Bio Ethanol gets greener

E92

As is the norm at any anyway recent Car Show, the manufacturers are trying to boast about how green their cars are, Honda are planning to build a hybrid sports car, Audi have the diesel R8 concept, even Ferrari have an FFV F430 concept, but GM have invented some new method of developing bio fuels that is far greener than at present.

Running cars on E85 could reduce a car's CO2 emissions by up to 80%, but this is often never achieved due to various reasons like the way it is extracted etc...

But GM have revolutionised it so as to make it more worthy of the "up to 80%" claim.

For more, see here.

GM pioneers "more efficient" ethanol

General Motors is developing a new method of making ethanol that addresses some of the environmental concerns usually associated with producing biofuels.
The process is claimed to use significantly less water and energy than making ethanol from grain. Instead, the fuel is made from a wide variety of waste materials, such as wood chippings, food waste and even used tyres and plastics.
Ethanol production using grain is often criticised for taking away land needed to grow food, while planting palm oil for ethanol is often at the expense of virgin rainforest, which helps to reduce CO2.
Pioneered by US company Coskata, the new process also uses significantly less energy than standard ethanol production – one unit of energy used in production produces 7.7 units in ethanol form. Ethanol from grain uses one unit to create 1.6 units of energy.
Water use is also cut; a gallon of water is required for a gallon of ethanol, compared to the three to four gallons needed in conventional production.
At the project's announcement at Detroit yesterday, General Motors’ president Rick Wagoner said there were currently six million vehicles in the US capable of running on ethanol, and if all of these cars, plus the ones that will be made in the next four years, used the fuel the US could save 29 billion gallons of petrol.

ninty9er

It seems this is one of those "revolutions" designed to save an ailing compnay. Just hope it doesn't work!! They'll have to ditch the loss making sh1t sooner rather than later and just concentrate on the European purchases if they're to succeed.

Timmaay

About time the US looked at making ethanol production from corn more efficent. Several reports have come to the conclusion that to produce one energy unit of ethanol, you end up using nearly the full unit of energy (ie, diesel to drive the harvester/processing the corn etc), so its barely worth while at the minute to make ethanol.

IMO, the US doesnt really care about the whole environmental side of things, all they want is to be seen to be helping the environment, but along side that they are achieving security of supply of oil, if they can say they produce X amount of barrels of ethanol, they dont appear to be as dependent on the middle east oil, even though they end up importing nearly as much oil to produce the bloody ethanol anyway.

D_murph

i think it obvious that they really dont care here about bio ethanol cars either. i got a ford focus ffv last april and i still had to pay the 1.8 litre road tax and because it is already registered i will not be able to get the benefits of having a low emission car when the road tax changes come in in july.
load of bs if you ask me

Del2005

The US are doing the whole bio fuel from corn to help support their farmers. The WTO have rules about providing subsidies for food but none for energy. There was an article last year about it somewhere but couldn't be bothered to look for it.

@ D_murph You could always move up North and then have to move back down as it didn't work out;)

D_murph

that would be more expensive though, not to mention inconvenient as well