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."

Comments

yes

[circletimessquare]

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

Thermal depolymerisation?

[david.given]

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...

Re:Not an issue...

[WhiteWolf666]

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.

So make biofuel from kelp, no freshwater needed

[Morgaine]

>> The only thing in danger is CHEAP water, really.

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? :P