Ethanol: As a fuel

Did you guys know what ethanol (chemical formula: 6 hydrogen atoms, 2 carbon atoms, and 1 oxygen atom for a molecule. No need to know the chemical formula if you don't even understand the words "chemical formula", "atom", "hydrogen", "carbon", "oxygen", and "molecule") is? It's a type of drinkable alcohol. In fact, it's in your wine and beer and other alcoholic beverages. Drinkable as it is, but it's also being used as a fuel for some powerplants, fireplaces, automotive vehicles... It's also in your white board cleaner. Ethanol could dissolve ink pretty well and is safe to be drink, as long as you don't keep on drinking alcohol until your stomach's the size of 6 bowling balls stack on top of each other. But this article is about using ethanol as a fuel. Here’s how most people make ethanol.

The feedstock for making ethanol are living or recently living things, leftover food, and food wastes. To use sewage waste and animal droppings (including human droppings) as feedstock for ethanol, I don’t know if we can do that. Maybe it’s impossible to use them as feedstock for ethanol. Don’t know what feedstock is, search for its definition on www.dictionary.com. Grind the feedstock up into a fine powder and mix the powder with water. Add enzymes to break the powder into tiny particles. Heat the mixture up to breakdown the particles even more and then cool it down. Add some more enzymes, breaking the particles into sugar. Mix yeast with the mixture for 48 hours or so, and voila: ethanol, at least it’s still in the mixture. Filter out the water and remaining particles. Literally! Filter them. Filter the water from the ethanol by using a molecular sieve, which is just another form of a filter. And you got pure ethanol ready to be use instantly as a fuel or mixed with gasoline to be used as a fuel.

There’s one more way of making ethanol. It’s pretty unconventional, since that way of making ethanol was patented recently. The company that patented it is Algenol. A type of algae called cyanobacteria will grow in a tank of salt water. Like other types of algae, it sucks in carbon dioxide, but releases ethanol along with oxygen. The ethanol evaporated and will be piped away to be purified. So you’ll only need carbon dioxide and nutrients for cyanobacteria in order to make ethanol.

So as you can see, ethanol’s a renewable resource. But it has several drawbacks when burned. Burning ethanol would release more carbon dioxide for the same energy amount as gasoline and more ozone-forming pollutants than gasoline. Yes, ground ozone. It could increase the risk of people getting diseases affecting their respitory system, or “breathing system” as I called it, and stunt plant growth. Ground ozone is caused by sunlight reacting with unburned gasoline in the air and nitrogen oxides (A type of molecule. Don’t understand it, better study it right away). Flex-fuel vehicles, vehicles that are capable of using gasoline, ethanol, and any blends of both, aren’t as fuel-efficient as vehicles using only gas (By gas, I meant gasoline).

Although it has several drawbacks, it also have some advantages over gasoline. Burning ethanol releases less carbon monoxide, a toxic gas, and less carbon dioxide than gasoline. It’s a particulate-free burning fuel. Particulate matters are very extra tiny solid particles, like soot, causing an estimated 200,000 deaths per year in Europe alone. It’s a low emission fuel. So using ethanol as a substitute for gas could help in reducing global warming and deaths associated with carbon monoxide and particulate matter. Not just that, ethanol have a higher octane rate than gasoline, meaning more compression of the fuel allowed before burning in an engine. More compression allowed means engines using both ethanol and gas or ethanol-only engines produce more power than gas-only engines.

Most ethanol being used as fuel in the world today is blended with gasoline. In the US and Europe, the blend of ethanol and gas with the highest percentage of ethanol is E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and, usually, 15% gasoline. In Brazil, flex-fuel vehicles are capable of consuming only ethanol. Ethanol is growing in popularity, although blended ethanol and gasoline have a lower octane rate than normal ethanol, but it still have an octane rate equal to or greater than premium gasoline.

 

So, as you can see, ethanol is a very good replacement for gasoline, especially since the world’s running out of crude oil, and gasoline is from crude oil (It’s the black, gooey, and oily liquid underground drilled up from oil rigs. Crude oil could be separated into plastic, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel…). Crude oil is pretty useful, right? Right! Never run out, right? Wrong!!!!!. So I suggest you using ethanol. But keep this in mind: most of the world’s ethanol use crops as feedstock, so using ethanol could change farmland negatively, despite the image below.