Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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...
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.
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
>> 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
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.