Fuel Ghoul

Ethanol is handy stuff

Believe it or not, one hundred percent pure ethyl alcohol is handy stuff – it’s used for many different things besides fueling North American cars and heating houses. Ethanol is one of mankind’s most important industrial organic chemicals. In Canada, the largest and most efficient producer is GreenField Ethanol.

One hundred percent pure ethyl alcohol is a colorless, limpid, volatile liquid that's flammable and toxic and has a pungent taste. It boils at 78.4°C (173°F) and melts at 112.3°C (170.1°F), and has a specific gravity of 0.7851 at 20°C (68°F). It’s soluble in water and most organic liquids.

Ethanol is used as a cleaner and disinfectant – if you wipe your neck with ethanol before wearing your favorite dress shirts, you’ll never get ‘ring around the collar’.

Ethanol is sometimes used in the manufacture of cologne, perfume. It preserves all natural fragrances and its volatile molecules carry sweet smells through the air and into human noses. The sale of alcohol based perfume is however highly regulated in the United States. Here are the BATF guidelines - the US government doesn’t want anyone drinking the stuff.

While we’re discussing sweet smelling things, maybe I should mention that ethyl alcohol is also used in the production of essential oils for aromatherapy. Ethanol extraction is a type of solvent extraction used to harvest fragrant compounds directly from dry plant materials, as well as impure vegetable oils. Vanilla extract is often produced using a polar solvent such as ethanol.  The polarity of ethanol allows extraction of the volatile aromatics while leaving behind the non-polar plant waxes.  The ethanol is then evaporated to leave behind ‘absolute vanilla’ (but in most cases as much as 5% ethanol remains).

One of the most interesting uses for ethanol is marine taxidermy – here the stuff is used as an transparent embalming fluid.

Marine biologists who adventure deep inside the ichthyarchy (the domain of fishes) often try to capture rare photosensitive critters that don’t keep well in fresh water, or brine, and don’t display well in glycerin. The solution is pure ethanol. This clear and colorless alcohol preserves deep water marine specimens and keeps them looking just as fresh as they did when they were first caught.

Is ethanol a fuel fad?

Let me tell you a little something about ethyl alcohol…

Ojibwa hunters in Northern Ontario tell funny stories about a drunken moose named Ayaabekwébii that waits a week after the first autumn frost to eat the mountain ash berries in the forest. The freezing loosens the fruit’s natural sugars and fermentation occurs in the warm autumn sun. According to the Ojibwa, the mischievous moose actually dislikes the taste of the berries, but enjoys how they make him feel. As you might imagine, an intoxicated moose is a hazard to unprepared hikers and motorists that happen to cross its path. Unlike drunken humans, this animal weighs eight hundred pounds and has an arsenal of hammers and knives on its head. After listening to the Ojibwa’s cautionary tale, and being assured by outdoorsmen that the drunken moose phenomenon actually exists, I can more easily imagine early man stumbling through a primeval bush eating overripe grapes.

According to Princeton's Samuel Wise, man’s first ‘home brew’ was probably date wine. Egyptian hieroglyphs show kegs of beer and date wine being included among the Pharaoh’s provisions for the afterlife. Wise believes that ethyl alcohol was made from dates, grapes and other fruit more than 8,500 years ago. This substance is intimately connected with mysticism, shamanism and alchemy - it predates all religion and laws prohibiting public drunkenness are included in Hammurabi’s Code in 1750 BC.

So where and when did man first use ethyl alcohol as fuel? Although the claim is widely disputed, a cleric and alchemist (and the inventor of the first French perfumes) Raymond Lully (1235 - 1308) was the first to prepare pure ethanol by distilling fermentation alcohol three times from quicklime, CaO. Normal fractional distillation can only produce a 95% pure ethanol (95% C2H5OH - 5% H2O) because ethanol and water mixed in this composition form an azeotrope. (An azeotrope is a mixture with a fixed boiling point that cannot be further separated by fractional distillation.) The quicklime must be added to remove the water from this azeotrope by chemical reaction: CaO + H2O --> Ca(OH)2. It seems reasonable to me that in demonstrating the new substance’s combustible nature Raymond may have tried burning it in a terra-cotta lamp with a wick. That would make him the first to ethanol as fuel.

In early modern Europe, glass chimney oil lamps were status symbols and their fuels included all kinds of vegetable oils (castor, rapeseed, peanut), animal oils (especially whale oil and tallow from beef or pork,) and refined turpentine from pine trees; and alcohol. Three hundred years later, the most popular lamp fuel in the United States (before petroleum) was a blend of alcohol and turpentine called "camphene".

By 1838, pure ethyl alcohol replaced the more expensive whale oil in most North American lamps. It easily took the lead because it was such an improvement over all other oils in use at that time. By 1860, thousands of distilleries churned out eighty million gallons of the pure spirit every year. All of which lit houses after the sun went down. In the 1850s, camphene (which sold for fifty cents a gallon) was cheaper than whale oil ($1.30 to $2.50 per gallon) and lard oil (90 cents per gallon). It was about the same price as coal oil, which was the product first marketed as "kerosene" (literally "sun fuel").

What happened next is subject to intense speculation – The first captains of industry worked hard to make cheap fossil fuels the number one choice for the 'horseless carriages'. Rockefellers and the Rothschild’s established institutions and colluded with automakers to make gasoline the transportation industry’s number one fuel choice for the next hundred years... but those days are over now and energy consumers are getting smarter everyday.

NEWSFLASH – pure ethyl alcohol C2H5OH is called ethanol, and there’s nothing new about it. It’s older than petroleum, and way more environmentally friendly. In fact, the more I investigate this biological fuel the more I’ve come to understand that ethanol is this planet’s most logical fuel choice, and gasoline seems like a fad to me.

Reading about Greenfield Ethanol’s forward looking operations in Canada helps, http://www.greenfieldethanol.com/index.php?v=1&p=2&i=23&t=Template7Paragraphs

Introducing his 1982 book Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller writes , ‘humanity's present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income. ...Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.”