Sugar or alcohol best to ocean ship energy?

Discussion in 'Chemistry' started by Billy T, Apr 10, 2009.

  1. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    AFAIK, Brazil and others plan to make alcohol and ship it to consumers in special tankers. Why is this more efficient that shipping sugar in bulk ship and let the user make whatever fraction he likes into alcohol?

    Anyone willing to do the work to answer why alcohol is best economically?

    Certainly it is better for Brazil to ship the greater value added product, but from a global economics POV is that best?
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    Greater energy density? That's why early Americans preferred to ship barrels of whisky instead of corn.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    by weight or by volume? I think you are guessing. - why we need a chemist. Also how is energy to be mearured? -I assume the correct way is heat released by full oxidation. If one starts with enough sugar for a meg joule of heat of combustion and efficiently converts to alcohol (lets forget about the heat needed to distill it from water for now) how much heat energy is in the alcohol? Less than a mega Joule I am sure has the bugs needed some.

    Probably that is my answer - you ship too much sugar energy for what you get in alcohol energy and you can not just burn the crushed cane to do the distilation as it was left behind in Brazil.

    Back when I went caqmping, I liked to throw sugar on the fire. It burns well. I recall seeing a serious article on a coal dust powered car. Can the sugar mobile be far behind? That would solve both the "you got to feed the bugs" and the cane left unused in Brazil problems. (I bet it is burned to boil off the water from the sugarsolution, but perhaps a partial vacuum is used too.)

    Anyone know how they make sugar from sugar water? If you actually know about any of this, please jump in.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,559
    Why did 49ers in SF ship their clothes to Hawaii for laundering? It took two weeks, but it was cheaper than trying to find people in SF to do it [way back in 1849].

    Likely Brazil can do the fermentation cheaper than in other countries, and this also provides a value-added cost to the shipment.

    Why did we ship logs to Japanese ships in the pacific to have them fabricated into lumber, which they then shipped back to the US?
     
  8. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    When I was student at Cornell, my father was an "on call" resident doctor* at a West Virginia state mental hospital (they provided house and did his laundry). I had an aluminum box and mailed my shirts and other items needing to be ironed back for inclusion with his. I was very poor. Often the clean shirts came back with some food too, but even just the free laundry service saved several times the cost of postage.
    -----------
    *Later he became board certified psychiatrist (Thank God not while raising me – I AM CRAZY ENOUGH AS IT IS.)
     
  9. Felon Banned Banned

    Messages:
    35
    yes......
     
  10. Felon Banned Banned

    Messages:
    35
    this is true.
     
  11. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

    Messages:
    10,890
    Sugar has an energy density of 17 MJ/kg
    Ethanol has an energy density of 29.7 MJ/kg

    Bulk White Sugar has a density of 880 kg/m^3
    (anhydrous) Ethanol has a density of 789 kg/m^3

    Therefore Bulk white sugar has an energy density of 14,960 MJ/m^3 and
    Ethanol has an energy density of 23,433 MJ/m^3.

    So not only does it make sense to ship Ethanol over sugar in terms of how much potential you can pack into a tanker, but as has already been pointed out, Ethanol represents a value added commodity, and as such it makes more sense to ship that (if you can process it economically).
     
  12. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,049
    it could be that its to dangerious to ship as pure ethanol because of the risk of fire
     
  13. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    To Trippy: Thanks

    Good to have a real chemist around. I guess this thread is dead now.

    PS with there being much more energy in the crushed cane than the distilation needs, clearly it is more economical to make the alcohol near the cane fields, as Brazil does, than to send sugar to US to ferment there and boil the ETOH out with natural gas, etc.

    However, the combustion of either fuel, makes much hotter temperature than needed to distil, so the distialtion heat could come from the exhaust of an electric power plant with little loss of electrical energy produced, I would think.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 11, 2009
  14. Algernon Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    176
    hehe... alcohol/beer has more calories than coca cola. =D

    And more expensive.
     
  15. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    Not too hard to make your own. I think they even sell kits nowdays. Don't bottle too soon. I had case of home brew, (24 bottles in wooden case for bottles in basement). One eve one blew its top and the vibrations made about 20 others go in the next few minutes.
     
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    Yes, even without correcting for the slight difference in density, I would assume that within reasonable limits shipping costs are more a function of weight than volume. Look at any nutritional table. Alcohol is very similar to fat, and has approximately twice as many calories per gram as sugar and other carbohydrates.
     
