America's First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant

hankmt writes "The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America. Cellulosic ethanol produces ethanol from cellulose, which all plants have, instead of from sugar, which is only abundant in food crops. Corn ethanol only produces 1.3 units of energy for every unit of energy that goes into growing the crop and converting the sugar to ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol can produce as much as 16 units of energy for every one unit of energy put into the process. The new plant will be online in 2008 and aims to produce 100 million gallons of ethanol a year."

Comments

Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[plover]

This isn't the first time I've read that corn yields 1.3 units of energy out for each unit put in (or some factor other than 1.3) But where does this number come from? And really, how far back does it go -- gas in the farmer's 4x4 inspecting his fields? Energy used to produce the fertilizer? The energy to produce the food the farmer ate?

I'd like to know because it's so hard to compare with oil at that level. It's much easier for a consumer to simply look at the price on the pump. But that only tells us what the market is willing to bear (what the fuel is worth), not the true costs of production.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[aichpvee]

It isn't about monetary value at all anyway. It's about corn being a poor source of material for producing ethanol because it is low in sugar. This type of ethanol works great in places like Brazil because they make it out of sugar cane.

If it were just about the monetary cost of things even corn ethanol wins over oil, which would be $13/gallon or more if we started charging the oil companies for our military services.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[ScrewMaster]

It's even worse than that, since methanol production is heavily subsidized by the Federal Government.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[evanbd]

Comparing prices also gets subsidies (especially corn subsidies, but also renewable energy subsidies) involved.

Those numbers certainly ought to include the energy content of the fertilizer -- it's decidedly non-trivial in comparison to the output energy, though I don't have a reference handy so I won't go quoting numbers. Most fertilizer is ammonium nitrate (or other nitrates), which is made from atmospheric N2 + H2 from fossil fuel sources (mostly natural gas, but also oil and coal to some extent). The ammonia is oxidized to nitric acid and reacted with more ammonia to form fertilizer AN, or used directly as anhydrous ammonia.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

The DoE publications and others are all fairly consistent at a factor of 1.2 to 1.4. High sugar sources, like sugar cane, are over 3:1 ratio. High oil-content plant products like soybeans are also over 3:1. That is the "direct" energy cost. Includes the energy for the tractor but not energy for the farmer. The tractor fuel really is negligible... the real cost is in the heating of the water and lost water needed to make ETOH from corn. Sort of like using an electric raxor uses less energy than a plain manual safety razor because of the hot water used. But petroleum based fossil fuels are well over 50:1, and can be 100:1. That's right, 50 to 100 units of energy released for each unit of energy needed to produce it. That drops by about 15% when you include cracking it to gasoline, but you are still at 50:1 even on a bad day. Now do you see why oil it is so widely used?

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[mdsolar]

This is the ratio of fossil energy put in to energy out. Most of the fossil energy input for corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer which is produced using natural gas (though it does not need to be http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/04/smelling-salts .html) and fuel used for harvesting and planting. Some distilleries also use natural gas. Forest waste products to be used here don't have any fertilizer inputs and much of the fuel used for harvesting would have been used anyway. Brazil is achieving some very impressive values for this ratio in its biodiesel production: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/juicing.html. On the energy out side, everything is really stored solar power.
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Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[mdsolar]

These guys are going for ethanol though they also get some methanol, propanol and butanol. Look at step 2b here: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process
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Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[slughead]

But that only tells us what the market is willing to bear (what the fuel is worth), not the true costs of production.

Actually, it's especially easy with gas. The 'demand curve' is so steep, usually quantity demanded remains very constant regardless of price (at least, in the short term, obviously).

This is noted by gas taxes: the burden is almost entirely bore by the consumer, so an extra 18 cent tax adds nearly 18 cents to the price of gas because the companies know we'll pay it. In addition from gas taxes end up being nearly proportional to the rate.

Compare this with something like cigarettes taxes: The companies actually reduce the price of cigarettes and end up paying (I'm guessing here, from my days as a smoker) roughly half of the tax. This is directly related to the demand curve and the nature of the market. In addition, revenues are not nearly proportional to the tax rate increase because people generally do buy many fewer cigarettes when they cost more. The companies have to balance the tax burden with their loss of revenues, and they hire really smart guys to do this.

By the way, the emboldened words in this post are there to indicate trends and averages.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

It comes from a selection of five papers from the late nineties which did the calculation in a number of ways. Generally, they attempt to account for the entire manufacturing process, from energy in oil used in fertilizers to fuel for farm equipment, to transport of the ethanol or corn, to the refineries that distill out all the water. I do not believe they go so far as to account for feeding the farmer, but I honestly suspect that is a very minor correction, as much as I like farmers.

However, there is a fairly well known outlier which claimed to do a better job of accounting for processing costs. Pimentel and Patzek attributed what they claim are more accurate inputs to the agriculture, transport, industrial, and distribution components of the manufacturing process, giving the also oft-quoted value of around 25% energy *loss*. Ordinarily, people would probably dismiss that one given the seemingly overwhelming amount of contrary evidence, but Pimentel and Patzek are very well-respected scientists. It's difficult for me, as an energy researcher, to know who to believe. I suspect it's nigh impossible for people who only study this passingly.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe that even if Pimentel et al are wrong, 1.3 is just way, way too low to be reasonable. Improvements to technology (as this plant represents), are the only way that ethanol can ever be practical. We'll see soon enough if it's as good as they claim.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July05/ethanol .toocostly.ssl.html has a summary of the debate.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[ChrisMaple]

At some point you have to say "It's not valid to count this as a cost." Why not charge military expenses to the existence of religious insanity? Why not add the cost of building roads to the price of oil? How about the cost of educating future oil company employees, or feeding them until they join the oil company?

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[edwardpickman]

You make a hell of a point. I say we fund the war through gas taxes. You want to end this war tomorrow add a $10 tax on gas to cover the cost of fighting for it. Even Congress might be on the people's side when it costs them $600 to top off their Hummer.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[djh101010]

It's even worse than that, since methanol production is heavily subsidized by the Federal Government. Your reliability on this topic is, ahem, somewhat diminished let's say, by the fact that you seem to have confused "ethanol" and "methanol". Sometimes the better way to support your point, is to stay silent when you don't have a basic understanding of it.

I might even expand on that to say, that if you aren't clear on what you're arguing against, you just might now have done enough research to have made your decision on facts rather than emotions. Just sayin...

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[tepples]

Why not add the cost of building roads to the price of oil? This already happens in the form of tax on the sale of gasoline.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[mothlos]

What they fail to figure is the opportunity cost of turning all of that cellulose into ethanol vs. its current use, which is largely animal feed and compost that is used to make products, as cover for off seasons, and to enrich soils for another season of crops. What is the energy cost of destroying your soil or offsetting the loss in other areas of the economy?

The number comes from estimates that agricultural analysts make about the energy inputs of farm production. Human inputs are generally not considered, but equipment repair costs (not replacement) are. The big energy inputs are equipment, water, and soil enrichment.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[maxume]

Boris, the demand curve you describe for gasoline is nearly flat, not steep.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[ScrewMaster]

{sigh} you really must be new here. There's no need to be snide over a typo, and other than your pointless grammar-Nazism, you offered nothing of substance in your reply.

Your inappropriateness aside, are you actually claiming that the Federal Government does not subsidize the conversion of corn into motor fuel? Huh. That's a remarkable degree of ignorance, given the nearly forty billion dollars that Congress has given in such subsidies in the past decade. Your taxpayer dollars at work. In any event, just so you won't think that I'm making this up, there are some who would disagree with you on this subject.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[infaustus]

It's true that the government subsidizes corn to ethanol conversion (and corn itself) to a ridiculous degree, but it's balanced by incentives against sugar-to-ethanol conversion. (If we stopped keeping sugar prices artificially high, and especially if we let Cuban sugar in, it would be amazingly cost-effective.)

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no need to be snide over a typo

I don't know what kind of keyboard you are using, but from where I'm sitting the 'm' is an awfully long way from the 'e'. Typo indeed!

