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Biofuel Production to Cause Water Shortages?
WED Fan writes "Scientists meeting in Stockholm are reporting that increased food and biofuel production will place higher demand upon irrigation and water resources." From the article: "Demand for irrigation -- which absorbs about 74 percent of all water used by people against 18 percent for hydro-power and other industrial uses and just 8 percent for households -- was likely to surge by 2050. Many nations are also shifting to produce biofuels -- from sugarcane, corn or wood -- as a less polluting alternative to fossil fuels. Oil prices at $75 a barrel and worries about global warming are driving the shift."
If that was true, the use of biofuels could cause more climate changes.
We're doomed. I'm gonna go hide under the bed. My Y2K supplies are finally coming in handy. Call me when its over.
biofuels lead to water shortages, and wind power kils birds, and nuclear causes terrorism concerns, and coal causes acid rain, and solar cells create pollution in production, and tidal leads to increased silt deposits, and hydro interferes with fish spawning...
etc., etc., etc...
finding ANYTHING wrong with an energy source is not a valid point. weighing the trade offs of one energy source's negatives against another's IS a valid point
and in a world where chinese demand fuels increased petrol prices, and in a world where petrol dollars fund islamic fundamentalist militants, and in a world where petrol fueled global warming creates hurricane katrinas, then whatever downside to biofuels you find to throw at me doesn't even begin to tip the scales. because it's not about choosing some magic energy source that has no downsides. it's about picking the energy source with least downsides that we can adequately foresee
i don't blame post-world war ii planners and politicians for making us so dependent on the internal combustion engine and the diesel engine for so much of what we need in our lives today. they didn't, and couldn't, foresee the problems in today's world
but if we're still largely dependent on petrol we dig from the ground in 50 years, then yes, i would blame today's politicians and planners. for whatever doom we would then be neck deep in, we are only knee deep in now. and any fool can see continuing to be so dependent on petrol is so dunderheaded wrong for so many reasons: security, environment, economics, etc
i say revive nuclear, and bow low before the mighty country of brazil for showing the rest of the world the way to a more secure, less polluted, and cheaper world of biofuels
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oil is useful for portable energy applications, otherwise you'd have to be an idiot to use it (or to even suggest it).
Tidal would be an obvious choice for desalination plants. Wind, Solar, Nuclear, etc., would be equally well suited for the job.
I doubt that you actually exist, and are not just a figment of my imagination...
The facts don't happen to care about your doubts.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
(plus dependent on the location, it could have an added benefit of recharging local aquifers)
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
There's a process, which apparently nobody appears to know or care anything about, that will convert pretty much anything containing long-chain hydrocarbons into, roughly, crude oil, natural gas, potable water, and assorted minerals. Check out thermal depolymerisation on Wikipedia. There's a pilot plant in the US that currently runs on turkey guts --- it's producing oil at about 400 barrels a day, at about break-even prices.
The real bonus? It's an energy-positive system. That is, the process itself produces all the energy it needs to run itself, plus a bit.
The system needs to be specialised for a particular input material; you can't (currently) build a plant that can take all feedstocks. That said, it ought to be entirely possible to build a giant TPD plant that takes raw sewage as its input feedstock. If you do this, and plug it into the sewage output from, say, New York, then you should be able to have it produce drinking water and biodiesel more or less for free (minus fixed running costs). After all, the feedstock's not costing you anything --- you're just throwing it away...
Even if it turns out that sewage contains too much water for the system to be power itself, it'd most likely still be worth doing simply as a sewage treatment system. TPD fully sterilises the input feedstock; it can break down prions and dioxins, remove heavy metals, and so in, and what's more, can do it in bulk. The fact that the output is saleable can be treated as a bonus.
I just seem to be amazed at how little interest there is in this...
Actually, the long term outlook is oil surpluses. Currently, production is higher than it's ever been, with increasing capacity occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, Canada and other places. Heck, even Castro is getting ready to drill off of Key West. Lucky for him, he doesn't have any environment regs or NIMBY whatnot to deal with.
