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Burn Grass, Get Green Biofuel
Roland Piquepaille writes "Do you want to use an economical and environmentally friendly biofuel? Just grow grass. Burning grass pellets will produce an energy-efficient biofuel, according to Jerry Cherney, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University. In this news release, 'Grass as Fuel,' he says "Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels." Unfortunately, there is nothing like a grass political lobby in Washington, so he might not be heard. But with current oil prices, more and more people will be tempted to use cheaper -- and cleaner -- sources of energy. This overview contains many more details and references about this environmentally friendly biofuel made from grass."
Another Roland Piquepaille story
Here is what he wrote if your interested:
samedi 2 avril 2005
Burn Grass, Get Green Biofuel
Do you want to use an economical and environmentally friendly biofuel? Just grow grass. Burning grass pellets will produce an energy-efficient biofuel, according to Jerry Cherney, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University. In this news release, "Grass as Fuel," he says "Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels." Unfortunately, there is anything like a grass political lobby in Washington, so he might not be heard. But with current oil prices, more and more people will be tempted to use cheaper -- and cleaner -- sources of energy. Read more...
Here is the introduction of the Cornell University news release.
Grow grass, not for fun but for fuel. Burning grass for energy has been a well-accepted technology in Europe for decades. But not in the United States.
Yet burning grass pellets as a biofuel is economical, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and sustainable, says a Cornell University forage crop expert.
This alternative fuel easily could be produced and pelleted by farmers and burned in modified stoves built to burn wood pellets or corn, says Jerry Cherney, the E.V. Baker Professor of Agriculture. Burning grass pellets hasn't caught on in the United States, however, Cherney says, primarily because Washington has made no effort to support the technology with subsidies or research dollars.
Why is it important for environment?
Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels," says Cherney, who notes that a grass-for-fuel crop could help supplement farmers' incomes.
Cherney points out that grass biofuel pellets are much better for the environment because they emit up to 90 percent less greenhouse gases than oil, coal and natural gas do. Furthermore, he says, grass is perennial, does not require fertilization and can be grown on marginal farmland.
Cherney recently presented his conclusions about grass biofuel at the Greenhouse Gases & Carbon Sequestration in Agriculture and Forestry conference, held March 21-24 in Baltimore.
You can find the abstract of his talk, "Grass Bioenergy in the Northeastern USA," on this page. Just scroll a little bit or search for Cherney on the page.
If you're interested in this subject, here is a link to the July 2004 issue of the "Dairy & Field Crops digest" (PDF format, 12 pages, 728KB). The article "Grass Management for Forage or Biofuel?" appears on pages 7 and 8.
In this article, Cherney argues that "grass is converted to useable heat at over 80% efficiency, with an energy output:input ratio exceeding 10:1, compared to other bioenergy sources with typicalsystem energy output:input ratios around 1:1."
The cost-effectiveness of pelletized grass as a fuel results from:
* efficient use of low cost marginal farmland for solar energy collection
* minimal fossil fuel input use in field production and energy conversion
* minimal biomass quality upgrading which limits energy loss from the feedstock
* efficient combustion in advanced yet modestly priced and simple to use devices
* replacement of expensive high-grade energyforms in space and water heating
Cherney is convincing, but it's hard to help him while living in Paris.
Sources: Cornell University News Service, March 31, 2005; and various websites
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
"So what does your car run?"
"Grass."
"Smokin."
Nobody rides for free!
Unfortunately, there is anything like a grass political lobby in Washington, so he might not be heard.
I beg to differ.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
...the same fuel that the Cheech and Chong mobile ran on?
One thing I don't get is how burning grass is not seen as having the same emissions problems as burning other organic material.
I'm no expert on American environmental regulations, but wouldn't a low-emission or zero-emission fuel source be considered more highly for North American use?
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
So is this burning of grass somehow different from the smoking of grass?
And to think ive been throwing away my grass clippings!
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I guess our running out of fuel in the future won't be the end of the world.. there are always sources of energy, perhaps not as easily attainable but nonetheless viable.
However, what about certain plastics, etc. that we need, that are made from oil? Perhaps we should start moving towards alternative energy now, and save the fuel for what we need it for?
I am by no means an expert, so please let me know if I'm way off base here.
Tommy Chong? Is that what you call yourself now? Trippy, dude...
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You'd know this if you weren't smoking it.
I joined NORML for a while a decade or two ago, but whichever years it was, they tended to be a bit too stoned to actually keep track of a mailing list :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... my own personal Grass Pellet Refinery from ThinkGeek, then I'll be excited.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
A huge market barrier is that consumers won't take the chance because they're not confident they will find gas stations that supply this stuff (not to mention all the other alternatives that have been around for a while). And what's in it for the gas stations to get started in investing in whatever equipment is necessary to store and pump this stuff?
Sorry to be Johnny Raincloud, but big changes, even if for the better with no apparent logical downside, tend not to happen. Regarding high gas prices, enough people are satisfied simply with bitching about the prices and won't bother making any dramatic changes. They're enough of them for the market to get away with blocking out newcomers like grass.
...except it doesn't get cold here, and I don't see them mentioning how to get a car to run on it. Furthermore, I'm not driving a steam car!
At 20 bucks per gram for fuel, I'd be better off taking the bus.
Ok this sounds like an awesome idea. And let's be honest it goes back as far as peat burning stoves to my knowledge, possibly before. But, can you truly see the US government going for such a cheap reaalistic idea? For that matter can you see the American public going back to something such as this? You will have people in arms about the smell, the smoke, and let's not forget that cheaper means less to tax. I just can't see this happening anytime in the near future.
