subject: Does Ethanol Gasoline Have A Promising Future? [print this page] When talking about the environmental and energy issues caused by motor vehicles, many people will think of the automobiles based on new energy. Fuel ethanol, which is produced by grains, once brought people some hope. However, with the rising of grain price in the world, this way of producing ethanol by grains has been criticized by a lot of people, because it greatly threatens the security of grains.
Experts point out: "In the current market, most automobiles still mainly rely on the combustion engines to provide power. While if we add ethanol with the percentage less than 15% into the gasoline, there is no need to do any changes to the original vehicles, no need to build new gas stations, and no need to transform the transportation infrastructure. In other words, as long as we add ethanol with a certain percentage into the tank, we can effectively alleviate the environmental and energy issues."
Different with the way of producing ethanol by grains, cellulosic ethanol is obtained from the "waste" cellulose, which is very rich in the nature but can not be eaten. As a result, some experts hold that, corn ethanol is only the beginning stage in the development of fuel ethanol industry. The bio-fuel ethanol, which takes cellulose as the raw material, is the key to the large-scale alternatives of petrol in the future.
"At the end of 2020, cellulosic ethanol will be able to replace 31 million tons of gasoline, and replace 10% of the petrol consumption. It will form a new industry with the engineering construction investment of 96 billion Yuan, which can generate 32 billion Yuan annually, and is able to provide 6 million job opportunities. At the same time, cellulosic ethanol plays a significant role in the emission reduction of carbon dioxide. The emission of carbon dioxide of cellulosic ethanol is 90% less than that of traditional gasoline. After 2020, cellulosic ethanol will be able to help China reduce more than 90 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year." say the experts.
However, experts also point out that, it is much more difficult to transform these "waste cellulose" into ethanol than using corn and other grains as the raw material. The productive technology of cellulosic ethanol is very complicated, which includes pretreatment of raw materials, hydrolysis, and fermentation. What's more, the high cost of enzyme used in the production of cellulosic ethanol is also a big problem for those manufacturing enterprises.