The current price hike has nothing to do with capacity and everything to do with fear. Even OPEC doesn't understand why prices are so high (despite their gain from them) and fears the backlash against petroleum because of the high price. Shortages alone aren't causing the price increase - fear is. Remember, petroleum is a commodity and is subject to the same whims and fancies as any other market.
I would also point out that areas like Zimbabwe, it's not the cost of fuel that is causing the problems with agriculture, it's the local politics. There were many successful agrarian societies before the internal combustion engine. The ones that survived formed some form of social compact, something alien to a guy like Mugabe.
Not everything is the fault of the oil companies. And the current price gouging reflects less on the companies using the commodity and more on the folks who make the market. After all, if someone was driving up Wal-Mart's stock price, would you blame Wal-Mart? Better analogy, if someone were driving up the cost of goods shipped for Wal-Mart, would you blame Wal-Mart?
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Actually, I've been thinking it might be sane to use ocean algae for biofuel production?
Some days ago there was a program on Discovery Channel which was discussing this exact thing. They dumped a lot of iron (salt) to a sea bed where there was no plantation at all. And after some months that area was 'blooming' with all the sea plantations and increased algae, more than they expected. The thing is, majority of the sea is barren because of lack of iron.
So I am quite convinced that work is going on in that direction too. Though it has its own problems of changing water currents, ocean geography, endangering species etc.
No, the long term outlook is big shortfalls, it's called "peak oil" and the only debate amongst credible scientists is when it occurs, not if. I'll give you a hint, the most optimistic estimates are for around 2035, with most realistic estimates coming in at about 2010. Unless you consider 20 years to be long term (I wouldn't) then it's not right to say the long term outlook is of a surplus.
That's correct, but then, it's always been correct. The worst we've ever had is a plateau of production, but that's actually all we need to create price rises because demand constantly accelerates. In fact oil production can still rise year on year yet there can still be shortages, if demand rises faster.
Increasing capacity? Where did you get that idea from? The tar sands and oil shales are largely uneconomic to extract - the costs being bandied about by Shell are simply wild guesses that have a history of being totally wrong. So that seems to largely rule Canada out, unless they develop some radical new techniques. Gulf of Mexico was largely wiped out by Katrina so you'd expect increasing capacity there, but it's simply catching up to what it once was. Meanwhile Mexican production itself is slacking off as Cantarell continues its downwards slide.
Well, I disagree. I say maybe $10 per barrel of the current cost is speculation. The rest is supply/demand in action. OPEC know full well what is going on, but they are known for lying out of their backsides about anything to do with hard statistics - they still claim they have has much oil in the ground as they did in the 70s. 30 years of constant production and their claimed reserves have never even moved! Internal Kuwaiti reports indicate that the true figures are far, far worse than the published figures.
The main problem is that the world crude supply is starting to shift towards heavy sour (the undesirable, hard to refine stuff) away from the easy to refine light sweet. This tends to show up in newspaper reporting etc as a "refinery bottleneck" when in fact it's to do with the changing composition of the original supply as we exhaust the easy to obtain oil. The other problem is very rapidly increasing demand from Asia, and the Asian countries are routinely now locking in supplies from new fields like Yadavaran, effectively taking that oil off the world spot markets. Combine that with increasing internal demand in places like Saudi Arabia and you have a recipe for more demand and less supply - therefore higher prices. Which is what we're seeing.
Hmmm... a group of scientists in Stockholm... and look at this company is right nearby, and has a booming business in water desalination and purification... coincidence? I think not!
Perhaps this is more about steering UN and IMF project money towards localized water purification solutions rather than big infrastructure projects like damns, etc.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Tidal would be an obvious choice for desalination plants.
Bingo!
