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Welcome to thecleanerfuel.com! This domain name is perfect for anything pertaining to ethanol. If you would like to buy it you can email us at here. Ethanol 85 fuel is the next big thing. According to wikipedia: Ethanol can be used as fuel for automobiles either alone or as an additive to gasoline. Ethanol can be blended with gasoline in varying quantities to reduce the consumption of petroleum fuels, as well as to reduce air pollution. The resulting fuel is known as gasohol. Two common mixtures are E10 and E85 which contain 10% and 85% ethanol, respectively. Ethanol is also increasingly used as an oxygenate additive for standard gasoline, as a replacement for methyl t-butyl ether (MTBE), the latter chemical being responsible for considerable groundwater and soil contamination. Ethanol can also be used to power fuel cells. Ethanol derived from crops (bio-ethanol) is a potentially sustainable energy resource that may offer environmental and long-term economic advantages over fossil fuel. It is readily obtained from the sugar or starch in crops such as maize and sugarcane. However, current bio-ethanol production methods use a significant amount of energy compared to the energy value of the produced fuel. For this reason, it is not feasible to replace all current fossil fuel consumption entirely by bio-ethanol. [1]

Sources

Ethanol for industrial use is often synthesized from petroleum feedstock, typically by the catalytic hydration of ethylene with sulfuric acid as the catalyst. This process is cheaper than the traditional fermentation associated with alcoholic beverages. It can also be obtained via ethene or acetylene, from calcium carbide, coal, oil gas, and other sources. Three countries have developed significant bioethanol fuel programs: Brazil and Colombia (from sugarcane), and the United States (from maize). Ethanol can be produced from a variety of other crops, such as sugar beet, sorghum, switchgrass, barley, hemp, kenaf, potatoes, cassava and sunflower, as well as many types of cellulose waste. This large-scale production of agricultural alcohol for fuel requires substantial amounts of cultivable land with fertile soils and water. It is less attractive for densely occupied and industrialized regions like Western Europe, or for regions where desire for increased farmland puts pressure on important natural resources like rainforests. Smaller quantities of fuel alcohol can be made from the stalks, wastes, clippings, straw, corn cobs, and other farm waste now used for fertilizer, animal feed, or electric power plant fuels. In fact, using a mix of, say, corn and corn plant stalks/waste would mean that industrialised countries like the US could get all the ethanol they need without cultivating any more farmland specifically for ethanol feedstock[citation needed] (however more land would still be needed to replace the lost plant wastes, used by many farmers as a cheap and clean source of fertiliser and animal feed.)

Production

Ethanol can be produced either by petrochemical feedstock or by fermentation [3]. Ethanol produced by fermentation results in a solution of ethanol in water. For the ethanol to be usable as a fuel, water must be removed. The oldest method is simple distillation, but the purity is limited to 95-96 % due to the formation of a low-boiling water-ethanol azeotrope. It is not possible to obtain ethanol of purity > 96 % by distilling any more dilute solution. For blending with gasoline, purities of 99.5 to 99.9% are required, depending on temperature, to avoid separation. Currently, the most widely used purification method is a physical absorption process using molecular sieves. In the past, when farmers distilled their own ethanol, they sometimes used radiators as part of the still. The radiators often contained lead, which would get into the ethanol. Lead entered the air during the burning of contaminated fuel, possibly leading to neural damage. However this was a relatively minor source of lead since at the time tetraethyl lead was used as a mainstream gasoline additive. Today, ethanol for fuel use is produced almost exclusively from purpose-built plants, avoiding any lead presence.

Ethanol Fuel in America

One criticism of ethanol usage in the United States is its availability. Roughly 685 gas stations, out of a total of 165,000 carry E85 pumps. If a wide adoption strategy were to be implemented, far greater availability would have to come to fruition. Another aspect of its availability is that it is predominantly only available in the midwest, where most ethanol is refined. As of April 27, 2006 in the US, there are 4485.9 million gallons per year capacity for ethanol production with capacity of 2229.5 million gallons per year under construction. [6]

Ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol or grain alcohol, is a flammable, colorless chemical compound, one of the alcohols that is most often found in alcoholic beverages. In common parlance, it is often referred to simply as alcohol. Its molecular formula is C₂H₆O, variously represented as EtOH, C₂H₅OH or as its empirical formula C₂H₆O.

This article is mostly about ethanol as a chemical compound. For beverages containing ethanol, see alcoholic beverage. For the use of ethanol as a fuel, see ethanol fuel. For its physiological effects, see effects of alcohol on the body.

History

Ethanol has been used by humans since prehistory as the intoxicating ingredient in alcoholic beverages. Dried residues on 9000-year-old pottery found in northern China imply the use of alcoholic beverages even among Neolithic peoples. Its isolation as a relatively pure compound was first achieved by Islamic alchemists who developed the art of distillation during the Abbasid caliphate, the most notable of whom was Al-Razi. The writings attributed to Jabir Ibn Hayyan (Geber) (721-815) mention the flammable vapors of boiled wine. Al-Kindī (801-873) unambiguously described the distillation of wine. Distillation of ethanol from water yields a product that is at most 96% ethanol, because ethanol forms an azeotrope with water. Absolute ethanol was first obtained in 1796 by Johann Tobias Lowitz, by filtering distilled ethanol through charcoal.

Antoine Lavoisier described ethanol as a compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and in 1808, Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure determined ethanol's chemical formula. In 1858, Archibald Scott Couper published a structural formula for ethanol: this places ethanol among the first chemical compounds to have their chemical structures determined.

Ethanol was first prepared synthetically in 1826, through the independent efforts of Henry Hennel in Britain and S.G. Sérullas in France. Michael Faraday prepared ethanol by the acid-catalysed hydration of ethylene in 1828, in a process similar to that used for industrial ethanol synthesis today.

Physical properties

Ethanol's hydroxyl group is able to participate in hydrogen bonding. At the molecular level, liquid ethanol consists of hydrogen-bonded pairs of ethanol molecules; this phenomenon renders ethanol more viscous and less volatile than less polar organic compounds of similar molecular weight. In the vapor phase, there is little hydrogen bonding; ethanol vapor consists of individual ethanol molecules.

Ethanol is a versatile solvent. It is miscible with water and with most organic liquids, including nonpolar liquids such as aliphatic hydrocarbons. Organic solids of low molecular weight are usually soluble in ethanol. Among ionic compounds, many monovalent salts are at least somewhat soluble in ethanol, with salts of large, polarizable ions being more soluble than salts of smaller ions. Most salts of polyvalent ions are practically insoluble in ethanol.

Several unusual phenomena are associated with mixtures of ethanol and water. Ethanol-water mixtures have less volume than their individual components: a mixture of equal volumes ethanol and water has only 96% of the volume of equal parts ethanol and water, unmixed. The addition of even a few percent ethanol to water sharply reduces the surface tension of water. This property partially explains the tears of wine phenomenon: when wine is swirled inside a glass, ethanol evaporates quickly from the thin film of wine on the wall of the glass. As its ethanol content decreases, its surface tension increases, and the thin film beads up and runs down the glass in channels rather than as a smooth sheet.