Bioethanol, One Solution Brings Hundreds of Benefits

As known, global warming has recently been the hottest issue the world’s dealing with. It appears as the consequence of human devastating activities. The impacts of these activities, or known as environmental pollutions, have been proved with the increasing level of ambient air pollution in urban areas as the result of fossil fuels utilization and also the existence of greenhouse gases, such as CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, HFCS, PFCS, and SF₆, in massive amount in the outer of earth atmosphere which will be blocking the re-transfer process of sun partial heat from the earth surface to the outer space. These situations have become the main cause of the rise of the earth temperature globally, or global warming, and climate change in all over the world afterwards.

In other situation, we also have been forcibly engaged to a problem related to cleaner fuels availability which has been a crucial demand among industries, both manufacturer and transportation industries. The global warming phenomenon which we have suffered much from its effects, besides the demand on safety and air quality in urban environment, encourages whoever in this world to improve the technology in order to bring the dangerous emission emitted by fuels to a minimum level.

Based on those problems we need to figure out one real solution such as an alternative source of energy which is more environmentally friendly like bioethanol. Bioethanol can be effectively utilized as an additive compound for gasoline within any composition. The mixture between absolute bioethanol 10% with gasoline 90% is often called as gasohol E-10 where gasohol itself stands for gasoline plus alcohol (bioethanol). The absolute ethanol possesses octane number (ON) of approximately 117 whereas gasoline approaching only 87 - 88. And gasohol E-10 proportionally possesses ON of 92 or equals to Pertamax. Within the composition, bioethanol is often known as the most environmentally friendly octane enhancer which has been able to replace the usage of either TEL (Tetra Ethyl Lead) or Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether (MTBE) in developed countries.

Here is a block diagram of Biofuels (esp. Bioethanol) production

Source: http://lasen.epfl.ch/page40078-en.html

To producing bioethanol, we require raw materials such as:

• Starchy ingredients (e.g. cassava, corn, malt, potato, etc)
• Sweet or sugary ingredients (e.g. molasses or sugar cane)
• Ingredients with cellulose (e.g. logging waste, and agriculture waste such as dried rice stalks, bagasse, corncob, tapioca waste, corn stem, sawdust, etc)

There are a lot of benefits we will earn by using bioethanol esp. for gasohol, such as:

• Creating job opportunity

Job opportunities will be available in plantations which potentially produce bioethanol like cassava and sugar cane plantations.

• Increasing farmers’ income

The needs of bioethanol for gasohol are expected to bring a positive effect to cassava commodity (including sugar palm and sago) which is to have high and stable commercial value in markets. This is simply because cassava farmers’ income has been in the lower level for years and uncertain.

• Minimizing the tendency of global warming and air pollution

Oxygen content in bioethanol, which is 34.7%, makes the fuel combustion finely converted in order to minimize the hazardous emission emitted. Moreover, the Carbon Monoxide (CO) emission of bioethanol is much lower at 19-25% than ordinary fuels’.