There are so many ways to use tidal energy for desalination that our company doesn't know which "branch" to take beyond the feasibility study stage. We're not a big company, more of small tech house, and our lab floor is littered with scale model prototypes for tidal desalinization. 10 years ago, none of these things made economic sense. Now, the developing Arab nations most in need of desalinization cannot afford to use their oil domestically (more $$ in selling it). They take their oil money and invest it into technologies like ours; and we'll sell it world wide.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I hope I don't get flamed for this as it is an honest question for those of us who are not physicists...
Regarding the Law of Thermodynamics, what implications does tidal power have for the Earth on a grand scale? Energy is neither created nor destroyed, if we keep tapping energy out of the tidal movements, what would this do to the Earths orbit or spin over the course of thousands of years? (Assuming we kept using this energy source, of course...)
I started thinking of this while pondering the future of space travel. If we used the Earth as a slingshot into higher orbit time and again, wouldn't this effectively pull energy out of the Earth's orbit? I know these are very large numbers involved here, but still. If this was as common as current highway congestion, surely spacecraft after spacecraft for thousands of years would do something? Wouldn't tidal energy do the same thing?
This is another great reason to go to nuclear power. How long will it take before people realize that biodiesel is just another crackpot energy scheme cooked up by people looking to get rich?
>> The only thing in danger is CHEAP water, really.
:P
Seawater is pretty cheap. Why not use it directly instead of using freshwater biomass and then needing a supply of freshwater for it?
Make biofuel from kelp biomass and no freshwater irrigation is needed. Grow it in situ or pump the seawater into a shoreline kelp farm, and harvest the biomass.
Jeez, do I have to think of everything for those environmentalists?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
So right now, the dynamic is that energy is being transferred from the earth's rotation to the moon's revolution. I think siphoning some of this energy off in the form of tidal power could -- in a very, very small way -- reduce this effect, making the earth's spin slow down even more gradually than it is now.
I am not an astronomer, but I once made a model solar system out of styrofoam balls.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
We need to go electric as much as possible. Build more nuclear power plants. Wind power is also a good idea. Upgrade our hydroelectric dams with the most modern and efficient technology (building more has it's own consequences).
Then move to a hydrogen economy with fuel cell vehicles, use battery-powered cars for city use, and build a first-rate, modern, automated system of moderate-speed (~100 mph) electrified passenger and freight railroads. I'm talking about routing and switching being done by computer and having either unmanned or minimally-manned freight trains that are constantly tracked by satellite. Also, encourage businesses to locate in towns rather than on the highway strips and encourage the growth of medium-sized (~100,000 people) towns outside the major urban areas.
Our moving to this new economy will cost money, but it will also create jobs; and the US economy isn't doing great right now. With appropriate government stimulus, this project could be a New Deal for the 21st century.
-b.
Sure. At the very least, you could generate the power precisely at the place where the demand is rather than transport it (with corresponding energy losses) from somewhere else. But what you really need is pressure. Rather than convert some power source to electricity, transport it to the plant, and then convert to mechanical energy, why not use tidal energy directly to generate the necessary pressure?
Between another series of civil wars all over the Middle East practically inevitable and daily production capacity already at a limit, oil prices are very likely to double in the next two years.
However, the price of crude oil is rapidly approaching the point where it becomes an elastic (demand sensitive to price) commodity--any higher and the demand will start to fall, which means if OPEC overprices oil they could end up holding the bag on too muc overpriced oil.
Also, at current prices there is huge incentive to introduce vastly better means of extracting oil such as steam injection and using heaters to liquefy highly-viscous forms of crude oil found in many parts of the world, which means a lot of supposedly unproductive oilfields suddenly become productive again. In the former Soviet Union, the introduction of modern Western oil extraction techniques have resulted in dramatic improvements in yield in oilfields in the former Soviet Central Asian republics and in the Caspian Sea. And you wonder why China National Petroleum Corporation is trying to possibly negotiate a deal with Vietnam and the Philippines so they could extract oil from the Spratley Islands between Vietnam and the Philippines, whose underwater reserves are estimated to be around 300 billion barrels alone.