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[djh101010]

{sigh} you really must be new here. There's no need to be snide over a typo, and other than your pointless grammar-Nazism, you offered nothing of substance in your reply.
Sorry, but going from "ethanol" to "methanol" isn't likely to be a typo, it's either an intentional manipulation to introduce FUD, or an outright error, or an example of dramatic ignorance of the topic. Wasn't sure which was the case, hence my question.

Your inappropriateness aside, are you actually claiming that the Federal Government does not subsidize the conversion of corn into motor fuel? Huh. That's a remarkable degree of ignorance,
And, that's a remarkable degree of "where the fark did you get that from what I wrote?".

given the nearly forty billion dollars that Congress has given in such subsidies in the past decade. Your taxpayer dollars at work. In any event, just so you won't think that I'm making this up
Yeah, whatever. Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us, so, yeah thanks for the link and all that but I don't see it as a problem. In fact I think we should subsidize the infrastructure for same, so we can get this stuff into production and stop pretending we like the arabs.

You seem to have taken my question about "Methanol, who said anything about that, we're talking about Ethanol here" and expanded it into a series of assumptions, some amusing, and some outright wrong.

I wonder why you do that.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[ScrewMaster]

I wonder why you do that.

A sensible reply to my first comment would have been, "didn't you mean ethanol?" Instead you chose to be an ass and read a whole lot more into my remark than was there. Next time bother to read the whole thread and pick up on the gist of what people are talking rather than jumping on a single error.

I wonder why you do that? In any event, don't bother replying, I'm not interested in a flamefest. Goodbye.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to know because it's so hard to compare with oil at that level.

By the same token how do you quantify the cost of oil? Do you include insurance claims for storm=damage, and if so which storms? (And if not you are simply ignoring the external costs of oil). At this stage climate science can only establish general trends, we can't point to any particular extreme weather events and say this one was caused by fossil fuel use and this one was not. Nor are we yet in a position to be able to 30% of the events are the result of climate change and 70% are not.

Cost comparisons of alternative fuels to oil are bogus. The point is that oil is no longer an option, we need to find viable alternatives and quickly. If we want to continue consuming energy at current levels, bio-fuels, along with nuclear fuels, are going to have to form part of the package, solar by itself (while it will be extensively used) ain't gonna hack it.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Jerf]

There's one and only one way to find out if ethanol-from-corn is a net win, or in fact any other alternative energy proposal: Strip it of all subsidies and throw it out into the marketplace. (More advanced students will note that we also need to internalize the appropriate externalities.)

If it is in fact an energy-positive process, the extra energy can be sold. If the process is economically viable, then pretty much by definition of "economically viable" they will be able to run at a profit. If it is not, then they will eventually go out of business.

Now, my point is not that this is desirable. It must be the ultimate goal of any alternative energy production system, but in the short-term you can make good arguments about subsidizing things to get over start-up costs, experiment with multiple things before we know which is the correct answer, etc. My point is simply that you can do math from now until the last drop of oil is pumped out of the ground and you won't really know whether such a marginal process is truly net-positive.

That's the beauty of money; it's hard to wrap your mind around it, but if you just let it do its thing, it will automatically account for labor costs, equipment costs, etc., and with some judicious law making (which has a roughly 0% chance of happening) it can account for the externalities as well, and the final result will be obvious and unambiguous. It can even account for corruption and mismanagement etc., which are really real risks, not illusions. It's the only way to go from theory to reality.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[plover]

Thanks, that was very interesting. Ethanol being a "net energy loss" was one of the figures I had heard earlier, which is why 1.3 sounded pretty good to me. What I didn't know is "who" did the research that calculated a loss, and I often wondered who paid for it as it sounded very much like the results you'd expect from an oil-company-funded study.

One of the reasons biofuels might still be worth it is as an "energy converter". Liquids are very desirable as fuels from a materials handling standpoint -- they're storeable, they're pumpable and flow through pipelines easily, they're directly measurable, they allow for readings of the quantities sold or stored, they have a fairly high energy density, most of them are stable enough, and they're already well understood by people. We already have a giant liquid fuel infrastructure in place (tankers, trucks, pipelines, storage tanks and filling stations.) And we already have millions of engines designed to burn liquid fuels.

If electrical energy could be used as inputs to the ethanol equation and especially in the production of fertilizer, the electricity could be produced by nuclear or solar power and turned into liquid fuels by this (very inefficient and obtuse) route. Plus, every efficiency gain in biomass-to-fuel conversion is solar powered, and results in "free" energy to us. These are all pretty new technologies, and I expect there are a lot of unexplored ways to improve the processes.

Economics aside, we are going to run out of fossil fuels at some point in the future, and the other replacement technologies just aren't there yet in terms of storage and usability.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[ClamIAm]

Comparing prices also gets subsidies (especially corn subsidies, but also renewable energy subsidies) involved.

You forgot to add "especially subsidies to petroleum companies, and the various tax and other loopholes they exploit". For some reason, it seems that corn subsidies are always mentioned in these discussions, yet there are times when nothing is said of the corporate welfare provided to the established oil/gas industry..

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[bensafrickingenius]

"I'd like to know because it's so hard to compare with oil at that level. It's much easier for a consumer to simply look at the price on the pump. But that only tells us what the market is willing to bear (what the fuel is worth), not the true costs of production."

I *wish* that were true. The price of E85 (commonly called ethanol, even though almost all so-called "gasoline" has some percentage of ethanol in it too) has little to do with what the market will bear. If we could look at the prices at the pump and draw meaningful conclusions from them, then gasoline would win hands down, and the ethanol experiment would end without so much as a last gasp. In Chicago recently, gasoline was going for $3.60 per gallon, whereas E85 was at $3.06. Wow, gimme some of that ethanol, right?!?! Well, on a level playing field choosing E85 isn't so easy. While the price for a gallon of gasoline includes $0.4365 in taxes, the same gallon of E85 benefits from about $1.00 in subsidies (http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/07/1 4/opinion/guest/20-guest.txt)! Subsidies come from the government. Guess where the government gets the money it plays with? With that in mind, is it really so simple to look at the price on the pump and make your decision based on that? I'm not saying the whole ethanol project has no merit. I *am* saying that making ethanol from food is downright crazy. If making it from cellulose instead of sugar really drives up the efficiency that much, let's keep trying for a while. But let's do it with our eyes open to the true costs.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Vitriol Angst]

Yes, but we compare this to $3 to $4 per gallon.... ... that is the wrong number. Bobby Kennedy (a Liberal with a track record for doing his homework to provide accurate stats) says the real cost of Gasoline -- without subisidies is $13 a gallon. Much of that cost, is related to our military -- which seems designed to always spend more than is required.

The Iraq war can be figured as a subsidy for Gasoline -- the 7% from the Middle East. Since the #1 issue with our withdrawal has to do with production sharing agreements and, well, nothing else.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[bensafrickingenius]

Unfortunately, we can't use our existing pipeline infrastructure to transport ethanol: "Ethanol absorbs moisture. That's a benefit when ethanol is present in your car's fuel system, but it causes problems during pipeline transport. Pipelines contain moisture and deposits that are absorbed by ethanol, thus changing its state during transport. To this point, the volume of ethanol has not been large enough to justify change in the pipeline infrastructure that would eliminate those deposits. However, as MTBE is phased out and more ethanol is used, such improvements may occur." http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/main/economics.htm

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

The demand curve for gas is steep but not quite vertical as price goes up (at least in the short term as noted by GP). Hint in case you need it explained: Price is on the left vertical axis and demand is on bottom horizontal axis. As price rises along vertical axis, demand stays in the same place along the horizontal axis. Demand for gas is relatively inelastic in that the same limited quantity is going to be demanded regardless of price. In other words the demand curve is steep not flat.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Ex-MislTech]

Add in $12 billion a month for the cost of the middle east,
with the Iraq war.

Oil is not cheap, not with the current crap going on.

Don't tell me we are over their for humanity effort
as we let thousands die in Darfur.

