A Viable Biofuel?

natural rah writes "A laboratory in India has developed a process for making diesel fuel from an inedible plant which grows in barren wastelands. Although biofuels are mass produced and used in USA and EU, they have been traditionally derived from edible oils like soy bean and rapeseed. Using edible oils to make fuels is evidently not an option in a country like India. This fuel is "carbon neutral" (at least theoretically), has potential to make good use of barren wastelands, is clean and sustainable. Read more here -- could you have a SUV and not put excess carbon into the air?"

Comments

Okay, it's another bio-oil source.

[Engineer-Poet]

Unless this plant is extraordinarily productive, it's not going to address anyone's petroleum dependency or carbon emissions (and it's hard to believe that a plant which grows on wasteland could be as productive as e.g. sugar cane). The reason for growing this plant is that it may make it possible to reclaim wasteland (increasing the carbon content of the soil, perhaps removing salt) while supporting the effort with a cash product (biofuel).

If you want to change the world's energy cycles you're going to need something with at least 20 times the productivity of standard farm crops, like the UNH biodiesel-from-algae thing.

Particulate production

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, it's not the carbon balance that worries me, its the production of lung-cancer causing and asthma-at-least-aggravating particulates. Most euro cities are "smoke free" in that burning coal has long been eliminated... but they still have petrol-burning cars spewing foulness into the air.

Just set up a VLF power transmitter network, dammit, and run cars on beamed electricity! The cancer risk from such e.m. fields is tiny if it exists at all, compared to airborne particulate pollution. Tesla would be turning at several hundred rpm in his grave if he had fitted his grave with a motor.

Re:Ummmm...

[jaakkeli]

Rapeseed is a plant that made an oil that was too bitter to eat. Rapeseed oil was commonly used to lubricate steam engines until the 1940's. Recently, Canadian farmers have bred the bitterness out of the oil to make an edible product called Canola. (Canadian Oil).

I see reading a few bits from Wikipedia and answering without actually knowing anything about the subject now gets you modded up. See the article on rapeseed to actually learn something about the subject; it's less nonsensical.

Rapeseed oil has traditionally been the most important cooking oil in many countries, especially here in the north where you can't grow corn, peanuts, soybeans, palm trees or pretty much anything (I live in Finland...). You need some processing to make it edible, but it's been one of the most significant sources of vegetable oil long before Canola was bred. Most of the world hasn't even heard of canola oil but is happy to eat rapeseed oil. I just fried some stuff using some.

Thanks for the data... I think

[Engineer-Poet]

I doubt I'm going to have time to read a 328 page PDF (my "fun time" is going toward Quicksilver, and I've got 4 other dead-tree tomes and the Lovins' old "Brittle Energy" on my list where most of them have been for months), but I'll take a minute to ask questions about the points you raise:

• In principle, why is it impractical to constrain the energy-production habitat to the desired species by e.g. harvesting everything in an area and re-seeding with a population grown from your best producers? This is how zymurgists keep their beer from getting contaminated too badly, it's not rocket science.
• If that's too much of a difficulty, why can't you use species with a different product (e.g. hydrogen instead of oil) and hold them under conditions which kill their competition (sulfur-deficient and in the dark)? Anything which adopts the same metabolic pathway to survive the stress periods would have the same product.
• What, exactly, is the problem with 10% efficiency when it's really, really cheap? 10% efficiency at 50 cents a square meter yields something like 1/10 cent per peak watt!

If you can point me to parts of the report which address these issues, I'd appreciate the savings of my time. ADVthanksANCE.