chains are better for the heating value. And even though it’s not the emphasis, I do still wonder what the butanol crops are…
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
October 1, 2007 @ 10:22 am
Corn makes no economic sense as a biofuel, but I’m pretty sure that the next round of genetically engineered crops the cleantech VCs are funding (e.g., switchgrass) will work great.
And this scares the heck out of me. We’ll be in a place where basically the entire ecosystem could be profitably replaced with monocultures dedicated to biofuel crops, and when human demands come in conflict with the natural world, the natural world loses.
So I hope that biofuels take longer than predicted, and that wind and solar come on line faster than predicted.