Rwanda before that, and so on, and so on.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[mdsolar]

Corn is a pretty good source of carbohdrates. The touble is that when it produces the carbohydrates it also produces protein http://www.kallipolis.com/diet/food.php?id=11168&w =3. It is the protein that needs nitrogen. In fact, talking with Tom Simpson from UMD at a biofuels conference last May http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/juicing.html, I learned that you can wait to fertilize corn until the ears set on. This can save money and also help to preserve water quality, but you need some pretty tall machinery to deliver the fertilizer.
--
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Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[JonathanR]

Do you really think that Iraq was about oil for domestic consumption? Consider that the modus operandi is to bomb the bejesus out of a country, and then exploit the resources for the purposes of subisdising the costs of cleanup. US military adventures are the pinnacle of pork barreling. The military-industrial complex gets a complete work-out, Halliburton et al make a load on the cleanup contracts, and the US Government gets to justify its part of the expenditure on the back of some demonized dictator.

Sure, oil lubricates this system, but don't be deluded into thinking that they're out their to help fill your Hummer.

I don't think any allowance for military intervention is required. It's most likely an unrelated issue.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Knuckles]

you are still at 50:1 even on a bad day.

And then the internal combustion engines we use still have an efficiency of 20%. Pathetic, if you think about it.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now now.
He was going to type "ethanol", began to mistype it as "wethanol", mentally inverted the "w" and typed "methanol". A simple and completely accidental chain of events that led to a largely irrelevant side issue.

Anyhow, back to the topic. Why is the government subsidising gyllenhaal production, how is producing fuel from cellulite so much more efficient, and what impact will all this have on the price of Korn?

The public has a right to know!

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[haakondahl]

You are making Jerf's point. You disregarded his(?) caveats about isolating the market from other forces, and he explicitly said it would take some judicious lawmaking, but implied that it would likely never happen.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

Actually, typically people suggest research bias in the other direction. The US Department of Agriculture (I believe) put out the report that initially said the value of 1.3 for the energy content. The DOA is heavily invested in corn, so many people suggest that they would prefer a result that suggests increasing the amount of farming being done.

And yes, the necessity of liquid fuels is important. However, as you mention, it is not currently possible to derive most of the rest of the energy from stationary sources. For instance, it's extremely difficult to produce fertilizers from sunlight, or fuel a tractor with batteries charged from the grid. As long as you accept that fertilizers are made from oil, the suggestion put out is that you're better off just putting the oil in your car instead of losing 25% of it's energy content to convert it into ethanol.

However, if cellulosic ethanol has 13 times more energy that costs to produce it (which sounds extremely unlikely to me -- if anything, cellulose should be *harder* to convert than sugar, yes?), then you're all set, because you can use that ethanol to power your tractor, you can probably convert it into fertilizer (though I'm not sure how -- but at least it's got a carbon-carbon bond already), and then you've got a self-sustaining system.

Alternatively, yes, if you did things like use a solar collector to heat up your distillation system, you could easily save a lot of energy. If I recall correctly, distilling from 90% to 100% takes about 10% of the *total* energy put into making ethanol. Presumably, most of that energy is used in the form of heat, so it would be a particularly convenient place to increase that 1.3 (or whatever) value by 0.1.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[TapeCutter]

"Do you really think that Iraq was about oil for domestic consumption?"

Yes, since you need a domestic infrastructure to support the military that "protects" the oil supply. However in times of "real" war, oil would be rationed for all but the military.

"Sure, oil lubricates this system, but don't be deluded into thinking that they're out their to help fill your Hummer."

Oil supply is essential to a modern military, the allies discovered this toward the end of WW2 when they started focusing their air-raids on Germany's refineries to such an extent that that Hitlers grounded air-force was a sitting duck. Nothing has changed, controling the oil supply still gives you the ability to control "everything".

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Usquebaugh]

No,

        it'd be $11.42/gallon.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[misleb]

It isn't about monetary value at all anyway. It's about corn being a poor source of material for producing ethanol because it is low in sugar.

Compared to what? Can't be too poor of a source if it is used to sweeten a good portion of the foods we eat. High Fructose *Corn* Syrup, anyone?

-matthew

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[calcapt]

Sugar cane isn't just a good source because it has a higher sugar content; the bagasse that's left over from pressing the cane is burnt to fuel part of the ethanol conversion process, making it more energy efficient than corn. The result is a 8:1 energy ratio. 8 units out, 1 unit in.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

'This type of ethanol works great in places like Brazil because they make it out of sugar cane'

If we didn't have ridiculous subsidies in place to allow american sugar plantations to compete we would pay the real price for sugar and could probably do the same.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

'Why not charge military expenses to the existence of religious insanity?'

Religious insanity is the farse being used to justify a war that really has nothing to do with religious fanatics and everything to with oil.

'Why not add the cost of building roads to the price of oil?'

Because roads are more appropriately added to the cost of using rubber tires. Regardless of what type of fuel we use we will need to use roads until we come up with a solution that is superior to rubber tires.

'How about the cost of educating future oil company employees'

The market takes care of this. Oil companies have to pay those employees based upon supply and demand, if that doesn't amount to enough to pay for their education then Oil comapanies will have to adjust their pay scales.

'or feeding them until they join the oil company'

Somehow I think they would be eating regardless of what field they went into.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[dman123]

Pimentel and Patzek are well respected? Maybe in the petro and bug worlds, but in the biofuel world? Hardly. They are well known for self-referential justification of their "facts" and citing old data (again, usually their own papers from long ago). All you have to do is read this paper http://www.ncga.com/public_policy/issues/2001/etha nol/08_22_01b.htm by Michael Graboski: Research Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Colorado School of Mines. And that's a kind review of Pimentel/Patzek. It's #1 if you google 'Pimentel ethanol'

Keep googling and you can find more about their dislike of biodiesel and any other non-biomass biofuel. Like this one http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/pressreleases/g en/20050721_pimentel_response.pdf about biodiesel. Is the source of the rebuttal (the National Biodiesel Board) biased? Read the reasoning behind the disagreement with Pimentel/Patzek and make up your own mind.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

'which is made from atmospheric N2 + H2 from fossil fuel sources (mostly natural gas, but also oil and coal to some extent)'

That would seem relevant until you realize that we can readily derive ammonium nitrate from renewable sources, including urine.

Ammonium nitrate also isn't the cheapest source of nitrogen available to farmers. It isn't used nearly as widely as it was a decade ago. Something to do with making fertilizers bombs.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[evanbd]

The fertilizer bombs haven't made it any less available. AIUI, the decline is more connected to rising use of anhydrous ammonia (which is cheaper). H2 can certainly be made from renewable sources, but making it from biomass would be much cheaper than urine.

The reason it's relevant is twofold: right now, it's made with fossil fuels, though that could change in the future. And secondly, it's an energy cost that has to be accounted for in determining whether the biofuel is energy positive and by how much. The 1.3 number (or whatever other number you come up with) doesn't care what the input energy source is.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, if cellulosic ethanol has 13 times more energy that costs to produce it (which sounds extremely unlikely to me -- if anything, cellulose should be *harder* to convert than sugar, yes?)

Well, no. I don't know the specific process they are using but that is not necessarily true. Turning sugar into alcohol is an enzymatic process, which is efficient and selective, but that only works when there is a sufficient amount of water. Basically it is some ethanol in a lot of water, after the process. Distilling water off of a water-ethanol mixture is very costly. In contrast, cellulosic ethanol is (probably) based on a cracking process. It is neither be very efficient nor very selective, but the product is easier to purify as it does not need to have a huge amount of water in it.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[timmarhy]

if you think employment is a free market, your delousional.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bobby Kennedy (a Liberal with a track record for doing his homework to provide accurate stats) says the real cost of Gasoline -- without subisidies is $13 a gallon.

Wow. Bobby Kennedy was killed 40 years ago. if unsubsidized gas was $13/gal then, imagine how much it would cost now!

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

if you think a free market is something other than the wealthy screwing the poor it is you who is delusional.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[JSchoeck]

Just to clarify:

Ethanol is CH3CH2OH, which is "regular" alcohol found in such beverages as beer, wine, etc.

Methanol is CH3OH, also an alcohol chemically, and will convert into formic acid in a human's metabolism, destroying the vision nerves.

So mixing up ethanol and methanol is a very big issue. BTW: If you happen to dring methanol accidentally you have to drink quite a big amount of ethanol since it is processed preferentially by the metabolism and will block the conversion of methanol to formic acid. No, this is not a joke.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[SEE]

Corn is only high in sugar compared to other crops that can be grown in mass quantities in the continental U.S. The only reason your food is sweetened with HFCS are trade barriers and tariffs approximately double the price of sugar -- barriers that persist mostly as a result of corn lobby demands.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

'The fertilizer bombs haven't made it any less available.'

It can still be had but you are crazy if you think its not less available.

'the decline is more connected to rising use of anhydrous ammonia (which is cheaper).'

Because of the increased regulation of Ammonium Nitrate.

'right now, it's made with fossil fuels, though that could change in the future.'

There is nothing wrong with using fossil fuels in and of itself. If using fossil fuels is cheaper then have at it. So long as the fertilizer can be cheaply made from renewable sources with existing technology the resulting crops remain a realistic renewable choice.

'it's an energy cost that has to be accounted for in determining whether the biofuel is energy positive and by how much'

If you mean the energy required to produce the fertilizer you are correct. The actual energy stored in the fertilizer becomes part of the energy stored in the plant mass. Particularly nitrogen fertilizer since if I remember correctly it converts entirely into plant mass without byproducts. Actually, the only byproduct of plant growth that I know of is oxygen. Conviently, oxygen is also a form of stored energy that is useful to humans.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Quiet_Desperation]

And really, how far back does it go

If you put it that way, all the way, I guess.

Production of one gallon of ethanol = the total energy of the Big Bang.

Q.E.D.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[nospam007]

Methanol is CH3OH, also an alcohol chemically, and will convert into formic acid in a human's metabolism, destroying the vision nerves.
---
So essentially drinking from your gas tank is still a no-no?
I'm relieved.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[jez9999]

Pipelines contain moisture and deposits that are absorbed by ethanol, thus changing its state during transport.

Wouldn't that only affect the first lot of ethanol pumped? Once it was being pumped constantly, there wouldn't be any moisture/deposits because they'd all been absorbed?

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[timmarhy]

free market isn't the answer to everything it's true. but in many cases people like you blame capitalism for fuck ups which are actually caused by government regulation.

there's so many conditions and laws on employment, it's no where near a free market.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[fastest fascist]

A free market is one where every transaction is entirely voluntary, and conducted between equal parties, neither of which has privileges that give them an edge over the other trading party. No system that results in "the wealthy screwing the poor" can be a free market.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[computer_chacham]

oil, which would be $13/gallon or more if we started charging the oil companies for our military services. How do you figure? The U.S uses something like 300 billion gallons of oil a year; at best you can say the oil companies owe a buck a gallon or less.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Firethorn]

Religious insanity is the farse being used to justify a war that really has nothing to do with religious fanatics and everything to with oil.

That's funny, seeing as how we're waging the war in a mannor completely unsuited towards keeping oil supplies up. We could have done that with orders of magnitude less money. Or just relaxed sanctions against Saddam.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Biofuels will server one purpose in the future: Legacy Support.

Bio-oils will have a place in lubrication.

The actual energy source of the future will be nuclear. Why? Because biofuels could not sustain current energy consumption, let alone sustain a non recessionary economy. The energy profit of biofuel production is piddling. Along with every other renewable "energy source".

Energy is only one concern we have to look forward to as a result of overpopulation however, and what we really need is big fucking piles of bodies.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Firethorn]

It'd affect quite a lot of it for quite a while, as there's loads of crud built up. Some piping networks are multipurpose(they'll ship multiple fuel types through them), so it'd affect the first portion of any ethanol shipment, resulting in more waste.

Essentially we'll have to build a new piping network for it.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[bhtooefr]

/me facepalms...

We're talking about ethanol here. No M.

Methanol destroys your vision and kills you. Ethanol doesn't (well, it destroys your liver if you drink too much of it, but...)

However, because in the US, fuel ethanol is blended with 15% gasoline normally, and even when it isn't, it's denatured so it tastes NASTY, drinking your fuel is still a no-no.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[rbanffy]

"There's no need to be snide over a typo"

So, you are trying to tell us you precisely mistyped an "m" between tho "e"s (quite far from the "m") and a spacebar (closer to the "m" but usually activated by a different finger), forming the word "methanol" instead of "ethanol", and thus making us all believe you don't know the difference between them.

We are sorry to underestimate your knowledge on the subject in such an unfair way.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[daem0n1x]

If our politicians were just cold calculators, they might think that way. But most of the times, they are just plain stupid.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[deimtee]

That's funny, seeing as how we're waging the war in a manner completely unsuited towards keeping oil supplies up. We could have done that with orders of magnitude less money.

Nobody wants to get oil out of Iraq. The whole point is to REDUCE the supply so as to drive up the price for all the oil from elsewhere.
If they were making a profit at $30 a barrel, how well are they doing when they can push the price to $60 or $90 or $120 with no increase in processing costs?

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[rbanffy]

"Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us"

Right now and until your current president steps down, it means just about every country. I can separate a really bad presidency from a so-so people I happen to like, but most people around the globe can't, won't or are politically manipulated not to do so.

On the bright side, things are likely to improve. As lousy as a next presidency can be, it can't possibly be worse than the current one (or I will be sadly disappointed on you, people). As about half mankind grew up watching the current one, anything seems destined to look better.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Firethorn]

which sounds extremely unlikely to me -- if anything, cellulose should be *harder* to convert than sugar, yes?

Yes, it's harder, in the sense that it's more expensive per gallon produced. However, it's not actually that more energy intensive - most of the work is done via enzymes, which is the big reason for the additional expense at this time.

On the other hand - you go from only being able to convert the sugars/starches*, which in a corn plant is pretty much the kernels. Go to a cellulose process, and suddenly you can process pretty much the entire plant - stalk, leaves, ear, etc... You're also not limited to sugar/starch producing plants. You can convert wood(this plant), grass, hemp**, pretty much any plant mass that's currently considered waste.

If I remember right, it also has some energy benefits in that it requires less heating.

*Ethanol production facilities actually prefer high starch corns over high sugar ones, more energy per bushel.
**For that crowd...

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[rbanffy]

IIRC, there is some questioning going on about the pollution generated by nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. Truly nasty stuff comes out from them.

So, unless we are talking about nuclear fusion, we still have problems. Different ones, perhaps. Less immediate ones, certainly, but still quite a few of them.

But I agree on something: bio-fuels are more on the carbon neutral side (no more increases in atmospheric CO2), but we really need carbon-negative power sources if we are to undo the mistakes we have been doing since some fellow had the bright idea of burning fossil fuels. Maybe we should start burying huge amounts of waste carbon to make it unlikely it gets back to the atmosphere anytime in the next million years.

And it's not like "it's economically unfeasible" when it comes to the survival of our species.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[indifferent children]

Oil supply is essential to a modern military

Which is why a true conservative, concerned more about America's security than about corporate profits, would oppose drilling in the ANWR. The ANWR is our true strategic reserve, and will keep us from being out-gunned by the last country to have any oil.

Even putting drilling equipment in place would threaten our national security, since some pissant will turn the tap to solve a "short term" crisis (like his own electability). After peak oil is undeniable, and the value of the ANWR as a strategic resource is univerally recognized, we can put the infrastructure in place.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

"it means just about every country"

God what the fuck is wrong with idiots who say this?

NO THE WORLD DOES NOT HATE US. I travel worldwide and every time I see some fucking jackass spew this garbage it makes me ill.

Shut up moron, you don't know what you're talking about.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[MobyDisk]

I can't answer you completely, but I can give hints.

• The energy density of petroleum is about 45MJ
• The energy densite of ethanol is about 23MJ
• There's a Wikipedia article on fuel energy balance which cites a figure of 1.24 for ethanol, and has links to various PDFs
• Lastly, try the library back issues of Scientific American for 2007. I just threw away a stash, and one of them covers the production of ethanol from start to finish, and talks about how tight the net energy gain is, and how subsidies are skewing it. It might have a comparison to oil, but I don't remember

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[rbanffy]

So, products imported from any theocracy should be taxed, say, 500%.

Better yet, there should be a table all countries should agree upon with cumulative taxations for multiple violations.

