Week Four: Ethanol, Not Just for Your Drinks Anymore

For starts, ethanol feul is ethanol, which is the same type of alcohol used in alcoholic beverages. However, it can also be used as a bioadditive for gasoline. Between the years 2000 and 2007, the use of ethanol tripled, and between 2007 and 2008, it's use increased from 3.7% to 5.4%. In 2009, worldwide ethanol fuel production reached 19.5 billion gallons.
Ethanol is mostly used in Brazil and the U.S., mostly because ethanol is produced from crops, such as sugar cane, corn, and potatos. There are still some concerns about the use of ethanol gas, mostly about how it's production may cause food prices to increase due to the large amounts of land required to grow crops. there's also worry about the pollution and labor needed to produce the amount of crops to supply ethanol, especially with corn.
However, a recent development with cellulosic ethanol has offered some hope still for ethanol because the cellulose fibers in plant walls can be used to produce ethanol. because of this, it's though that cellulosic ethanol could help ethanol to play a much bigger part in the world of fuels in the future.


Above is the machinery used in making ethanol fuel.

Ethanol can be produced in either a wet mill or a dry mill. The difference id that wet milling involves seperating grain kernals into into their componant parts before fermentaition. With the dry mill production, the entire grain kernal is ground into flour, then the starch in the flour is converted into ethanol during fermentation, creating carbon dioxide and distillers grain.

Wanna learn about the entire process, from the momment the corn arrives till it's stored away to be used in our cars? then check it out here- http://www.icminc.com/ethanol/production_process/

And if you'd like to learn more about ethanol in general (such as the other countries which produce ethanol gase and how it affects the environment) then i would suggest clicking here-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel