Petrol from Plants!

there was a very interesting feature in the Aug 8 issue of Newsweek. by the way, i consider myself very lucky because we get TIME, Newsweek, The Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review at home for free. daddy brings them from the office a week late, but still very good reading. so the article was: -

"Green Gold: After Years Of Hype, Biofuels Are Starting To Fill The World's Gas Tanks"

They are basically making petroleum-like, hydrocarbon-based fuels like ethanol(booze), something called biodiesel, and stuff like that. and they don't pump it out from the ground like oil. they extract the fuels from plants. what? yeap, from plants!

the ethanol is made from corn and other starchy grains. the corn is ground up and soaked, then dunked with enzymes to turn them into sugar. then they put in yeast to ferment it to get the ethanol. the pulp is filtered out, and the remaining ethanol is distilled(whee!) to 200-proof - that's 100% alcohol - and then distributed to gas stations. it's basically a 100% version of vodka and the stuff we get in bio lab.

as for biodiesel, it comes from crops like rapeseed(think peanut butter) and soya beans. plant oil is extracted from the plants under "high temperature and pressure"(remember your chem?) and the fat-filled oil is heated to purify it. then they add methanol and some catalysts to break down the oil to form glycerol and esters. the esters form the biodiesel.

damn i should have kept my chem.

now what's so good about so-called biofuels? the most magical thing about it is that you can use them in car engines just like petrol. if you mix ethanol or biodiesel with the stuff from Shell or Caltex the engine roars along just fine. if you want to use it pure you do have to vary the compression ratio in the engine cylinders but that's easy to do. there've been many proposed solutions to replace petrol - from battery-powered cars to clean coal to hydrogen - but with every single one of them you need new technologies and new cars and new engines and new "petrol" stations. that's very inconvenient and the costs involved will overtake the savings from not using petrol. so if you can keep your car and still use the new fuel and save money and save the earth, i think that's the best of both worlds.

another thing is of courses the usual environmentalist lines. biofuels produce less carbon dixoide, nitrogen and sulphur oxides, and less of the smoky shit in general. it's called "cleaner-burning". and they don't worsen global warming(ie. atmospheric CO2 concentration) because - and read this - every atom of carbon that comes out of a biofuel exhaust pipe was extracted from the atmosphere already by the plants that gave their lives for your fuel grew to adult size. (if you didn't know already, plants get their food from turning CO2 into glucose.)

and if you're thinking, you'll also realise that since the fuel comes from plants its supply is unlimited. the day that we run out of biofuel is the day we run out of vegetables. we'll never have to worry about oil again!

lastly - and i'll keep this simple - it's much cheaper. just ask your dad how expensive petrol is now.


while the stuff we in Singapore put in our cars is still 100% crude-based petrol from Brunei and Saudi Arabia, the new fuels are catching on in many places. in Brazil for instance, with its massive agricultural output, all the petrol you get at gas stations is about 22 to 26% ethanol. and if you get your car modified to run on pure ethanol, you halve your fuel bill! the US and Germany are already producing lots of the plant-based fuels, with even more to come since they are cutting taxes on the new fuels to encourage their use. and in Austria - believe it - the public buses run on fuel modified from McDonald's french fry oil!

now that's an idea. i'll set up a biodiesel factory in Tuas or something and ask everyone to send me their used oil and turn it into petrol. this will be a real money spinner since i don't have to pay them to take their trash. interesting.

it seems that everyone is happy. fuel users - especially drivers - worldwide are happy at having something cheaper than normal petrol. farmers are excited at having a new market for their produce. and the treehuggers are pleased that biofuels are less pollutive and don't worsen global warming. investment in biofuels - building factories, setting aside more cropland, and upgrading petrol stations - is growing fast, and soon i believe it will come to singapore. you can even power aeroplanes and ships and power stations with the new fuels.

even Malaysia is growing more oil palms and building new biofuel factories. we won't be far behind.

and the technology is just going to get better. with the old-style biofuels - biodiesel for instance - you get a lot of pulp and other waste left over after the process. it's not a bad thing; the factories sell the waste off as fertilizer. the wonderful thing is that we can now make our own enzymes(remember in bio class you learnt we had to extract them from whatever natural organism secretes them) and even better, we can genetically modify the artificial enzymes to make them do whatever we want them to do! so some genius develops an enzyme that digests cellulose and turns it into sugar.

for non-bio students that's the stuff that makes up paper, trees and dietary fibre, and is actually made up of very long-chain glucose strands. that's how you can get sugar out of it. my first thought was to look at the trees outside the window and imagine throwing a pail of enzyme at it and turning it into a glistening sweet sugar tree just like willy wonka would do. that's magical.

the implication here is that you can turn an entire plant into sugar and then ferment it to make your ethanol. it's a very high level of efficiency that makes the whole process much cheaper - US$1.30 per gallon, much less than petrol is now. it reduces the area of land needed to grow the same amount of petrol as well - and means also that you can grow any type of plant whatsoever since they are all made of cellulose. even cactus!

since the big oil companies are getting into it as well, i think the only people who need be worried are the arabs. God help their economies when we stop buying their oil.

what actually bothers me though is the new fuels' impact on hydrogen power technology. if we have clean limitless energy from plants, why invest in hydrogen? that means things like hydrogen cars, fuel cells and nuclear fusion reactors won't get developed. experts in the article say that if we combine biofuels with improvements in natural gas technology and fuel efficiency and materials engineering, "we may not ever need the fuel cell at all". now in reality fuel cells and nuclear fusion are the cleanest and most efficient technologies - literally zero pollution, with high energy density impossible with any other fuel. they just need development. with biofuels we are just staying with 20th-century technology and fuels which have reached their maximum development potential. are we going to be stuck on hydrocarbon-based fuels forever?

i was an environmental geography student throughout RI, and am doing economics now in JC. but long before all of that i was a dreamer and a science fiction fan. i grew up on Star Trek and Gundam. and all the starships and mobile suits run on compressed hydrogen for power. so do Imperial Star Destroyers, X-Wing Starfighters and Death Stars. that's what we can do with hydrogen! we can never use biofuels in space, there's no oxygen for combustion. i have always believed that our destiny as a civilization lies in the stars, the Second Coming of our LORD notwithstanding, and plant petrol isn't going to get us there. for all the advantages of biofuels, a part of me will always be unhappy if we neglect our hydrogen research.