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| Ethanol replaces BTX, not gasoline(E85 is a relatively small market). BTX is more expensive and oil companies make more money selling it elsewhere and buying 10% ethanol for octane even with these low oil prices.
http://ethanolproducer.com/articles/13028/economists-ethanol-retain...
Here is technology to reduce distillation costs 75% with a demo plant in Minnesota:
http://ethanolproducer.com/articles/12371/novel-distillation-to-be-...
It is a game changer, even cheapens drying distillers grain, hopefully older ethanol plants can retrofit this in, reminds me of our air induction sprayer nozzles:
“We take the beer and infuse air into it and saturate it and spray it through some special nozzles into a vacuum chamber, the distillation column. We replace the stripper section with our equipment,” Burton explained. “When the fluid is sprayed into the column, aerosol-sized droplets come out. Each of the droplets has a bubble inside. The bubble grows exponentially inside the vacuum chamber and explodes the droplet. It creates tens of thousands of very small droplets. Those nano droplets now have surface tension relieved on them and they readily vaporize at half the energy.” Burton added that the low-vacuum environment also relieves the azeotropic bond. “You can make pure ethanol at one pass, without molecular sieves,” he said.
With the proof of concept established at bench scale, the brothers are looking for partners to test the concept at pilot scale. “On the ethanol side, 75 percent of Btu used for distillation is saved,” Burton said, which translates into a 24-cent-per-gallon savings. Experiments done on water purification indicate a 50 percent energy savings. “That will save additional money for ethanol plants by cleaning their water so they recycle more.” Burton said they expect the concept can be applied to drying distillers grains as well.
Edited by Fletch 2/14/2016 09:46
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The next time you see an eviromentalist thank him for Ethanol's survival
