Your choices:
1 Biomass (fermentable sludge); 2 Transport; 3 Fuel: liquid
| What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
| Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
| 1 Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | Electricity |
| Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
| Geothermal | Fuel: Gaseous | Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
| Sunshine | 3 Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
| Water | Fuel: Solid | Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
| Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | 2 Transport |
| Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
If there is an over-capacity at the production end, ethanol aimed for the transportation fuel market may just as well be sold as a replacement fuel for other purposes. There are no major technical problems to replace fuel oil with ethanol in a number of industrial, high-temperature processes. However, this market is so limited that there is hardly any request for such replacement fuels.
To judge the potential usability of a fuel for a high-temperature process it must be remembered that the heating value of the fuel is not enough. The most crucial parameter is instead the theoretical flame temperature. Ethanol has a relatively low heating value (28.9 MJ/kg) and also a low density (790 kg/m3), so the energy content per volume is low. However, it will still have a theoretical flame temperature above 1800 °C. This means that ethanol can well be used to produce temperatures in the range of 1500 °C.
The main hindrances for the use of ethanol to replace fossil fuel in industrial processes are instead:
- The price for ethanol. The price reflects mainly the cost for distillation and is not likely to drop within a foreseeable future.
- The raw material for ethanol. A large fraction of today's ethanol production is based on dedicated crops (maize) grown on fertile land. An increasing worldwide awareness of the scarcity of such land has triggered a reaction to the use of ethanol as a fuel.
- There are no commercial burners available, designed for high-temperature applications and using ethanol as a fuel. Any major burner manufacturer would be able to design such burners but they are not available "off the shelf".