The thing that really scares OPEC is the announcement last year that a division of Royal Dutch Shell demonstrated they could extract out crude oil in liquid form in situ from oil shale found in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Utah by using steam injection and directly heating the shale rock itself. By improving this technology, this could free up two trillion barrels of crude oil found in the oil shale in the USA, more oil than the ENTIRE Middle East combined! A modified version of this technology also means we could extract oil from the oil tar sands of Alberta province in Canada and along the Orinocco River in Venezuela without having to mine out the tar sands, possibly opening up several hundred billion barrels of crude oil for extraction. (In short, the most powerful member of OPEC could end up be Venezuela, of all things!)
I think that your worldview is entirely accurate, if you're talking about a fictional set of environmentalists invented by Rush Limbaugh.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
But this thread is about getting net energy out of biofuels.
Who says? You're the first one who's brought the net-energy question up. Let me rephrase the problem so you might get it: biofuels are _not_ an energy source, they are an energy conversion. All of the recent studies show that ethanol production (one biofuel, but not the only one. This argument should be approximately right for biodiesel from plant oils.) produces more energy from burning the ethanol than it takes to (1) grow and harvest the corn, and (2) convert that corn into the ethanol. The trouble is that there's another energy input: the sunlight used to grow the plants. If you consider the sunlight input into producing ethanol, the process cannot be more than about 10% efficient, probably much less (and I cannot be bothered to even try to do the math).
That being said, why in the world are we even considering it? Why don't we just build solar panels there and forget ethanol (or other biofuel) production? Because biofuels are valuable not for their net energy storage, but because they are a compact energy storage mechanism. We're already putting far more energy/effort into the process than the net energy output would justify, it's the conversion of (some of) the energy into a form we really want that makes the whole process worthwhile.
That is also why using nuclear or coal or whatever else to desalinate water to irrigate the crop for growing biofuel is not a net-energy output question. We wouldn't burn oil or diesel fuel or any transportation fuel to run a desalination plant. Those fuels have more value elsewhere. We would use a low-portability energy solution like nuclear or wind or coal because we are essentially upgrading a (small) portion of the energy output of those facilities into a more valuable energy storage form, the biofuel. Using an externally powered desalination plant might decrease the net efficiency of the sunlight-to-biofuel conversion from 10% to 5%, or whatever, but if the whole process is still economical, then it is appropriate. Until the technology is developed for a more direct electricity-to-transportation fuel conversion is in place, that high-inefficiency conversion of electricity-and-sunlight to biofuel is still worthwhile. (And don't go spouting "hydrogen" at me, because while the technology for hydrogen _production_ is available, the technology for its distribution and consumer use is still pretty green, if you'll pardon the pun.)
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It's a real issue. Historically, water shortages have brought down several civilizations, usually those with failed irrigation cultures.
It could have been worse. A few years ago, there was much talk of "privatizing" the world's water supply. Enron entered the water-trading business. (Their web site for water trading was Water2Water.com.) Fortunately, this didn't catch on, except in Australia, which does have water trading.
My wife and I decided to try out collecting roof runoff from our house in Phoenix, Arizona - we purchased a small storage "tank" (about 40 gallons) for this purpose, which was designed to collect runoff from the downspout, and hook up a hose to irrigate a garden. We figured we could use it for this purpose. We quickly found a problem with this method.
The biggest problem was mosquito production. While the unit we used had screens and a top to prevent debris from collecting, the holes in the screen are big enough to let in bugs, which can breed in the water. Furthermore, the screening was big enough to let in "leaves" from our mesquite tree in our backyard (the "leaves" on a mesquite tree are very tiny things), which would get in the water and provide food for the insects. Then there is the stagnation of the water to contend with.