Also, would you be able to use "field trash" from corn and soybean fields to manufacture the pellets, or does it require green plant matter?
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
That sound you hear is thousands of hippies bubbling with excitment over the idea of a grass-fired powerplant!
What about all the land it takes to grow the grass? What about all the fresh water it takes to grow the grass? What about all the energy and logistics it takes to put the water on the grass? What about the energy it takes to harvest the grass and turn it into a form that's useful? How much grass would one have to grow to actually put a minor dent in the fossil fuel consumption of the world? After the dust settles, what would it cost relative to gasoline or oil?
Why does it seem like they always fail to mention this stuff?
What does the mower run on?
I, for one, look forward to the new Ford Taurus, which travels down the interstate grazing the median line. At least with this new model, the bovine name DOES make sense!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
a grass roots campaign to get this one going.
I've read quite a few articles about this sort of alternative fuel in the farm publications I recieve, and I think it would be more difficult to get alternative heating going in urban areas due to the size of heating units (the ones I've seen pictures of are the size of a small shed or larger) and the infrastructure needed to deliver grass/wood/grain as a fuel source. But for those in rural areas where one often needs to get fuel hauled in anyway, why not? I have to get oil delivered to my farm for home heating anyway, so it's not a stretch to consider setting up a heater than can burn straw bales, or grain that these days seems almost worthless anyway.
maybe there is some brilliant way to avoid this but I would think that burning grass would have a lot of particulates in the exhaust? Guessing that in addition to the usual combustion products makes grass less attractive than biodeisel.
Carbon Dioxide emissions are really different, because the problem is greenhouse heating caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Burning oil and coal takes carbon that's been in the ground for a long time and pumps it into the atmosphere, which is a problem. But growing grass or trees for fuel takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, using solar energy and chlorophyll to split it up into various plant compounds, so any carbon dioxide emissions you get from burning the grass are just moving around carbon dioxide you took out of the atmosphere last growing season, so it's no problem.
ObDoperReference: Hemp is a really good grass for applications like this. It grows fast, doesn't need pesticides, you can do useful things with the seeds, the fiber can be used for cloth if you don't feel like burning it, and as a bonus you get a bunch of flowers that you can divert to other applications.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unfortunately, when you do the numbers, we do not have enough land to replace more that a few percent of our fossil fuel consuption with biomass.
An article in Physics Today discusses this. They only talk about fertile agricultural land, but even if you were to use marginal land, the argument stays the same.
Yeah. I was thinking: some friends of mine would love the idea of burning grass as fuel, then I realize that he meant grass as in lawns.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
My great grandfather had a mode of transportation that ran on grass.
Am I the only one who finds that claim implausible? My (uninformed) guess is that burning grass would give off almost as much CO2 as burning wood.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
but not TG...
t m
http://www.rossrabbits.fsnet.co.uk/rabbit-sales.h
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Fill 'er up with perenial rye.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
I had been thinking about how much it sucks to go the landfill with my garbage, and how much it sucks to mow my lawn. I recycle a lot of stuff, but I still produce a lot of non-recyclable food and paper waste. I would compost, but I don't have anything I could do with the compost.
Cellulose, one of the primary components of grass and other plants, is a polymer of glucose, and can be converted back into glucose by the action of several natural enzymes (like the ones found in the bacteria in the guts of termites) and by concentrated sulfuric acid. Glucose, under the action of additonal enzymes, like those found in yeast, can be turned into ethanol. I did some research, and it turns out a company called Arkenol Fuels already has a factory that implements this process with sulfuric acid.
My thought was that it would be excellent to develope smaller, at-home version of this process. If it also used sulfuric acid (as opposed to the termite enzymes), you could probably put just about any cellulose-containing or food waste into the process, and get out fuel for an automobile.
Roland's not here.
Not to be outdone by the growing hybrid boom, it seems Volkswagen is taking one of their strongest technological resources, their proficiency with diesel, and is focusing on a decidedly American spin with the consideration of Agriculture and its relation to biodiesel.
The environmental benefits are clear, and the side-effect of lowering our economic reliance on oil-producing countries are a welcome side-effect. The government already as tax-breaks on the books for bio-diesel, so its new inclusion in the form of B5 biodiesel as covered by the Volkswagen new car warranty is a strong move on the part of the German automobile manufacturer.
Volkswagen is currently the only manufacturer in North America selling a whole range of diesel vehicles, including the Golf, New Beetle, Passat and Touareg. We learned that Volkswagen plans a diesel version of the new Passat for the USA in 2007.
If you own a TDI and are interested in purchasing B5 biodiesel for your vehicle, more information can be found at www.biodiesel.org.
See the full article here.
Any reasonably dry organic material from grass pellets to corn to camel shit will burn. There are corn powered stoves and furnaces on the market right now, as well as ones that burn sawdust pellets.
Problem being they burn dirty. Dirtier than wood or the deeply despised coal, and MUCH dirtier than fuel oil or natural gas.
You wanna see some smog, just let grass pellet furnaces become popular. Particulates, sulphates, nitrogen oxides, all the fun stuff that Greenies have been shreiking about lo these many years.
I wish people would give their head a shake befor climbing on these bandwagons. There's no clean fuel that's practical for large scale generation other than nuclear right now. Fusion is still science fiction and wind power is 90% hot air. You want electricity you've got to burn something.
And incidentally, most "biofuels" return less energy that it takes to grow, harvest and process them into fuel.
So unless people want a quick return to the 17th century, maybe it would be good if nuke plants got another look.
Now we'll have a bunch of hippies gluing their mouths to their exaust pipes while their buddies rev the engine!
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
All of us in the US are going to have to get on the alternative fuel bandwagon soon whether we like it or not. If the current oil futures boom is any indication, we're at or very close to the Peak Oil point, and it's only going to get worse from here on out.
Most people fear higher prices at the pump, I welcome them. Anything that gets people out of SUVs and in hybrids/bicycles/walking modes of transportation will at least help give us more time to use oil while it's still plentiful to build solar panels, wind turbines, and the things we'll need to avoid going back to a 100% lo-tech farming nation.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
Seems like a compelling argument. It has lots of advantages, and little drawbacks.
However, I could not find this info in the article:
Let us say I have a growing season of May to September (South end of Ontario).
What is the amount of land needed to run a car for a year, or heat a house for the winter?
When this is answered, one can know the amount of grass-mass needed, and whether it would be a commercially viable mass market thing, or a private grow-your-own thing.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
We can come up with alternative fuel sources all day long. That's not the problem! The problem is: where and how are you going to put filling stations for the gazillions of cars, trucks, tractor trailers, airplanes, and ships?
It's gonna take billions upon billions of dollars, no matter what we choose. Finding something that "mother earth likes" is the least of our (us humans') worries.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Any way to get grass into liquid form? Pellets are great for heating your house and all, but when it comes to sticking it in your gas (err... fuel) tank, the fuel lines aren't gonna like it one bit.
This would actually be great if it could be converted into bio-disel. Then you could fill up your tank with your lawn clippings!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
E85 fuel will be the perfect for the migration. Current cars that are "fuel flex" will take any mixure of gasoline and E-85 and wont be a bother to the driver or cause for worry. In fact, E-85 is nothing but 15% gas and 85% ethanol hence it's name.
Though only a select few cars are certified to use E-85, basically any car can run the stuff provider you have higher flow fuel injectors, fuel lines and tank that wont corrode, different O2 sensors, and a modified fuel map in the ECU. Not that hard of a conversion, but it can be done for around 2 to 3 grand I would imagine. And you can be sure there will be a huge aftermarket for these conversions once gas gets very expensive.
Life is not for the lazy.
uh, what was the question?
Huh? There is anything? Huh?
Timothy... must be smoking some... Timothy Grass.
--RIMSHOT--
Thanks, I'll be here all week, be sure to tip your waitress.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Because you can use motor oil to fertilize your lawn. Its true, I saw it on a billboard once. ;-)
We can go back to have steam engines... except powered by grass pellets!
Texas gave up all rights to privacy long ago...
Texas law enforcement isn't much better than their Mexican Police counterparts on the other side of the border.
In both cases, you'd rather be shot, than detained.
I've been taking an envirnomental science course this year. Another cool fact is that grass(or more accurately hay) plus mud make for very good insulated houses. Thick bales can give you between R-35 and R-60 insulation, compared to R-12 to R-19 in conventional housing which will not only add to a more comfortable living but will decrease your energy bills. These houses can't be huffed and puffed down either(contrary to what nursury books may say). The idea is that we are using safer, renewable resources instead of non-renewable potentially hazardous materials that we have synthesized.
"Want a free iPod?"
They have been burning turf for hundreds of years.
That peat can't be much different than a compressed gress pellet.
Let's start a grass-roots movement!
*duck!*
The big advantage of biofuels is that while they are growing, they absorb all the CO2 that they will emit when burned some months later. The more biofuel feedstock we grow, the more CO2 it will absorb while growing. We pay our CO2 debts in advance, and there's no net addition to atmospheric CO2. Here's a link to a paper that suggests the cultivation of agae in salt pools to make biodiesel which can be burned in unmodified diesel-from-oil engines.
A pretty good post over at Peak Oil Optimist makes the obvious point about this nonsense: if it were really an economically feasible alternative source of energy, it wouldn't require subsidies. Saying that it beats other biomass crops in terms of energy input to output ratio isn't saying much-- ethanol production, for example, is typically a net energy loser (but it exists due to heavy subsidies). Maybe we need to stop spending so much money on farm subsidies, and focus on more realistic avenues for alternative energy?
More moderator incompetence, April Fool's was yesterday!
I demand that Roland Piquepaille and Jon Katz team up to write the ultimate slashdot articles!
[o]_O
Until someone come up with a way to streamline this as building a power plant in millions of grassy acre out in middle of nowhere with controlled environment which can maintain persistant output of grass, I doubt it's practical.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Hemp (yes, cannabis) is absolutely the best plant for this application, and without peer in the overall output of biomass gasses. Jack Herer wrote the book on hemp as a source of biomass fuel and offers a $100,000 chllenge to prove him wrong!
Grass for fuel! yeah, but not that kind, man!
I know that there are severall real world projects that burn grass. Mainly for building heating or CHP (combined heat and power).
African elephant grass (Miscanthius?) is a good one due to the rapid growth cycle and that it re-nitriates the ground.
It should be remembered that in most indistrialised societies buildings and industry acocunt for the majority of green house gas emisisons (80-90%) as opposed to transport (about 10%).
this is a good use as the building is fixed in location it is often easy to arrange for a good regular supply.
Yes, I said it.
Fnord.
I'd just like to point out another victory for Big Red!
GO CU!
Doesn't hemp grow faster and produce more flora to utilize than grass? I guess grass would be more saturated and take up more per square foot for growing, but plants such as hemp that grow vertically would take up less space. Maybe even using the special type of bamboo that grows incredibly fast (somwhere around an inch a day) would yield more fuel?
:)
This is a great springboard for alt. fuels, as the introduction of fossil fuels pretty much took all of the focus off of wood/plant/flora burning technology as a form of energy. Let's at least get the full potential out of them before we move on to more harmful/complicated means of energy.
If anything, it would allow native Japanese speakers to call them grass stations without embarassment(?)
If you're going to burn something to get energy out of it, then burn it REALLY HOT in a VERY LARGE furnace so you can reduce it to CO2 and water, and take advantage of thermodynamics. I'm not advocating big power plants, but they are the best bang for the buck as far as extracting energy from carbon fuel and creating the least amount of pollution from it.
Growing hay as fuel also means not needing to use herbicides and pesticides which slowly build up in the soil. It could also have an effect on beef prices if this affected the price and availability of feed.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Well, have you ever seen Roland Piquepaille and Jon Katz in the same room at the same time?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Burning things for energy is what we're trying to get AWAY from. Burn 70 day old grass or 70 mllion year old grass you got out of a mine and you've still farted a bunch of carbon into the air. Burning anything for energy adds to global warming. Just because something puts less carbon into the air when you burn it than the other thing doesn't mean you're saving the planet. It's the difference between barfing at the table and barfing on the guest of honor: You've still ruined dinner either way.
This scheme isn't green at all. It's the same idea as burning coal only you get the fuel someplace else. You're still taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the air.
This is a bad idea.
Great. Now all I need is a grass powered lawnmoer to collect it...oh, wait.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Wind power is the only actual mitigation of increases in greenhouse gasses.
I seem to remember a problem with soil nutrients going up in smoke. There are all types of studies pointing to the reduction of top soil. That is why farmers have to rotate crops, add fertilizer, etc.
The grass pellets may sound good now, but may have some serious down side.
Not only is it "environmentally friendly", but watching grass grow is a seriously exciting activity to do on a Saturday night in Slashdotville! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
More importantly, what would the appliance I burn them in look like?
A rticleID=6600&ShowSection=Farmers'%20Week m
e +to+make+%22grass+pellet%22&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3D countryCA
These stories would be far more interesting if they pursued the recipe.
Another story;
http://www.agrinewsinteractive.com/fullstory.htm?
Here is a good link;
http://www.reap-canada.com/bio_and_climate_3_2.ht
A stove that burns pellets;
http://www.pelletstove.com/
Google does not like my search choice;
machine to make "grass pellet"
http://www.google.ca/search?num=20&hl=en&q=machin
I've played with making a lawn mower that was powered by biodigesting grass it'd harvested. I wonder how that method compares to this guys grass pellets. For a lawn mower at least it makes a lot of sense to power it with grass. It sure works for goats.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
At first glance I thought they meant marijuana grass. I kept imagining a huge increase in automobile accidents involving drivers chasing imaginary penguins.
... the difference is that fossil fuels are sequestered, where grass gets its mass from atmospheric CO2.
Dog is my co-pilot.
If the net amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere is 90% less than fossil fuels, it releases only 10%. So, in that respect it is 10 times better than fossil. So, it is 900% better.
As to other points in this thread:
Whether carbon is taken up from the soil is of no importance, as long as the plant roots don't reach into an oil well and extract carbon from fossil origin.
Of course other pollutants are important as well, but can we please accept that progress doesn't come with one perfect solution, but that things evolve? Please don't stand in the way of progress by shooting something down for having a disadvantage if the sum of advantages and disadvantages is better than that of the present situation.
Bert
Before some tinfoil hat wearing person comes along and says that Mobil/Exxon or BP will never permit anything better to replace oil, you can be pretty sure that if there is indeed a better substitute (be it grass, hydrogen, or otherwise), you'll be buying Exxon or BP brand grass pellets (or whatever else comes along).
A friend of mine had a wood pellet heater for his house. It looked like a wood stove with a hopper on the side. Not all that big. Of course they had bags and bags of wood pellets in thier garage...right next to the dog food.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
To protect Gaia it is imperative that we remove the filthy noxious material known as crude oil from the festering wounds of mother Earth. This Oil is trapped and is harming Gaia the provider of life.
We must remove this toxin and turn it into something useful. By using Large SUV like vehicles we can convert much of this mass noxious waste oil into life giving C02 which will make our plants stronger, healthier, and grow faster and better. This will give us a truly Green Earth, free from obnoxious black oil.
And if this global warming stuff is true, maybe we can help those areas of the earth above 30 degrees latitude and free them from the dangerous killing colds and storms that plague those people for most of the year.
i knew smoking weed gave me more energy!!
What's the energy density of grass?
How about petrol?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
you know i think it's just to bad that it will be awhile till we see hydrogen powered cars. even if they have the techology to make them I don't think the president will back it up much. i mean it is no secret that the iraq war going on has atleast something to do with oil. and the oil industry is going to do whatever they can to keep in buisness as long as they can. it is just to bad that it is always going to be more about money then effiecentcy. i think its sad. i would totally back up grassgas
Talk about a grassroots energy source
check out the best blog ever:
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Grass uses a LOT of water. (Not surprising, since it's got a lot of surface area.) Acre for acre it takes more water than trees or pretty much any food crop. It evaporates something like six times as much water as a lake.
So you're not going to want to convert land to growing grass if it doesn't have a lot of water available allready. So much for the southwest - and a lot of areas where you have the other main ingredient: sunlight.
But if you're already growing and mowing it, what a deal.
I'd love to get a lawnmower that delivered fuel pellets rather than mulch that needs to be hauled away or worked back into the ground. Given the price of natural and the small amount of heating I need to do in the climate where I live, a pellet stove burning lawn trimmings would be a godsend.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
from the burn-timothy dept.
That all depends on how many more Roland Piquepaille articles he posts.
Actually, some regions of the world burn animal dung for fuel. All they have to do is go out and gather it, no more processing is needed. Think of a horse as an efficient grass gathering and pelletizing machine.
In many places you don't need to fertilize or water your grass in order to get it to grow. I think the issue people have with these ideas is they expect that an alternative fuel has to be an alternative that's applicable everywhere. Why? This would be a great solution for areas where it doesn't take any effort to grow grass. Other areas will have other optimal solutions. But investigation of alternatives like these will allow development of a variety of solutions that can be implemented locally.
The byproducts of burning and thermal output are comparable to wood. Now that is fantastic news, because a crop of grass can be grown in months rather than decades for wood. From an ecological perspective, grass is very cheap. Forests are extremely expensive, because of the destruction of habitat, disruption of drainage systems, and long growing cycle. But we can grow grass on all kinds of (marginal) land, without ruining good forests.
BUT this doesn't compete with coal, oil, or natural gas. The energy capacity of those materials, for the mass required, is far greater than burning wood/grass. For example, from this source we see:
So your car is not going to be running on grass pellets any time soon. However, why not relace wood burning with grass burning? From all perspectives I can see, except for needing modifications to furnaces, it sounds like grass makes a better fuel than wood.
There is also an excellent source here but the site is down.
My car would get so high that it flies? I better put wings on it.
Thank you, i'm here all week
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Thank you (and scareduck in another post) for clearing things up for me.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
So, burning grass pellets produces less greenhouse gasses? So, if the carbon in the pellets isn't burning, what exactly is, and why are those byproducts not harmful?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
In Soviet Union, grass burns YOU!
Grass Management for Forage or Biofuel?
By: Jerry Cherney, Dept. of Crop & Soil Sciences
[Dairy & Field Crops Digest, July 2004]
Perennial grass management to produce high yields of high quality fiber in the diets of lactating cows will lower feed costs and may also improve rumen health. Perennial grass forage can deliver milk production similar to that found using alfalfa forage, but good grass haylage is more difficult to make than good alfalfa haylage. Intensive, aggressive perennial grass management and feeding is essential for economic survival on dairy farms with soils not suited to alfalfa production. Are there other potential uses for grass other than forage for ruminants such as biofuels? Most alternative energy sources suffer from the same problem, they are not economical and require subsidies.
Converting biomass into a viable energy option for widespread application requires an energetically efficient, economical, and convenient energy transformation pathway to meet consumer needs. The recent development of "close coupled" gasifier pellet stoves and furnaces with well designed ash removal systems are capable of reliably burning moderately high ash agricultural feedstocks. These advanced pellet burning stoves and furnaces have fuel conversion efficiencies and particulate emissions in the same range as modern oil furnaces. With recent increases in natural gas prices, this bioenergy fuel system is lower cost than all conventional energy forms for space heating buildings. It appears to be a promising new alternative for biofuel development that can economically displace high grade imported energy forms such as electricity, oil and natural gas for heat related energy applications. Recent studies in Canada have proposed that grass can be economically pelleted and burned as a biofuel in pellet stoves and furnaces.
Upstate NY imports most of its energy needs from outside the region. Any new method of producing energy would create jobs and improve the economic climate by reducing the amount of energy imported from outside the region. Equally important is the need to develop strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Governments around the globe are setting targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Grass pellets can provide home and small business heating with the potential to reduce fuel costs about 30% (unsubsidized), and also would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 90% over conventional fuel sources.
Past efforts to produce a renewable form of energy on a local scale from agricultural crops have been futile because of no economically viable, energetically efficient transformation into a useable energy form. Densification of grass into a pellet form appears economically attractive and is essential to create highly controlled combustion for space heating applications. Combustion of pelletized grass is both economically and environmentally feasible. Grass is converted to useable heat at over 80% efficiency, with an energy output:input ratio exceeding 10:1, compared to other bioenergy sources with typical system energy output:input ratios around 1:1. The cost-effectiveness of pelletized grass as a fuel results from:
Canadians have developed close-coupled gasifier pellet stoves and tested them in homes using pelletized switchgrass as a fuel source. They also have developed high-ash pellet furnaces wi
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...it eats its own exhaust!
You can't ignore this grass lobby!
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I know some of my hippie friends have stated for a few years now that Hemp would make the perfect fuel, for simliar reasons. So which gives you the highest energy yield over a year, "grass" or hemp?
how many acres of grass is it going to take to equal one gallon of gasoline, or a tankful of gasoline? We're already running out of good land for growing food, so if we use too much land for growing fuel, how are we going to grow all the food we need?
How much energy does it take to grow, harvest, and turn the grass into pellets in order to eventually burn the pellets for energy? Is it a net loss or a very small gain?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I for one, will not drive a hydrogen car. The short range, light cars necessary for such a beast combined with the other unsafe elements inherent to hydrogen storage are unnecessary if synthetic hydrocarbon fuels are available.
advantages of hydrocarbons over hydrogen:
energy density: much greater energy per volume (since it's a liquid) than H. (though slightly worse energy per mass)
Ease of storage: one relatively thin-walled fuel tank of arbitrary shape will hold enough for a 300 mile trip. Hydrogen will require either high-pressure tank or a really efficient dewar.
problems with high pressure tanks:
from your wikipedia article, hydrogen embrittlement. (and don't think about using aluminum tanks to avoid this, evidence suggests they are succeptible to a form of it, and al releases toxic fumes during combustion-- say in a particularly deadly accident..)
composite tanks are more difficult to see damage
Really high pressure for maximum efficency. about 10 ksi if you want it to liquify.
I wouldn't be so concerned about the hydrogen itself exploding in an accident, but pressurized gasses can do a number on you without burning at all. most dangerous time: filling.
Problems with cryogenic storage
must be really cold: about 20 kelvin
if unused for a period of time, all the fuel will eventually boil off. (period of time is greater with better containers, but if liquid nitrogen is a good indicator, about a week is all we can expect.)
all of which are solved by transporting your hydrogen as part of a hydrocarbon. and if you're storing it as a hydrocarbon, why not store it as a hydrocarbon that a lot of machinery can already use--C8H18 for instance.
Really, I don't much care where you get the hydrogen from, but for transportation use there's a reason we still use hydrocarbon fuels. The "fuel source" in a car or bus is really just an energy transport device (unless you can figure out how to make a solar or wind powered car). maximum efficiency and safety should be considered and all options should be weighed.
You want to do something to help the environment? Stop growing grass!!! It uses an immense amount of water, and provides (almost) nothing in return! Grow a garden instead, it'll use less water, and actually produce food. And if you don't use chemicals, it will be an inexpensive source of organic produce.
Burning grass would close the CO2-cycle, but asides from the fact that growing grass uses lots of water, as mentioned in the thread, the process of burning releases nitrogenoxides and sulfuroxides which also contribute to the greenhouse-effect. Therefore one would have to convert the pellets into a gas or, better yet, a carbon which gets into a gasoues state at about 150C. Then you can feed this to a fuell-cell. Why use hydrogen when you can use ie ethanol and methanol. Big advantage: everyone gets happier:=)
There's already electrical power already being delivered to your house. Not to mention biodeisel and ethanol as viable fuel options.
Do we really need another (worse) option? If someone manages to find something better than what we've got now, that's great, but I'm not sure putting this kind of stuff out there is helping. Alternative fuel researchers may be best served by continuing to bring alternative fuel prices down. With rising gasoline prices, it might be only a matter of months before it's cheaper to run a car on ethanol (which is a higher performance fuel anyway).
The main idea here is for home heating. There are clean burning pellet furnaces which use wood pellets now. By making pellets from other sources a good savings can be had.
Plants cannot extract carbon from the ground. They absorb CO2 from the air and emit O2. They do need trace amounts of phosphorous, potassium, and nitrogen which they get from the soil. Some plants, such as soybeans, harbor bacteria which can fixate nitrogen from the air and put it into the soil.
Irrigating this is ridiculous. You would simply grow it in areas where it rains. Put solar panels in the desert, grow fuel vegeatation in places where it rains.
You could concievably convert these pellets to gaseous and then liquid form. If you heat them up without oxygen you can break it down into gaseous carbon radicals which will recombine with steam to form methanol. I've often wondered if you could drive the reaction using heat from a large fresnel lens. In this case the potassium ash residue would be available to be used as fertilizer.
Overall, this is probably considerably more efficient than using solar panels to directly crack water and produce hydrogen, but it is also quite a bit more complicated.
Clickety Click
Libertarians are the most successful 3rd political party in the US ... and legalizing most drugs is usually one of their platform's planks (this is what keeps most conservatives from crossing over outright, as the Republican party does them little good for their desires).
It actually depends on the type of the grass you burn. With certain types of grass you can forget about the fuel (and car) entirely.
I still cannot understand why people think something as complex as nuclear power involving a wide variety of expensive materials is a cheap way to boil water. The dream was to offset the huge capital cost with a low fuel cost, but it hasn't got there with the existing plants so now people are trying to tell us the huge capital costs never happened.
Nuclear power is only an economic option at this point if other forms of energy are penalised - however it's so expensive it even makes photovoltaics look good if a carbon tax is imposed. Perhaps the newer nuclear options are viable, but the myth of cheap nuclear power has removed the incentive to research so it they will not be developed in the USA. The US nuclear industry has been too busy whining for decades and trying to make other power industries look bad to be capable of doing much if the govenment gives them a big slab of money to build new plants anyway - and no-one else has given them money to build plants in decades and isn't going to do so now.
Carter liked the nuclear industry, he was part of it before he was President, but that didn't stop him from deciding not to give them money to build more plants for economic reasons. I suspect he knew more about what he was doing than anyone reading this.
Nuclear power is nice if it is a long way away, you consider the short term and some other sucker is paying for it - but we need to consider more than CO2 emissions guys.
It's been done before with 1940s technology in a real hurry - but it wasn't cheap. It comes down to economics, and nuclear hasn't even made it onto the list of possibilities after fifty years of expensive steam.Agriculture uses a lot of water: 69 percent worldwide. This will be a big problem in a few years.
Grass is therefore an extremely inefficient way to get power, even if the conversion from solar energy is very good, because of the intense use of resources it requires to grow. Yeah, it's a closed carbon cycle but that's not good enough if it soaks up so much fresh water.
What about weed? Can I smok....er...burn that too?
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i dont get it
plans and plants for growing algae are there have been made and tested.
and they grow way faster then any grass
yes you need a body of water but that body can be closed of so water loss is minimal even beter you can work in 3d if you can keep the temprature right
and the amount of sunlight.
This is one of those enviro mental patient ideas that will be praised by the raise-vegetables-in-your-own-poop crowd and laughed at as ludicrous by the mainstream.
Wanna see grass as a *practical* fuel? Don't pelletize it - ferment it into methanol, and then use it to replace fossil fuels at the gas pump.
THEN its starts to make both economic sense AND have at least a feeble chance of happening in the real world...
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
I agree that biomass is worth investigating, but there have been dozens of projects in the area over the years, and nothing usable so far.
how is the concept of "burning" clean?
I have successfully run a 1988 Citroen CX 25DTR on normal diesel fuel, heating oil, jet fuel, waste veg oil, waste hydraulic oil, and odd mixtures of these things. With the waste veg oil there was no smoke at all from the exhaust even under very heavy load at full power - and only a slight smell from the exhaust. It does *not* smell like greasy chips!
"Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels."
you can't really compare 70 days of grass to 70 million years of fossil fuels. how much energy can i get from a barrel of grass pellets. i know i can get tons of energy from a barrel of fossil fuels. in fact, how far can my car drive on a tank full of grass pellets is my question.
HD Trailers
How do you deliver grass pellets to my house in pipes like they do with natural gas?
Seems to me that natural gas burns cleaner anyway. I still like the idea of capping off old landfills and collecting/burning the methane for power anyway.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
An article in the NT Daily talks about how Denton Texas has started producing bio diesel. For an investment of about $650,000 they have reduced their cost for diesel from $2.20/gal to about $1.00/gal. The plant currently produces enough to run the cities entire fleet of diesel vehicles.
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
How does burning grass pellets result in a fuel? It seems to me that it would result in burnt, used up grass pellets (eg, soot and ash).
Now perhaps grass pellets might *be* a clean, better fuel, but as far as I can tell burning them is the act of using that fuel, not the method of production of the fuel.
According to the brochure XCel Energy sends out, they detail where their power production comes from in percentages. It appears that particulate matter would be the trade-off no one seems to be acknowledging. It's bad enough our automobiles produce this scourge, but if industrial power production shifts to this source of fuel, buy stock in any company making anti-asthma
0 0006- -----------1909/2.1/9.1--/0.43/.0000073 139/0.4/7.9--/0.88/.00003. 5/4.0--/0.33/.00004
medication.
Air Emissions by Fuel Type
(lbs/ thousand kwh)
C02--S02-N oxides--Partic Matter--Hg
Coal------------2358/6.3/5.3--/0.41/.
Nat gas---------1344/0.03/1.8--/0.06/.00000001
Oil--
Refuse Fuel-----6300/1.3/9.4--/0.34/.0001
BIOMASS------
Purchases-------1839/5
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Does this mean that all those lawn-mower crazed suburbanites will be the next to be accused of hiding WMD?
Yes - got one. Honest. And it keeps growing and stuff, all by itself. No reboot required. ;-)
Insert
The author is not suggesting that the grass pellets be used for vehicle propulsion. The suggestion is that they could be a replacement for home heating purposes.
"The bottom line is that pelletized grass has the potential to be a major affordable, unsubsidized fuel source capable of meeting home and small business heating requirements at less cost than all available alternatives."
looks like more and more people will be smoking grass in the future, that is all...
I can't believe I just clicked on a Roland Piquepaille link. :(
Hopefully he doesn't get paid for the ads that are Adblocked. (only the Google ads show up on the page)
Don't get me wrong, I think we should be thinking greener. One of the reasons I bought my car was that it gets 30mpg. And I think gas prices should be at least $4 a gallon -- there's currently a huge disconnect between the cost of gas and the cost to the environment and public health. But in our society, people will drive 3 blocks rather than walk. They'd switch to coal burning cars if it was cheaper.
That's the last hurdle energy efficiency needs to overcome, the economic one.
Btw -- you're not off base. I completely agree. Oil is for making plastics, not for wasting on transportation.
Look, I run diesal. I could convert to biodiesal without any conversion in my engine. Why don't I? Cause theres no where you can buy the stuff.
Biofuels are great and all but alternative fuels have all flopped with the exception of the city busses running off french fry oil.
You have to change the market and theres enough money in oil as well as polotics that its not gonna happen any time soon.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
We don't want to share our grass with power plants!
paintball
Alternatively, get a diesel car, and just stick rapeseed oil into it. Not sure how refined the oil needs to be, but this is possible. I think it's even the case that a petrol (gasoline) car can be suitably rigged up to use biodiesel (maybe I'm wrong on this point).
Using vegetable oil in existing internal combustion engines is a comforting thought for when the black stuff runs out, even the solution does have its own problems (i.e. using all that arable land for oil crops rather than food!).
That said, having a ready replacement for diesel fuel does dismiss the notion that all global commerce will end when the oil runs out.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
There's more to consider than just greenhouse gas. CO2 is not a poison, burning grass makes more than plain old CO2, that's the point.
BTUs available by weight of fuel for coal and oil are considerably higher than grass (or wood or corn)therefore fossile fuels are more efficient energy storage with less non-combustible mass.
Coal and oil can be much more finely divided (atomized in a spray or powder form) and you get a much more complete combustion, resulting in essentially CO2 and water. That's the goal, 100% combustion. Modern gasoline engines closely approach 100% combustion.
The more extraneous chemicals you have present, like sulphers, nitrates, proteins, sugars etc. the more stinky pollutants result. Like sulphuric and nitric acid, hydrogen sulphide and etc. which have to be scrubbed out of exhaust and disposed of somehow. Hence the catalytic converter on cars, and the titanic scrubbers they have on power plants.
Then there is the ash to consider. Hard coal burns with almost no slag if done properly because it is pretty much pure carbon. Oil has no ash at all. (How much solid crap do you get when you vacuum out the furnace every other year? Couple ounces, maybe.)
Wood produces considerable ash, and so do all the other pelletized products. It won't burn, so you have to bury it. That'd be the 20% left over from Mr. Cherney's 80% efficient combustion. Sounds better when he says it, right?
Bottom line, while it is "possible" to burn grass pellets cleanly, it is more expensive per BTU than easilly available alternatives like coal and oil and you need a lot of scrubbing equipment. And somewhere to dump the ashes too.
