One of our readers submitted the following: “After reading Robert Zubrin’s book Energy Victory I have two questions. Can ethanol production facilities make or be converted to make methanol; and are sugar beets being used to any significant degree in Colorado to produce ethanol as a substitute for corn?”
These are great questions. The sugar beet industry in Colorado produces refined sugar — a commodity which has seen large price fluctuations over the years, making it difficult to achieve consistent profits. The Great Western Sugar Company exemplifies this. At one point, it operated more than a dozen sugar beet processing plants in Colorado. Now it has one left, located in Fort Morgan. To my knowledge, there are no plants that use refined sugar as feedstock to produce ethanol, because refined sugar is more valuable than ethanol. Similarly, I know of no alcohol plants in the USA that use sugar beets as an input source.
Sugar beets are not as flexible as corn for a continuous process like large-scale alcohol production. Beets are harder to handle than grain crops because of their lower energy density, and they must be harvested and processed quickly before the sugar content has a chance to chemically degrade. Corn can be dried and stored for months or years, allowing corn processing plants to run all year round and make better use of this capital expense. You’ll also note from the aforementioned book by Zubrin that the amount of maximum ethanol yield produced per acre is nearly the same for corn and sugar beets (i.e. about 400-450 gallons/acre/year).
Corn ethanol processing plants are highly tuned to produce ethanol from corn grain only. The processing equipment contains automated feeding and processing mechanisms — from the rail cars that deliver the grain, to the tanker cars that take away the ethanol. For this reason, it would be less practical to convert a plant from corn to an alternate feedstock. This is typical of many processing plants; all the equipment pieces inside fit together like a giant puzzle.
Zubrin favors methanol, but I say if you can get ethanol from feedstock, don’t settle for methanol. Methanol has lower energy content than ethanol and is much more corrosive and toxic. Its current lower cost is likely due to the fact that most of it is derived from non-renewable sources (such as natural gas) which are still inexpensive and abundant. Zubrin’s enthusiasm for methanol is probably related to how easy it is to convert cellulosic and other non-food sources of biomass into methanol.
Converting food products into motor fuel is a source of a lot of controversy, and presumably methanol won’t be similarly stigmatized. Having said that, I am also seeing initiatives by several companies to convert cellulosic materials directly into ethanol.
I agree with Zubrin that all cars manufactured today should be able to run on any form of alcohol fuel or gasoline. At one time, this was a costly point of view, but now that all fuel systems need to handle ethanol in gasoline anyway, and engine computers can adjust the air-fuel ratios according to feedback from sensors, there’s really no reason not to make all vehicles flex-fuel capable.