Theocracy: 500%
Other less-than-democratic regime: 200%
Waging wars of aggression: 200%
Genocide and other atrocities: 150%
Other human-rights violations (including health issues): 100%
Lack of effective freedom of press: 100%
Other violations of civil liberties: 100%
Bad distribution of wealth: 75%
Having the same president for two consecutive terms: 50%

I like the idea. ;-)

And, BTW, I hate not being able to build a table here.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[BVis]

Gee, with an attitude like that, it becomes more and more clear why the US is so disliked.

Congratulations on proving the exact point you were arguing against. Asshole.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[try_anything]

I doubt the people behind the adventure in Iraq are so patriotic. I'm sure the politicians and their advisors justify it to themselves in terms of US oil security, but the powerful people who are in a position to provide incentives to those politicians are interested in profits. What really matters is that a few companies (some of which, like Shell, aren't really American) get to run the oil business in Iraq -- infrastructure, extraction, processing, and sale -- with as little money as possible remaining in Iraq. It doesn't matter where the oil goes after that.

Whatever lowers oil prices (for the entire world) is good for the US (no matter how much it costs us) -- a terrible rationalization for being in bed with the oil lobby.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[rbanffy]

Careful. You are mixing fuel with fertilizer in the same post. Please do not smoke next to it.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[marcosdumay]

"f it were just about the monetary cost of things even corn ethanol wins over oil, which would be $13/gallon or more if we started charging the oil companies for our military services."

But remember that fuel is an input to ethanol. And because corn ethanol has a low energy return, that means it needs a lot of fuel to produce, its price will go up acordingly.

Of course, it won't rise as much as oil, just some 1/1.3 = 77% of the oil raise (discounting inflation, that of course will affect both).

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[CaptnMArk]

To anyone that has ever sucked on hose to start the gasoline flow, this seems dangerous.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

A true free market is akin to anarchy in the economic world. After all, that is what anarchy is, a lack of regulation. The results are the same, the strong utilize their power to exploit the weak. Because they are strong, the only ones they must placate are those who are also strong. The weak take what terms they are given because they have no choice.

Since we are talking about an economy, the strong is the wealthy. It's beside the point but before someone points out strength and wealth being the same thing I would like to remind them of feudal europe. The strong (the lords) could take the wealth of merchants at will.

'there's so many conditions and laws on employment, it's no where near a free market'

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Employment isn't entirely a free market now but it used to be. The cold and cruel conditions that killed workers left and right while failing to pay them a livable wage are the reason employment is regulated now.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

'and conducted between equal parties'

Bzzt you just failed. A free market is a market with no government regulation or intervention. Economically speaking everyone starts equal (in a mythical free market world, in the real world some are born rich, others are born poor) but the moment someone is able to manipulate the market in a way that gives them more wealth than others they wield more economic power.

A free market is economic anarchy. The natural result is the strong (wealthy) exploiting the weak (the other 99%). As someone else pointed out, we technically don't have a free market anymore. I would like to remind those people that we don't have any anarchies anymore either.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[djh101010]

"Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us"

Right now and until your current president steps down, it means just about every country. I can separate a really bad presidency from a so-so people I happen to like, but most people around the globe can't, won't or are politically manipulated not to do so.
If you think that until Bush was in office, the muslim countries didn't hate us, then your lack of history knowledge is astonishing. Also, senators on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq (yes I can provide links, so can you with google). Blaming other countries hating us on Bush for the war, or on Bush in general, is inaccurate and oversimplifying the situation.

On the bright side, things are likely to improve. As lousy as a next presidency can be, it can't possibly be worse than the current one (or I will be sadly disappointed on you, people). As about half mankind grew up watching the current one, anything seems destined to look better.
Right. "Do something! Anything!" in other words. Sorry, but getting the wrong idiot in there could easily be worse than what we have now. Fred Thompson is probably the best candidate, and he's not even running (yet - if ever). The crop of idiots who are running, on either side of the aisle, there's not a one who interests me at this point.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[cduffy]

Some people have at least a moderate tendency to think and type in letter groups associated with sounds, which can lead to inadvertent errors which would be improbable in association with pure finger-slips (as opposed to invocation of muscle memory for similar-sounding but differently spelled phrases). I think it is reasonable to characterize these inadvertent errors as "typos" so long as the generated text does not reflect the thought process of the author while said text was being written. (Unusual keyboard layouts are also not necessarily as unusual as you might think -- though the "m" and the "e" are still a good distance away from each other even on Dvorak, there nonetheless are far more layouts than QWERTY in common use).

From my perspective as an uninvolved 3rd party, you're the ass in this thread.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[RancidBeef]

This is also how they treat the ingestion of ethylene glycol (anti-freeze). The ethylene glycol itself isn't toxic, but is converted into a toxin by the liver, which, if I remember correctly, plugs up the kidneys and causes kidney failure. You keep the patient drunk until the ethylene glycol passes from the body unconverted.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[fastest fascist]

And, I would contend, the moment someone is able to manipulate the market in a way that gives them more wealth than others, the market ceases to be free. It's not unthinkable that a free market is, simply put, impossible to have.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[djh101010]

Some people have at least a moderate tendency to think and type in letter groups associated with sounds, which can lead to inadvertent errors which would be improbable in association with pure finger-slips (as opposed to invocation of muscle memory for similar-sounding but differently spelled phrases). I think it is reasonable to characterize these inadvertent errors as "typos" I've heard these described as "brainos", which I think is a more accurate description. But whatever.

so long as the generated text does not reflect the thought process of the author while said text was being written. (Unusual keyboard layouts are also not necessarily as unusual as you might think -- though the "m" and the "e" are still a good distance away from each other even on Dvorak, there nonetheless are far more layouts than QWERTY in common use).
But again, this is the use of one word where the other meant something entirely different. And as I said, IF the reason for saying one when we were talking about the other is that they didn't know enough about the issue to know it's an entirely different chemical, THEN any advice they had to share on the issue would be of limited use at best. IF the reason for the error was to try to intentionally obfuscate the matter at hand, THEN even more reason the answer is suspect. However, if it was simply a briano, then the rest of my post becomes the central point, which is "So what if we're subsitizing? Good - we should be subsidizing it, even more." Or words to that effect.

From my perspective as an uninvolved 3rd party, you're the ass in this thread.
(shrug) OK, fine, point is, guy wasn't clear on what he was talking about, I asked a clarifying question AND made the point that the thing he was most likely arguing against is, seems to me, a good thing. So I addressed both his error and his presumed point. I didn't make a federal case over the methanol/ethanol "typo", I pointed it out and went on with the subtopic as if he meant ethanol (which he did). Thanks for your input but, sorry, did you want to talk about subsidizing biofuels grown in this country vs paying money for dino-fuels to countries who hate us?

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[evanbd]

It can still be had but you are crazy if you think its not less available.

I've heard this repeatedly but I never hear anything to back it up. I've bought ammonium nitrate fertilizer post-9/11. 50 lb bags, $8/bag. I paid cash and didn't show ID. The purchase went something like this: I arrive in my decidedly-not-a-farm-vehicle sedan, with my typical geek pony tail. "You guys carry ammonium nitrate?" "Yep. $8 a bag." "OK then. Can I get two bags?" "You can get two tons if you want. Right this way."

Of course, fertilizer grade and bomb grade aren't the same thing -- the fertilizer is processed so as to make it more difficult to use in a bomb. I think it mostly has to do with how the prills are formed. I think in the UK it's adulterated with ammonium sulfate, which makes it harder to detonate.

Oh, and the anhydrous ammonia isn't exactly free of regulation -- the DEA cares about that one, because it can be used in methamphetamine and MDA production.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Kidbro]

"Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us"

Right now and until your current president steps down, it means just about every country

If you think that until Bush was in office, the muslim countries didn't hate us, then your lack of history knowledge is astonishing.

The "muslim countries" may be influential, but they're not the entire world. GP is spot on. Before the Bushes, some countries hated the US. Now all of them do, including your old friends.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

'That's funny, seeing as how we're waging the war in a mannor completely unsuited towards keeping oil supplies up.'

Who said anything about keeping oil supplies up? You seem to have this crazy idea if the war is about oil its about protecting the interests of america in oil. The war isn't to let you keep your SUV. The war is for the benefit of the oil companies not the consumer.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[misleb]

Corn is only high in sugar compared to other crops that can be grown in mass quantities in the continental U.S.

So it makes sense that corn is used for ethanol in the continental US. What's the problem?

he only reason your food is sweetened with HFCS are trade barriers and tariffs approximately double the price of sugar -- barriers that persist mostly as a result of corn lobby demands.

The only reason? HFCS has desirable qualities for food producers/processors (I try to avoid the stuff, personally)

-matthew

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[shaitand]

'I've heard this repeatedly but I never hear anything to back it up. I've bought ammonium nitrate fertilizer post-9/11. 50 lb bags, $8/bag.'

That's the 'it can be had' part. There just isn't as much of it and you can't find it everywhere now. Largely it just depends on where you are. If you are in a community with a small local outfit that chooses to carry it anyway you'll find it. If they have a good relation with a supplier you'll get it cheap. Where it is available people use LOTS of it.

If you are in a town where a corporate chain has put the local outfit out of business; say a home depot, lowes, walmart, etc. You won't find ammonium nitrate anymore. You used to be able to buy those $50/lb bags on the cheap anywhere. Now it is limited to a few small rural outlets and those are becoming more and more scarce every day.

'Of course, fertilizer grade and bomb grade aren't the same thing -- the fertilizer is processed so as to make it more difficult to use in a bomb. I think it mostly has to do with how the prills are formed.'

Yes, it has to be ground fine and the moisture removed with alcohol washes to use in explosives manufacture. While powerful, most explosives made with ammonium nitrate are very stable and it actually takes a strong blasting cap to make it pop. By all means, refer to improvised C-4 books to learn more about this fun hobby.

'Oh, and the anhydrous ammonia isn't exactly free of regulation -- the DEA cares about that one, because it can be used in methamphetamine and MDA production.'

Yeah. When I say regulated I am talking about the manufacture and sale. The DEA isn't really hassling the distribution chain, they are monitoring the end purchasers. Buy the wrong combination of crap and you'll be harassed with a DEA raid. Nevermind that for every meth 'lab' (read kid in his basement with a nose ring, not scientist with a white coat) they raid there are several dozen innocent people who just bought the wrong stuff raided.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[rtechie]

It's not about cost, it's about that mythical 1.3 conversion number that we get from the ethanol industry. I don't buy it. Not for corn, not for sugar. Independent analysts (employing common sense and basic physics) realize that we will always see a net loss. It's even arguable whether or not ethanol fuel will result in less net pollution because alcohol is so much less efficient than gasoline.

The choice is not between oil and ethanol, but between oil and nuclear. We have to cope with the fact that our domestic and global energy needs aren't going down, they're going up dramatically. So far, nuclear is the only system we've developed to which provides energy efficiency comparable to fossil fuels. Maybe in the distant future we will have more efficient solar systems and there is always hot fusion. But RIGHT NOW, nuclear seems the way to go.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[cduffy]

I've heard these described as "brainos", which I think is a more accurate description.

I agree that that's a better description. My point is that you tried to paint your opponent as either unknowledgeable or intellectually dishonest based on this thinko, which seemed a bit over-the-top -- and looking over your posts so far in the thread, I'm finding much less signal than noise thus far. In any event...

[D]id you want to talk about subsidizing biofuels grown in this country vs paying money for dino-fuels to countries who hate us?

Not so much; my position is well-formed, and I don't think there's much point to getting involved in discussions where I'll just be reiterating it (and probably not changing it much, unless someone who knows considerably more about the topic chimes in). In short, biofuels are a Darned Good Thing, but we're going about it wrong -- and putting enough money into that misguided approach that we're getting a huge amount of physical and political infrastructure built which will need to be reworked (at great difficulty and expense) to take a more optimal approach in the future -- not entirely unlike our failure to use the best available nuclear reactor designs, despite the production of waste which could be reused were we using modern breeder reactors. Brazil has a good thing going on due to their use of sugar, but if that's not going to fly here for various reasons I'd prefer putting money into the R&D necessary for large-scale algae-based biofuel production; since algae can be grown (extremely quickly and cheaply) using land unsuitable for food crops (and just about anything makes more sense than corn from an efficiency perspective), it makes massively more sense as an eventual direction than other approaches taken thus far.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[djh101010]

If you think that until Bush was in office, the muslim countries didn't hate us, then your lack of history knowledge is astonishing.

The "muslim countries" may be influential, but they're not the entire world. GP is spot on. Before the Bushes, some countries hated the US. Now all of them do, including your old friends.

Sure, that happens. And then next time country (x) invades country (y), country (y) will be all wanting us to help again, and complaining we didn't come in quickly enough. It happens every 50 years or so, seems to be overdue by a decade or two. And we'll go in, save some ungrateful country's ass yet again, so they can spit on us. (shrug). I'd also like to know where you get this "all" from - seems like one of those statements which is a generalization with few facts to back it up. Point remains, blaming Bush for the Iraq war ignores the fact that most of the Democrats in congress also voted to authorize the use of force, and are now suffering an apparently crippling loss of memory in that regard, pretending they didn't. If you're gonna blame Bush, you better blame all those Democrats too...many of whom were talking about the need to stop SH _long_ before (this) Bush was in office.

But, perception is reality, right? So if people who don't get all the facts, and choose to blame only Bush for the actions of the entire legislative _and_ executive branch, well, they can hate the entire country out of ignorance, there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. But, if someone hates you because they don't get the facts, does it matter?

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[djh101010]

It's not about cost, it's about that mythical 1.3 conversion number that we get from the ethanol industry. I don't buy it. Not for corn, not for sugar. Independent analysts (employing common sense and basic physics) realize that we will always see a net loss. It's even arguable whether or not ethanol fuel will result in less net pollution because alcohol is so much less efficient than gasoline.
The thing is, to the consumer, price at the pump is what they are going to decide on. Hidden subsidy costs are just that, hidden. Do you count the cost of military activities in oil-rich countries in the cost? Maybe, but you don't see that cost at the pump. Or maybe we do. But at the end of the day, if I can get to work for 5 bucks a day instead of 6, I'll go with the apparently cheaper solution.

The choice is not between oil and ethanol, but between oil and nuclear. We have to cope with the fact that our domestic and global energy needs aren't going down, they're going up dramatically. So far, nuclear is the only system we've developed to which provides energy efficiency comparable to fossil fuels. Maybe in the distant future we will have more efficient solar systems and there is always hot fusion. But RIGHT NOW, nuclear seems the way to go.
Absolutely. I think it's criminal that the US hasn't built a new nuke plant in decades. It amazes me that people who pretend to be environmentalists buy into, and sometimes help spread the FUD around nuclear power. NO, Chernobyl can't happen here, for at least the following several solid reasons (insert reasons here), but, they start quoting that and 30 year old movies and the non-event of Three Mile Island for why we shouldn't be using more nuke power. It's really disheartening to see someone who claims to be an environmentalist, but who fights against the obvious solution to the problem.

That said, it won't help me today with my existing car, or any car I'm likely to buy in the forseeable future. Until plugins are ready for a 100 mile per day round trip, they won't do me any good. But, once they are, I'll be all over it.

Someone, maybe you, mentioned that biofuels are really for legacy support. That's a good way to put it. Today's cars and distribution networks/systems are set up for liquid delivery. Here's a progression that to me, makes sense:

1. (today) Mostly dino-fuels, small amount of bio
2. Increase biofuels using same infrastructure, distributions, and vehicles.
3. Add hydrogen (if viable) vehicles and fueling stations to existing
infrastructures. This allows people to drive to the same businesses which are currently selling them gas/diesel, this just adds a third option. But, it can come from existing power systems (using carbon-based fuels), or:
4. Nuclear-based generation of Hydrogen for vehicles, providing a fuel source and emissions free of carbon.

Each of these steps is an incremental change from where we are today. Social inertia being what it is, jumping from step 1 all the way to step 4 is too much for the masses to understand/accept/adopt. But I think step 4, in some form, is where we want to end up. Let's do it in such a way that we don't break the existing modes, or diverge too far from them all at once.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Fordiman]

Corn is actually quite low in sugar per unit plant mass - but we make a LOT of it.

For ethanol production, we actually *malt* corn to get some sugar out of its more starchy bits.