Now then, biofuel uses solar energy to grow. Truth. The energy expenditure I'm talking about is the fossil fuel used to drive the lawnmower that cuts the grass, the truck that takes it to the pellet factory, the electricity that runs the factory, the truck that brings the pellets back to your house, etc. Then there's ploughing, weeding, fertilizing... you get the idea.
It has been firmly established that it takes more than one gallon of ethanol fuel to grow and process a gallon of ethanol from corn. As in 1:>1 per Mr. Cherney.
The growing of corn in the USA is amazingly efficient, I very much doubt the growing of grass is going to even aproach it for fuel efficiency. And you can't eat grass.
That's the physics and chemistry biofuel is up against. If for some reason fossil fuels are not available we can probably make it work, but it will suck from a pollution stand point and economically it will be a disaster. Think $100 dollars a gallon for fuel and think about what that will mean for the average schlub. No car, no electricity, no nice clothing made by electricty, no food from California shipped by refrigerated truck etc. Think Darfur, Biafra, etc.
Because biofuel simply cannot be grown in the volumes required and at the price required to match coal and oil. Do some simple BTU/ton and ton/acre/year calculations, it will become very clear.
There are some innovative projects being done with turning manure and other biotrash into synthetic oil and also incinerators to burn it directly. These are useful as additions to the electric grid because they burn material that has to be disposed of somehow. In this way the incinerator kills two birds with one stone and therefore has a positive economic effect. Example for grass, if you own a sod farm installing a grass pellet furnace and a pellet maker might be economical (depending on equipment cost) because you literally have grass clippings to burn. But it is not as efficient nor as clean as fossil fuel, and completely impractical as a replacement.
Now, as to nuclear generation, it is at the moment the only reliable, industrial sized method of producing electricity that does not produce greenhouse gas, period. So for those who consider CO2 a greenhouse gas and therefore a pollutant a la Kyoto, nuclear is the single solitary solution.
While your 1988 Diesel will turn over with all the substances you described, some of them were producing pollutants above and beyond conventional diesel fuel.
With the jet fuel, you probably shortened your fuel pump's life by several thousand miles.
There is such a thing as diesel knock. If a fuel's cetane is too low then the engine will run rough, rougher, or not at all.
If you don't believe me, try running substances like napthalene, BHT, or some other hydrocarbon that's highly branched and/or aromatic.
measure the CO2 in the atmosfere of a closed system on january first. on the 2nd, i plant some grass, which pulls some CO2 out of the air as it grows, on april 1st, i cutthe grass and burn it... on april 2nd, take another CO2 reading... and you have the exact same amount of CO2. conduct the same with fosil fuels and there will be an increase.
tasty electronic music vittles
This site says they just use steam and sawdust. Probably something like making commercial pasta.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Your argument about exotic, expensive materials is crap. Your argument about President Carter is crap, too. Your huge capital cost argument (with respect to US) has historical validity (30-year old data), but the economics must look good elsewhere, like Finland, Japan, South Korea, France, etc. By the way, the huge capital costs you cite are not so much capital costs, but interest-carrying costs due to construction time periods that were doubled or tripled due to insane regulatory policies which have since been remedied.
Look, your whole argument is old and tired. This post even reads just like your past posts. Rather than argue with you again, I'll just refer to the previous thread and remind you of the facts.
Previous Thread
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
Biofuels either grab CO2 out of the atmosphere or intercept CO2 which would have gone into the atmosphere.
That's why scientists accept biofuel as carbon neutral.
WIND POWER IS NOT A UNIVERSAL SOLUTION.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Ever seen what happens in forums/newsgroups when a whacko on the wrong side of an issue asserts that he's getting lots of support from the community in e-mail from people too shy to speak out in public? Sounds like the same thing is happening here.
Scientists are not especially shy, and the researcher who can prove abiotic oil by showing the oil industry where to drill for it would probably become a multimillionaire in very, very short order... along with collecting some interesting prizes along the way.
The phrase that stuck in my mind was that abiogenesis is just "waiting for a few more obituaries," or words to that effect. I tried to find that article but no luck.
Don't bother, the International Energy Agency is NOT figuring this into their projections and has suddenly gone from "peak oil in 2050 maybe" to "start looking at alternative fuels RIGHT NOW" in the last couple of weeks.
Abiotic is dead, mourn it for a few seconds amd move the fuck on.
Tech Public Policy stuff
We've all seen the talking points from the PR firms of the chemical and oil industries... your regurgitation of them adds nothing new.
If you're a "concerned citizen" who is reciting them and NOT getting paid, you're an idiot as well as a troll. Go check out Techcentralstation for how to get on the gravy train.
For real information from actual scientists working in the field, the rest of slashdot can check out:
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.altenergyaction.org/
Tech Public Policy stuff
replacing petroleum with renewable energy sources is a pipe dream.
See above. Unless you're figuring on our running out of sewage any time in the foreseeable future.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Wouldn't it make sense to subsidize a few bloggers to spread the "good word"? (see also TCS)
The posts that look like collections of talking points created by ad agencies probably are.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Commercial sites could be encouraged to truck it to central processing facilities by simply making it free to dump grass, etc. there... instead of their having to pay a dump.
I think this deals with everybody's objections.
However, I think of this as more of a eco-friendly way to get rid of landscape waste than as a way to get energy... but every little bit helps.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Once we get three times the capacity, then we can take full advantage of the law of averages -- the wind is almost always blowing somewhere -- and we can shape locally with existing hydro, and convert coal, gas, and nuclear plants to demand only operations.
Not OT for the thread, which got here by evolutionary means.