Some Interesting Developments

First off, a couple of new ethanol developments. The first is a plant to make ethanol from cattle manure. According to the article, 30,000 cattle will produce 20 million gallons of ethanol a year. According to this report (PDF) there are 122 million cattle in Canada and the US. According to my math, that could mean up to 81 billion gallons of ethanol from cattle manure every year. It would be interesting to see if this could also be used for pig manure. The new wave of hog farms create vast lagoons of manure, which causes problems with water quality, as well of course as the smell. Gee, if it goes far enough, we might never have to roll up our windows when we drive through farm country. The problem is that the methane from the manure is just a fuel for making the ethanol from traditional corn, so we still have the problem of finding enough corn to feed this machine.

Second item: a coal-fired, corn-fed ethanol plant. I'm not exactly cheering this, because it's not like we need more coal. But it shows how serious the market is becoming for ethanol production.

Incidentally, I haven't read much about cellulosic ethanol lately. I wonder what's up? Doesn't seem to be much according to google, but here's an interesting rebuttal of the claims that ethanol takes more energy to make than it contains. Good tidbit:

Some studies that contend that ethanol is a net energy loser include (incorrectly) the energy of the sun used to grow a feedstock in ethanol's energy balance, which misses the fundamental point that the sun's energy is free. Furthermore, because crops like switchgrass are perennials, they are not replanted and cultivated every year, avoiding farm-equipment energy. Indeed, if polycultured to imitate the prairies where they grow naturally, they should require no fertilizer, irrigation, or pesticides either. So, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, for every one unit of energy available at the fuel pump, 1.23 units of fossil energy are used to produce gasoline, 0.74 of fossil energy are used to produce corn-based ethanol, and only 0.2 units of fossil energy are used to produce cellulosic ethanol.

Toyota, despite being the largest vendor of hybrid cars, has so far been vocally opposed to the idea of plug-in hybrids. (Remember, PIHs are cars that get X amount of driving distance before turning on the gasoline engine.) However, it looks like Toyota may be changing it's tune, according to Mike Milikin.

Zap, the company that produces Smart Cars for the United States market, plans to introduce flex-fuel cars in Brazil. No word on whether they plan to introduce them to the North American market.

Most interestingly to me, a company has introduced a new fast-charging, more powerful form of lithium-ion battery.

A123Systems’ battery technology delivers up to 10X longer life, 5X power gains and dramatically faster charge time over conventional high power battery technology, as validated by independent testing at Motorola and government research labs....

A123Systems’ first product packs up to five times the power density of current rechargeable, high power batteries. In addition, the battery has the ability to recharge to 90% of its capacity in five minutes.

The new trend in batteries seems to be cutting charge times. This is great for all applications, but especially for electric vehicles. Obviously, prices need to come down but an electric car that can get a 90% charge in five minutes would be essentially competitive with conventional gasoline cars. We're obviously still waiting for a company to introduce the "model-T" of electric cars. But we can see a number of key technologies coming together. Finally. At the very least, we can see just from the above that the idea of an ethanol-fueled plug-in hybrid is well within the possible.