Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.