Bioethanol - Disadvantages and Future Development
Disatvantages of Bioethanol Production
We have already spoken for the carbon in the previous post about bioethanol advantages. Something else – the different plants have different energy content. In USA corn is mainly use. In Brazil – sugar cane. The latter has higher energy ratio. On the other hand not every crop can be grown in all regions. So production may start to rely on importing crops or sugar.
A 5% displacement of petrol by bioethanol will require 5% displacement of food crops in EU. In the developed countries that is not a problem, but in the developing ones where we have a large number of people living below the poverty this may lead to a crisis.
Bioethanol is not as efficient as petroleum. Its energy content is 70% of that of petrol. As consumers are you agree to pay more for more fuel to do the same work. So the use of bioethanol in public transportation will lead to increasing the price of the service. For now there are lots of different governmental concessions, but this will not be forever. In USA for example all new cars are with flex-fuel engines and can run on 85% ethanol. But there are a lot of old cars which can not run on high concentration of bioethanol. They will need conversion, which means expenses. Additional money will be need for appropriate media campaign in order to inform people for the necessity of timely conversion of the engines. All these will increase the production expenses for bioethanol and from there will increase the consumer price
Future Development
If we want bioethanol to become more sustainable to replace petrol the production process has to be more efficient i.e. the cost of conversion to be reduced, to increase yields and to increase the diversity of crop used. Researchers are looking now to convert lignin and cellulose into sugars for fermentation. Interesting aspect is the possibility of simultaneous saccharification and fermentation. The problem is these two processes happen at different temperature. With the current methods we convert 50% to 72% ethanol per 1 gram glucose. In this respect microbiology and biotechnology will be helpful in the genetic engineering so to come to microbes which convert glucose into sugar so the latter to ferment in bioethanol.
In future consumers can take the initiative in their own hands and work by themselves for their own fuel – small home producers who will convert their household waste by small-scale fermenters and distillers into ethanol fuel. This will diminish the energy demand.
The technologies develop and new sources of energy and fuel come to live.
Photovoltaic energy and nitrogen energy are seen as the fuel of the long term future. Despite of the fact the production of nitrogen energy is very expensive is working hart every day on it. We should not forget the geothermal energy, the wind and nuclear one. So every country will use some of the above mostly in order of its geographical position and climate conditions. For example Australia may use more effectively the photovoltaic energy in comparison with UK.
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