Still, not the point; corn stalks and husks are an otherwise unused resource that, given a good method of converting cellulose to ethanol (or butanol, for that matter), is capable of turning a waste stream into a fuel stream without affecting food supply.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Sandbags]

Actually, the 1.3:1 ratio doesn't take harvesting into account. The fuel used per hectare is not really that relevant compared to the energy created. We're talking small percentages. What's more of a concern is energy per acre per year...

That said, corn is FAR from an ideal source for how we make ethanol today (think moonshine, the process is very similar). Corn is difficult to harvest (special equipment, lots of time, susceptible to disease and insects and drought and flood, requires massive amounts of fertilizer, can't be planted year after year in the same field without even more fertilizers, and you only get 1 crop per year.

Sugar Beets are close to the best thing we can make ethanol (using traditional methods) out of. It's practically a weed that grows like potatoes. It's easy to harvest, has significant higher energy yield per crop, is practically immune to most bugs (because it grown under the soil), requires little fertilization, and is much heartier. Besides, 90% of the plant can be used for ethanol, as opposed to Corn's approx 20%. In many places, 2 crops per year can be grown, yielding between 4 and 8 times the ethanol per acre. On top of that, it's a plant and forget crop, unlike corn which requires significant routine effort. Sugar beets also do not leech soil provided a simple and common fertilizer is used. The sugar beets convert to ethanol at about 2:1 compared to corn's 1.3:1.

Going cellulostic is a completely different way to make ethanol, not a different material. This is an enzymatic process that converts plant material directly into ethanol, without the heating and brewing processes (or the eminent potential for dangerous explosions if not managed properly). It has an extremely high energy output, but unfortunately the current methods for making it are expensive. Science can drastically improve this over time.

The fact that they've chosen WOOD as the media to convert simply shows (again) how industry and the government control this process. Wood is a BAD choice for this process. It's packed with energy, sure, but the process is slower and more difficult than other materials, not to mention WOOD GROWS SLOWLY, COSTS A LOT, AND IS IN SHORT SUPPLY!!! Want to know a perfect material for this process? Think Kudzu! Most weeds make a good medium for cellulostic crops. Wood takes 20-30 years per crop to mature and require expensive and dangerous harvesting methods. Without wiping out almost every acre of natural forest, we also can't make enough wood. We can get the same cellulostic mass from existing, unused cropland (like all those acres being paid not to plant tobacco) in 10 years or less using equipment every farmer already owns. Why go against that? Money, not science is surely a factor.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Fordiman]

The issue with gasoline isn't production efficiency, but sustainability.

That 50-100:1 ratio is based on ignoring how the stuff was generated in the first place: ie, biomass formation, and its subsequent breakdown in a geothermal prison.

Yes, I know, natural energy resources get a pass. But the point is how *long* it takes for those natural processes to generate petrol. It's a lot less time than it takes us to drill, process, and ultimately burn it.

Still, with the cellulostic promise of meeting that 100:1 ratio (and the potential for butanol to break right through it), I only have one regret in our energy history.

I'm going to miss Irish Peet when we run out. That stuff smells unlike any other form of lignite.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[AndersOSU]

Yeah, but FTFA, there's this

Unfortunately, it's still more expensive than sugar ethanol (and gasoline) to create

Which is really the bit that matters. Maybe the cost of cellulosic EtOH will keep coming down, and the cost of gasoline will keep going up, but as long as we're talking about converting plant matter to fuel the economics looks like this biodiesel> sugar EtOH > cellulosic EtOH.

For you chemistry buffs here's why:
All plants contain triglyceride, some (like algae and soy, and rapeseed contain lots of it) going from triglyceride to biodiesel looks like this: RCOO-CH2CH(-OOCR)CH2-OOCR -> 3RCOOEt

Sugar to EtOH looks like this: C6H12O6->CH3CH2OH

Now can someone spot why this one is different? Cellulose -> EtOH: (C6H10O5)n -> CH3CH2OH

That little n makes all the difference. It is much harder (read expensive, energy intensive, and/or sensitive) to make a polysaccharide into an alcohol than it is to make either a sugar into an alcohol or a triglyceride into an oil, which is precisely why we've known how to make oil from seed and alcohol from sugar for centuries, whereas we've just figured that maybe we can get something out of the chaff we've been throwing away forever. Sometimes its best to KISS, I am of the opinion we'd be better off just burning the cellulose to produce electricity.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[edunbar93]

Why not add the cost of building roads to the price of oil?

We do that up here in Canada. But nevermind that. We're crazy.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[TapeCutter]

"It doesn't matter where the oil goes after that."

Don't kid yourself, it goes to their friends first (like the friendly military that supports them).

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[hobs314]

The energy balance isn't particularly meaningful anyway, and pays no attention to the kind of energy used (electricity vs oil for example). And it is useful to note that the energy balance for gasoline is quite negative. But if you would like to know, you can look at the EPA's rule making for the Renewable Fuel Standard http://www.epa.gov/otaq/renewablefuels/ Or this paper http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/30/11 206 published in the proceedings of the national academy of science is also a credible source. These are all fairly comprehensive and fairly consistent with the 1.3 to 1.0 ratio. Costs are probably the best measure actually, (if we properly account for government subsidies and externality costs such as environmental or otherwise). Most credible estimates find that externality costs very roughly equal government subsides, so actually they cancel each other out.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Kidbro]

And then next time country (x) invades country (y), country (y) will be all wanting us to help again, and complaining we didn't come in quickly enough. It happens every 50 years or so, seems to be overdue by a decade or two.

The thing is that up until the eighties, USA was rather popular with large parts of the world. Not all of it, but large parts of it. Only in small part due to military action during the World Wars. This is something that has changed in the last twenty years.

I'd also like to know where you get this "all" from - seems like one of those statements which is a generalization with few facts to back it up.

Hate is a very general term, so of course it's a generalization. On top of that, countries are abstract constructs and incapable of hating, so the entire discussion is pointless, hmm?
What I have noticed though, is that people I speak to, pretty much wherever they come from, express very negative opinions about the USA nowadays. Granted, my sample is primarily from the "western" world (Europe, Australia, South Africa, Canada), but there's a few from "the far east" (Japan, South Korea, India) and South America. Admittedly, I have only had words with one single person from the middle east (Lebanon) so that sample is rather poor. OTOH, it was already established earlier in this thread that the hate had always been present in those parts of the world.
However, if you take my lack of "evidence" as an indication that there has not been a major shift in world opinion about the USA over the last decades, I believe you are making a very grave mistake.

So if people who don't get all the facts, and choose to blame only Bush for the actions of the entire legislative _and_ executive branch, well, they can hate the entire country out of ignorance, there's nothing anyone can do to stop them.

Oh, please. You can't expect people to have a deep insight into the political parties and branches of government of a country just in order to have an opinion about it? How well do you know the political parties and branches of government of the 193 other countries in the world? Ever had an opinion about any one of these countries?
I think you overestimate how much people care about Bush. He sure is a criminal, and ought to be put in jail, but nobody ever suggested he's the only one. What he is though, is your chief of state, and thus the main representative of your country towards the rest of the world. Part of the job description of representing something is that you're the one to take the blame when whatever you're representing does something wrong.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[sawdey]

For those who are google-impaired, here's one source:

http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/net_energy_ balance.pdf

From the table on page 5 ... the energy output is 1.02 to 1.10 times the input if you only look at ethanol.

Here's another:

http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/aer-814.pdf

This one's conclusions have 1.34 as the ratio.

Corn is not the problem, converting corn sugar into ethanol. That's where 2/3 of the energy used goes.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Vitriol Angst]

Goes by Robert and Bobby.

Has a weekly show on Saturdays called "Ring of Fire." The Kennedys tend to repeat a lot of first names. And due to their honesty and courage, tend to be REALLY unlucky.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Vitriol Angst]

It's the oil.

Domestic consumption isn't necessary.

The US is merely a "home base" for multinational corporations who use our military to force adoption of their companies in various countries. You can look at how they are trying to get ANWR oil reserves -- which I believe are high sulfur content, so it would be an export.