I ended up putting in screening with smaller holes, which helped with the mosquito issue, but the leaves clog it worse, so it has to be cleaned periodically. I am thinking about removing the whole system, it just isn't worth it overall due to the way our backyard is set up and with all the problems.
That doesn't mean I don't think it is a good idea - just that our implementation of it is bad. If we had an underground cistern, or an above ground tank with proper screens and traps (a U-trap would keep out insects, and limit their breeding to the trap), and didn't have a mesquite tree clogging it up - it would work out. I know, because I have seen similar installations elsewhere in Arizona. It takes some planning and thought, but the results could be very beneficial, even if the water is only used for "greywater" usage.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I, too, live in Kansas. I also live next to a river. It may be that the river water needs treatment to be human consumable, but it doesn't need anything to be used as cooling water for a distillation tower. And as the ethanol produced is never intended for human consumption, river water is fine for the fermentation as well. No need to take the water from an aquifer.
Grow corn, soybeans, canola, rapeseed, sunflowers, even - this is Kansas, after all! Press the seeds for oil. What is left is seedcake. Mix with water, ferment the sugars, distill the ethanol produced. What is left is dried and fed to animals - pigs, cows, rabbits, whatever. Instead of growing a field of corn and feeding it to the cows, you grew a field of corn, extracted the oils for production of biodiesel or bioheating oil, running in a digester to convert starches to sugars then fermented the sugars to produce ethanol for additional fuel, THEN fed the protein and fiber rich residue to the cows (or to people, if processed into a form that was marketable). After running it through a cow, pig, rabbit, or chicken you get methane (less than currently as there are less sugars and starches remaining) meat, and great fertilizer.
The way I see it, it is not a question of crops for food or for fuel, but making efficient use of the crops - for fuel, THEN for food.
What percentage of crops is already grown for (food grade) oil production, what percentage for (food grade) sweetener production, what percentage for starch production, and what percentage for animal feed production? If you are processing corn for corn syrup production, corn oil is a waste byproduct. Use it for biofuel production. Processing corn for cornstarch? Then both oil and syrup are byproducts. Use them for biofuel production.
On the other hand, it is possible, I suppose, that the efficiency of the system is already at 100% so that any production used for fuel would directly reduce the amount available for all other possible uses. In that case, stop paying farmers to NOT grow crops which will increase the total amount available and so make some available for fuel production.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Well, as you must know, there is a history of hundreds of examples of disfunctions, even in todays's most "modern" nuke plants.
But you are right. These are not facts. Let's keep our eyes wide shut.
One could argue that the fact that we find these disfunctions is proof positive that the nuclear safety process is working, but the truth is that there is a hudge gap between the reality of the danger and the supposed nuclear safety : it's only because of various counter powers that these disfunctions are known. The nuclear industries are closely linked to the military industries and to say the least the field lacks in transparency
I should also point that if you sticked to a scientific and factual approach of the problem, you would certainly realize that defining something as safe once and for all clearly is not a good safety procedure. Err , let's just hope you are not in charge here !
Proliferation of nuclear power will lead to chernobyl like problems, if not only statistically then in the same way that the US power grid is failing : safety brings no short term profit.
But in all your arrogance and pride for your technology i doubt that you can stand back from this nuclear fiction, untill a disaster happens. In your backyard maybe ?
Security processes have no zero default, and you know it. Nuclear safety is a myth. What is the risk ? Don't ask. What are the benefits ? Trust us. The reality is that we shall leave our fate in the hands of the nuclear goons, despite the wastes, despites the risk, despite the damage already done but most of all despite the fact that this energy is over used and wasted in mainly illogicals and ineficient ways. Only the fake sense of safe and infinite energy that the nuclear industries promess permits such a waste of energy, and this has other dramatic effects. One simple example : excessive packaging. Very expensive energy wise, very destructive (plastics, heavy metals in paints, chemical tratement of paper et al), mostly useless.
And keep the insults to yourself, nuclear monger, because be it reason or unfortunately disaster, time is on my side.
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.