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."

Comments

Obvious marijuana jokes aside...

[kwoo]

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?

Re:Obvious marijuana jokes aside...

[gwydion04]

Plants do not get the majority of their carbon from the ground. I quote from Wikipedia:

"Plants are autotrophs, which means they are able to synthesize food directly from inorganic compounds, instead of eating other organisms or relying on material derived from them. Most notably, they use carbon dioxide gas and water to produce sugars and oxygen gas. The energy for these processes comes from photosynthesis. For instance, the over-all equation for the production of glucose is:

12H2O + 6CO2 + light --> C6H12O6 (glucose) + 6O2 + 6H2O

The glucose is variously used to form other organic compounds, such as the building material cellulose, or it may be used as a fuel."

Cellulose = polysaccharide that makes up the majority of a plant's structure - i.e. what you would burn.

Plants need only minerals and water from the ground - that's why you can grow them with hydroponics. Crack open that high school bio textbook before posting to avoid such future didatics from your fellow slashdotters. ;-)

Conserve fuel for what we NEED it for.

[SteelV]

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.

Re:Conserve fuel for what we NEED it for.

[wwahammy]

Yes but that would require foresight beyond the next election cycle from our political leaders, something which is has been lacking even more lately.

Re:Conserve fuel for what we NEED it for.

[drinkypoo]

The strength of this kind of thinking is that it relies on human greed, one of the most reliable forces in the known universe. If the oil runs out then petroleum plastic products will be extremely highly desirable. A lot of the plastic items we have now will be replaced with other materials that are similar in one way or another, including plant-based plastics, Aluminum, carbon fiber, blah blah blah. It will happen because people will find a way to make money doing it because it will be cheaper than, for example, digging up landfills and sorting out all the plastic which in turn will be cheaper than pumping the last few barely-accessible drops of oil out of the ground.

Of course in the meantime a lot of people will suffer due to the inequalities inherent in such a system. No plan is perfect. A few people will get disgustingly rich, of course. Also, the planet is being shit upon. It turns out that basicallly all of the alternatives to pumping oil out of the ground and burning it, which as we all know is not particularly good for the environment as it relates to humans, are more environmentally friendly than burning dinosaurs (or turning them into soda bottles.) Of course a lot of them aren't nearly as convenient, but I don't think there's too many things that we make with oil that we can't duplicate fairly well in some other way. To preserve our ability to perform those sorts of things, we should really think about moving to some other source of energy sooner rather than later.

Duuuude...

[nxtr]

You'd know this if you weren't smoking it.

Another reason it won't happen.

[Douglas Simmons]

"Unfortunately grass has no political lobby, which makes the start up of any new alternative energy industry problematic," says Cherney

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.

Re:Another reason it won't happen.

[El Puerco Loco]

The real problem with this and other biofuels is that it is not sustainable. to grow enough to be commercially viable will require huge amounts of fertilizer. most fertilizer for large scale farming is based on ammonium nitrate. almost all ammonium nitrate is produced directly from natural gas. so it would really just be converting petroleum to biofuel, which doesn't make sense, as the petroleum is a perfectly good fuel as it is. if the worry is running out of petroleum, the current common sense best solution is nuclear power, but common sense rarely prevails when discussing nuclear energy. replacing petroleum with renewable energy sources is a pipe dream. i think once the situation gets critical, people will be a lot more open to the nuclear option, but things will probably have to get awful bad first.

What about?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:What about?

[dmaxwell]

Compared to solar energy, it's somewhat favorable also

Strictly speaking, this grass is solar energy. It's just that plants seem to be more efficient at converting solar energy than anything we've devised thus far.

Already been done

[Kohath]

My great grandfather had a mode of transportation that ran on grass.

Re:Roland Piquepaille

[Anonymous Coward]

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"

So... where's the money?

[RaveX]

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?

Re:"closed carbon cycle" != zero emissions

[vrmlguy]

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.

Re:"closed carbon cycle" != zero emissions

[damiam]

I think the point is that the act of producing plant-based fuels removes CO2 from the atmosphere.

Grass is VERY thirsty.

[Ungrounded 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.