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."
What these environmentalists need to do is build a priority management system. This shotgun approach has got to end. They are going to have to decide if global warming is worse than water shortages, if nuclear power is worse than coal, etc.
Good grief! The only solution that the shotgun approach gives is for all humans to go live in caves--with the caveat that 5 billion or so of us dissappear (remember that farming and ranching contribute to global warming as well).
Using energy from what? Oil? I doubt that you could irrigate biofuel crops with desalinated water, use the biofuel to power desalination, and wind up with an excess of energy.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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
To reduce the demand for irrigation requires a whole lot of technologies, some cheap and some not, but the situation is far from hopeless. This is not about environmentalists, it's about politicians finding the political will to do something concerted and practical. In the US, bioethanol is largely a porkbarrel project. In Europe and Brazil, it's about energy cost and so more practical. Growing the wrong crops in the wrong places and spending a fortune on irrigation is stupid. Moving the US economy to dry States and then irrigating golf courses is stupid. And your post is stupid.
On the other hand, working out a plan to find the best places to grow biofuels and then, say, providing tax breaks to make it happen might be a sensible option. What is clear is that politicians need to be talking to scientists and economists on the whole energy and water issue, not to lobbyists.
Pining for the fjords
Actually, desalination means centralized power generation. We generally don't use oil for that.
Using modern technology, that would mean nuclear, coal or (in some areas) passive power (hydro, solar, wind, etc). The latter option isn't going to work everywhere, but building a nuke plant or two should solve the water problem rather nicely. In places where tidal power is available, you also have an abundance of salt water, though that does raise issues regarding transporting the desalinated water, or selecting our biofule agricultural land to be near the ocean. Using coal would contribute to gobal warming, but even then we get the economic benefits from using biofuel over oil, since coal isn't in short supply or in the hands of unfriendly nations.
Using probably future technologies, fusion would work wonders. Fusion plants scale up better than they scale down, which is exactly what we'd want for a desalination facility. Orbital solar is another possibility along the same lines. Even without such technologies, a more modern fission reactor design would be an improvement over using existing nuclear plants - something like an integeral fast reactor or a pebble bed reactor for instance.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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...
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 live in Kansas, where there are a couple of ethanol plants either under construction or in the planning stages. Ethanol plants require something like 200 gallons of water a minute to function, which is a huge amount of water. Some posters above have mentioned desalination to get water, but they're missing the point of ethanol plants: to put the plant near corn production, i.e. away from the coasts. The vast majority of the water in Kansas comes from a single aquifer, and there's a lot of debate about how long before the aquifer will run dry. It's not always an issue of having good water; sometimes it's an issue of having any water at all.
>> 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
LOL! You do realize you're a nut job, right?
Nuclear is safe. You're touting Chernobyl as an example of how unsafe nuclear power is? Get real. Chernobyl is an example of stuidity of mankind in its most extreme. Your argument makes as much sense as saying dynamite (the basis of most modern techonological infrastructure) should be banned because some idiot terrorist strapped it to himself and blew some people up. Simple fact is, dynamite is one of the safest explosives we have. And yes, idiots do blow themselves up with it. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
Fact, Chernobyl would have never been allowed to be built in the US (even in the 50s, or any other country in the world) as it failed to meet the most basic of safety standards. Fact, Russia suffers from penis envy (compared to te US) and considers its people to be disposible; thusly they knowingly created a very, very dangerous reactor. Fact, Russia has a long history of ignoring safety at the expense of their population (comparisons to civil terrorism would not be unwarrented). Fact, it had little to no containment shielding to begin with. Fact, what failsafes they had in place had been disabled. Fact, with a skeleton crew, making them unable to react to any emergency, they decided to operate their reactor outside known safe parameters to observe what happens. Guess what, they acted like terrorists strapping dynamite to themselves and the world is shocked. Gasp! Chernobyl is an condemnation of Russia, Russian politics, and Russia's complete disreguard for humanity; however, it is not a statement about nuclear power.
In the final analysis, only an absolute idiot would use Chernobyl as a posterboy for how unsafe nuclear power is. Why do I sound so harsh? Simple, because anyone that attempts to use Chernobyl for anti-nuclear reasons obviously doesn't know anything about the details and are running scared. If you insist on attempting to make an anti-nuclear, fear mongering position, please build a case based on facts rather than ignorance and stupidity. If you're using Chernobyl, obviously you have no facts and come off sounding like an absolute, raving, tree-hugging, loon. At best, you're simply ignorant, parroting fear.
Simple fact is, nuclear power, based on current designs, is very, very safe. Simple fact is, newer, modern nuclear designs are safer yet. One can certainly argue the economic merits and the finite duration nuclear power is an option. Nonetheless, nuclear is one of the safest sources of power on earth. Anyone with the slightest inkling of knowledge of the subject matter is forced to conclude, nuclear is safe. Period.