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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."
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.
- 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
Wikipedia mentions that the primary greenhouse gas is water (since water absorbs infrared energy, compared to nitrogen and oxygen which don't)... are these grass pellets dried when they're pelletized?And GEE! Look what "editor" posted the story!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
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.
After that, energy is produced via whatever method is most efficient currently (grass, hydro, solar, wind, cow earth, whatever), but we don't have to keep changing gas stations, because all of these are semi-easily converted into hydrogen.
the problem with that kind of thinking (and i do wish it were true), is that it relies on a certain amount of "sanity".
unfortunately, oil prices have been artificially held back (wish i could find the link to the story i read this in), so they're just going to suddenly spike when we're looking the other way. Hello, End Of the World...!
What about all the energy and logistics it takes to put the water on the grass?
It's called rain.
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(?)
You may be interested to know that some students at the University of Manitoba made a car that ran on grass in the late nineties, so this isn't a new idea. They won a few awards for it too, if I'm not mistaken.
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
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
Nuclear power produces highly toxic waste and byproducts.
Duh. These are produced in relatively small quantities, unlike coal-burning power stations.
Wind power, meanwhile, is localised and unreliable. You can't use it as your main energy source because you can't predict how much you'll get.
As for the atmosphere, wind power is neutral, at best. The energy extracted from the wind is promptly returned to the atmosphere as heat. Really, it's just indirect solar energy (like hydro).
If you want to actually cool the Earth down, your best bet is to dump megatons of dust in the upper atmosphere (cf. Krakatoa).
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:=)
Exactly the point -- Burning a large volume of something that didn't grow recently adds to atmospheric CO2, but if you grow all your fuel you are just cycling through the same carbon over and over.
As an aside, the idea that oil comes from 70 million year old organic matter is pretty much dead. Oil and natural gas have been found far below the organic layer, indicating a different origin, some process that happens deeper within the planet. The process is not known, but there is no reason to think it isn't still happening. As long as we keep developing deeper drilling techniques we may never run out of oil.
The best reason to search for an alternative to oil is the problems created by overloading the atmosphere with CO2. Switching to something totally replaceable can't be a bad thing. The article mentions that grass pellets produce 96% as much BTUs as wood pellets and can be grown on marginal farmland. Sounds like a great avenue to research.