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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."
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?
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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.
You'd know this if you weren't smoking it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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his content ?
Roland Piquepaille has just cut and pasted the cornell press release and some other one,
do a google phrase search , all will be revealed
or just wack in Rolands site in this plagiarism detector and see for yourself how he rips off other peoples content and reposts it for profit without permission
and then he has the cheek to put (c)Roland at the bottom of his shitty "blog"
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.
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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?
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.
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.
Actually, burning fossil fuels releases CO2 from carbon that's been sequestered for 70 million years or so, while burning renewable or sustainable plant matter simply recycles carbon that was sequestered within the past few months. In other words, burning fossil fuels increases the net CO2 in the atmosphere, which burning plant matter doesn't.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I think the point is that the act of producing plant-based fuels removes CO2 from the atmosphere.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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
Nuclear power produces highly toxic waste and byproducts.
I don't know much about this situation, but if he's not really doing anything other than swiping bits of other people's articles and
The counter-argument would be that he is adding insightful or helpful additional information, but from what I gather, this is not the case. And if there is a financial tie between the editors and this guy, then that could concievably lower the quality of
If this guy is simply copying other stories and pasting them on his website, then there seems nothing wrong with
In short, people get annoyed by those who skim money off other people's work without contributing anything.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
"I would compost, but I don't have anything I could do with the compost."
Ask your local authority to set up green waste recycling, collection, or somewhere to dump it. Or if you live on a street where you have no need for compost, but others might, and there is space, suggest a local composting initiative in the street. Where I live there is a green waste area at the local dump, and a street I used to live in had a communual compost heap (which was more convenient to go to than the municipal one).
The other thing is to try (I've tried this before, mostly I am still to embarassed) to complain about excess packaging, or even take the excess packaging back to where you bought the product and insist THEY recycle it (this is going to be an EU requirement for electronic waste, but doing it for excess packaging might make companies notice, perhaps).
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.