Determine the following for a plant that produces 150 million liters per year of denatured ethanol: 1.

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Question:

Determine the following for a plant that produces 150 million liters per year of denatured ethanol:

1. How many tonnes of corn is required, if corn contains 70% starch (dry basis)?

2. How many tonnes of DDGS are produced (dry basis)?

3. How much land is required for the corn, in Ha, if the corn crop yield is 160 bushels (wet) per acre

4. How much land would be required to grow enough corn to displace 10 vol% of the current annual U.S. gasoline consumption?

5. Cattle in a feedlot each consume about 125 bushels (wet) of feed corn annually. Alternatively, each animal may be fed about 85 bushels of feed corn and 1 ton of Dried Distiller's Grains with Solubles (DDGSs).

i. How much land is required to grow enough feed corn to feed 50,000 head of cattle?
ii. How much corn (and land) is required to feed 50,000 head of cattle a mixture of corn and DDGS?
Conversion Factors and Other Process Data:

1 acre = 0.4 Ha
1 US Gallon = 3.78 L
1 bushel = 56 lbs (corn) = 60 lbs (wheat)
1 ton = 2000 pounds
Corn (wet) contains 10% moisture; the price paid for corn includes the water present in the grain.
DDGS (wet) contains 10% moisture.
Hydrolysis converts 95% of the available starch into glucose; the balance ends up in DDGS. Don't forget to account for the 11% weight gain during hydrolysis, which inserts a water/hydroxyl molecule into each sub-unit. In other words, 1.11 kg of glucose is produced from every kg of starch converted.
Fermentation converts 93% of the available glucose into ethanol and CO2, and 5% of the glucose into biomass (yeast cells). The biomass and residual (unconverted) sugar end up in the DDGS, along with unconverted starch.
DDGS includes all of the non-starch materials as well.
Denatured ethanol contains 98% ethanol and 2% denaturant
Ethanol is 99.5% pure (the balance is mainly water), before adding denaturant