Alcohol: The Perfect Fuel

A discussion of alcohol as the fuel for the 21st century.

Alcohol promises to be the “perfect” fuel for the first half of this century:

  • It can be used to directly fuel engines or generators to either propel cars or produce electricity. Brazil now fuels 40% of its automobile fleet with 100% ethanol and the balance of the fleet uses a 22% ethanol/gasoline blend.
  • It is the perfect “carrier” for hydrogen. Alcohol can be easily and inexpensively transported, stored and used as the hydrogen source for fuel cell power systems.
  • Alcohol is a renewable resource that can be produced from corn or other crops, biomass or waste. In tropical countries alcohol can even be produced from passive solar distillation systems.
  • Alcohol production will create a major new fuel source and could eventually free much of the world from dependence on and vulnerability to politically unstable (or unfriendly) producers of hydrocarbons.

What follows are excerpts from some particularly compelling studies of the vital issues.

Ethanol & Fuel Cells: Converging Paths of Opportunity

By Jeffrey Bentley and Robert Derby for the Renewable Fuels Association

Copy of complete paper at (www.ethanolrfa.org).

  • Ethanol is a hydrogen-rich liquid, which overcomes both the storage and infrastructure challenges of hydrogen for fuel cell applications.
  • Because ethanol is far easier to transport and store than hydrogen, fuel reforming – which uses a chemical process to extract hydrogen from fuel – offers a practical solution to the challenge of providing hydrogen to fuel cells onboard vehicles or for remote or stationary applications.
  • Ethanol can play an important role in distributed generation by supplementing natural gas for fuel source diversity and as a portable, distributed fuel that is available in areas beyond the reach of the natural gas infrastructure. Fuel cells powered by ethanol will have very low emissions, noise and environmental footprint.
  • An ethanol fuel cell vehicle (FCV) will emit about 13% of the tailpipe pollutants compared with a gasoline vehicle and less than half the pollutants of even a gasoline hybrid vehicle.

The Future of the Hydrogen Economy: Bright or Bleak?

By Baldur Eliasson of Corporate Research ABB Switzerland Ltd. and Ulf Bossel, Fuel Cell Consultant, Oberrohrdorf, Switzerland
Copy of complete paper at (www.methanol.org)

  • The global energy problem cannot be solved in a renewable energy environment, if the energy consumed to make and deliver hydrogen becomes comparable to the energy content of the delivered fuel. ...the future hydrogen economy is unlikely to be based on pure hydrogen alone. It will certainly be based on hydrogen, but most likely the synthetic fuel gas will be chemically packed in consumer-friendly hydrocarbons.
  • ...instead of gaseous hydrogen, other liquid hydrocarbons such as methanol could serve as the general energy carrier of the future.
  • We have to accept that hydrogen is the lightest of gases and, as a consequence, that its physical properties are incompatible with the requirements of the energy market. Production, packaging, storage, transfer and delivery of the gas are so energy consuming that alternatives should be considered.
  • The ideal energy carrier would be a liquid with a boiling point of at least 60 C and a point of solidification below -40 C. Methanol is a serious candidate. It carries four hydrogen atoms per carbon atom. It is liquid under normal conditions. The infrastructure for liquid fuels exists. Also, methanol can … be reformed easily to hydrogen for use in Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells (PEFC or PEM). Methanol could become a universal fuel for fuel cells and many other applications.
  • Time has come to shift the attention for a “Hydrogen Economy” to a “Methanol (or else) Economy and to direct manpower and resources to find technical solutions for a sustainable energy future …