  17. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

    Messages:
    10,890
    For the most part, I believe so, yes, although over here our postal service has introduced a bizzare volumetric mass based system - the cost of posting an item over a certain size is based on it's volume multiplied by its mass.
     
  18. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

    Messages:
    10,890
    My father couriered me some homebre from the other end of the country. One of the bottles exploded in transit, the mess that it made shall not be discussed... :bawl:

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    uke:
     
  19. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,523
    Shipping bio-fuels is moronic to begin with: one of the primary arguments for alternative fuels is to reduce foreign dependence.
     
  20. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    So you think that the US should produce everything it needs, even it it cost much more*?
    -------------
    * Cost in pollution too, if speaking of growing corn** for alcohol fuel as the as although the full cycle CO2 relase may be only 90% as much coventional liquid fuels the NOx produce by growing corn makes about 8 times more green house gas release than burning gasoline does.

    I am surprized by your post:

    Most intellignet people since Adam Smith, have recognized the benefits to all of free trade. It also makes a difference who is getting the money from US import buying, terrorist or nations like Brazil that could buy even more US products. (Brazil is one of the few nations the US has a favorable balance of trade with. Help cut into the US 207 billion dollar trade deficit.***)

    **Iowa's growing season is short. A lort of fertalizer stimulation is required. Brazil growing sugar cane uses very little by comparision for each gallon of alcohol produced.

    ***See the trade deficit clock tick at: http://americaneconomicalert.org/ticker_home.asp

    BTW your new advar (if that is what it is called) is even better than the old one. Some are animated. Perhaps some geek here will help your get some tassels twirling?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 26, 2009
  21. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,523
    Nope did not say that. I do not believe the US should produce ALL or even most of its needs locally nor do I believe it should do so at significant cost. Mt argument is that shipping in alcohols is not going to provide incentive to change to alternative fuels, it will harmed alcohols competitiveness with other alternative fuels.
     
  22. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    I do not think that true, either for alcohol or many other products. There are two reasons why even with the cost of shipping (which is amazingly cheap in large volume) why trading for most of your needs is cheaper than making them yourself.

    (1) is obvious. Certain places have the raw materials and /or climate and /or cheaper labor and /or cheaper land to produce so much cheaper that the cost of shipping is insignificant cut into the profit margin. For example there is much more lithium in the US than electric cars will ever need, - but it is only a few percent at best as concentrated as in one Bolivian salt lake. Just because the US could use its own lithium for car batteries does not mean it should.

    (2) is not so immediately obvious (why Krugman got Noble prize for analysis and explaining it well) is economy of scale. Not every nation should build airplanes. US is probably soon to learn that it lost out on the scale economies and cannot make competitively priced cars for the mass market.

    It is quite clear that currently Brazil can deliver into the US sugar cane alcohol for much lower price (and with much less damage to the Earth via GHG heating) than Iowa corn can. If cellulosic alcohol should ever prove to be as economical to produce as tropical cane-based alcohol then there is a case to be made for the US growing its own car fuel. I doubt this will ever be the case:

    Brazil has at least twice more sunlight and abundant fresh water it can use to make cellulosic OR sugar cane alcohol with. (and all the other "cheaper" factors of Point 1 above)

    Brazil has long lead in the technology of sugar cane and alcohol production from it, cheap land and labor etc to make the equipment needed and already great economy of scale. (Almost all the world buys this technology and equipment from Brazil now.)*

    Starting with cellulose is a long complex process just to get to a sugar rich juice (compared to crushing cane) and that is a complex mix of many different sugars in that processed cellulose juice. Each needs it own yeast etc. - lots of cost to make them etc. Also there is much more waste, at all stages, especially the lignum that held the plants together.

    Lignum is a versatile matter. The joke in the industry is that: You can make anything from lignum, except money.

    ---------
    *Only one Brazilian company, Dedini, made 80% of Brazil’s alcohol industry and approximately 25% of the global production equipment. Unfortuantely, it is privately owned. It has no need to sell stock as it is making money by the truck loads. If you want some Dedini cane cutter or distilling equipment, get your order in line and wait at least three years. I think they should expand, but then there could be a bubble of production. Soon just the replacement of worn out equipment will keep their plants busy and they will exapand some, I think, but possibly never sell stock.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 26, 2009

Share This Page