Many multinationals don't pay taxes in the US. It's very easy to never show a profit if you can buy a Widget for outrageous amounts from your subsidiary in some off-shore tax haven. So our politicos have been bribed to look the other way, as the middle class gets squeezed. When the poop hits the fan -- much like Germany in WW I, I'm sure these carpet baggers will be running the same scam in another country they allow to prosper for a while before they harvest. You can just look how Prescott Bush was playing both sides in WW II as he bankrolled Buckenwald. Patriotism is just a scam for the unwashed.

Most of the Carlysle Groups companies, including KBR and Haliburton, are in Dubai. It really is an international concern, and I doubt it gives a crap about the US economy. Everything this government has done has been to reduce the Middle Class, and help multinationals. If we attack Iran, for instance, Big Oil and Russia will prosper. The US will be personna non grata around the world. What did Putin talk to Bush about in Crawford? How about; America plays "bad cop" for a while, and you can increase your iron grip on Russia by building up your military do defend yourself. Bush and Putin are really kindred spirits -- but Bush is a better actor. He cracks himself up with that Texas drawl coming from Connecticut. The guy didn't see a farm until after college -- so you tell me who Bush really is. Putting up that anti-missile system is just a boondoggle for profit -- that tech doesn't work, and I'm sure Putin knows it. If there were real animosity, I could understand his concern about more US bases on his border. But I have a feeling that the re-start of the cold war helps Putin and Bush bring in more tyranny in their respective countries.

Back to Iran; Will China merely stop buying our money in retaliation? Probably not. They are stuck at an 11% growth rate -- so that train is going to wreck if it ever stops. China will just buy up more of our infrastructure rather than depend upon the declining value of the US Dollar (which is based upon oil). Seems to me, that the rivalries showing on the world stage are all for show. Bush has safely steered any talk about the genocide in Africa away. That's where China is setting up their oil "freedom" initiative.

In Iraq, I'm guessing that their government doesn't have long to live. Either they give us Production Sharing Agreements (us, meaning BushCo), or we never leave. Cheney seems to be making headway on his efforts to bomb Iran.

But the Democrats seem to be getting some backbone and forcing the senate to stay awake until they end their filibuster seems to indicate that they know the clock is ticking. If they don't get rid of Bush and his entire cabinet NOW, then the Iran war and economic collapse and probably martial law are not far behind. If they don't understand this then we need new Democrats.

Still harder to make than corn

[lecithin]

But hey, it is something.

How would hemp do?

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Spookticus]

if you used hemp, you would then have all these people getting upset over people smoking it instead of using it for fuel.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[meburke]

Kudzu! We could do a lot for the environment by making paper, cloth and now ethanol from kudzu.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Dunbal]

you would then have all these people getting upset over people smoking it instead of using it for fuel.

      But like, chill out, man. I mean, who needs to drive to work after smoking one of these, man? I use less fuel by staying at home. Hemp is a win.... god I am hungry

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Suicyco]

See here:

http://fuelandfiber.com/Hemp4NRG/Hemp4NRGRV3.htm

Hemp is one of the top producers of biomass per acre. It is much better than corn and can be grown on fallow fields as well. And you can't even smoke this type of hemp, it grows 10-20 feet high and is all stalk with a clump of seeds at the top. Of course, nobody ever smoked this form of hemp, even when it was one of the primary cash crops of the south prior to the 1930's.

Too bad, since hemp is evil. It makes you rape white wimin: http://www.oddfrog.com/paper.htm

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[mh1997]

Hemp might be good, but here in rural Indiana, I get 50lbs of feed corn for $9, yeast costs about $1, propane about $2. So, for $12, I can drink about 4 gallons of corn.

Sorry, I thought I was at http://homedistiller.org/

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[linkedlinked]

And you can't even smoke this type of hemp Meh, nevermind then.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[vladsinger]

Informative? Are the mods smoking pot too?

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[SpaceballsTheUserNam]

In short, hemp is one of the most useful plants known to man.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[daeg]

Hemp, while good, isn't the best. It'd work in most climates, at least, and is certainly better than a lot of choices for yield per acre.

Switchgrass is one of the better ones. It grows everywhere and is very disease, drought, etc resistant. You can't kill the shit even if you try and it requires very little, if any, maintenance. For longer term crops, depending on the environment type, poppler and willow are good choices. The nice thing about fast-growing trees is that if your refining process gets tied up, your crop won't die. You can store the wood for a long time or just leave the trees planted. You don't have that option with switchgrass or hemp -- you can't store the stuff or it will start decomposing.

Besides, as with any type of farming, the best yields will come from a variety of crops rotated to preserve the land as much as possible.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[flappinbooger]

I wonder if bamboo would be any good. Apparently that stuff is insanely fast growing and indestructible. It spreads by itself and you can't get rid of it. That would be "perpetual motion" lol.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Hadlock]

Depends on how many nutrients bamboo sucks out of the soil. As I understand it hemp actually replaces some nutrients (nitrogen?) in to the soil as it grows, which is why it's such a wonder crop.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Blain]

I was thinking this might be a good use to put kudzu to. Unless it's not as fast-growing and earth-covering as I've been told.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[falconwolf]

if you used hemp, you would then have all these people getting upset over people smoking it instead of using it for fuel.

Industrial hemp has hardly any THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. You'd have to smoke something like a pound, a lot more than one joint, of industrial hemp to get high.

Falcon

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[wish bot]

Since you are new here....moderators sometimes reward a funny comment with a 'real' mod (informative, interesting, etc), since funny mods don't increase your karma. I've never really thought the practice was a good thing myself - there is a reason for the underrated and overrated mods.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Funnier still is that if they allowed people to grow this stuff for industrial purposes the pollen would ruin everything that people were growing for drugs.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering this also.

I was doing more research on Ron Paul and I found this bill. HR 1009

It is a bill introduced by Dr Paul and backed by a few others. Basically they want to amend the Controlled Substances Act to exclude industrial hemp from the definition of marihuana*, and for other purposes.

The short title of this is "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 1007"

Right now it is sitting in a committee. It was referred to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on April 20, 2007.

I attempted to get a link for this, but thomas.loc.gov did not give an actual address, I just used the search feature on the main page. Of course, if you prefer you can go to any search engine and look it up. I preferred the Library of Congress page for these types of things.

I, personally, do not smoke. However, Industrial Hemp has so many benefits it should be reclassified. Plus, as per Bill 1009, it has standards that must be met to be called Industrial Hemp, it is in Sec 2 of that Bill.

*Yes, marihuana is spelled correctly.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Every time cellulosic ethanol comes up, I wonder about the feasibility of planting the crop in the median strips of interstate highways. Generally people are talking about something that grows like a weed, so instead of having median strips full of grass and weeds that the state crews mow every month, we'd have median strips of, say, switchgrass that crews would mow and bale. The only increased costs would be baling the stuff up and transporting it to the ethanol plant.

Of course, with cellulosic ethanol production you could process the clippings from the grass that's growing there now.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Anonymous Coward]

The short title of this is "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 1007

After 59 years, it was about to be passed. The Norman Invasion killed the bill.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[poormanjoe]

I maybe mistaken, but I dont think you can get high off industrial hemp. If you ever read High Times magazine they always are selling legal weed in the back. It contains no THC, so i guess its legal. Hemp fuel could end a lot of our fuel problems. Along with solar.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Dr. Cody]

That's why you grow it indoors. In your bedroom. Where you can kiss it good night.

Re:Still harder to make than corn

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. I guess I did make a typo in that original post. I should have just copy and pasted it, but I decided to write it out. I even read it over a few times before hitting submit. I knew I should have gone straight to bed after work instead of reading /.

Cellulosic?

[Icarus1919]

What the hell kind of adjective is that? It's bullshity.

Re:Cellulosic?

[martin_henry]

Don't get so criticalistic!

Re:Cellulosic?

[trime]

Don't you mean bullshitine?

Re:Cellulosic?

[tepples]

What the hell kind of adjective is that? It's bullshity. Even if it is, what would you rather use to mean "of or pertaining to cell-wall sugars"?

Re:Cellulosic?

[Icarus1919]

Cellulose to Ethanol Plant would be dandy. It could be a Celtic Plant or something.

Re:Cellulosic?

[mattgoldey]

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there are plenty of ethanol plants in S. America, especially Brazil, but are they cellulosic? It's a big difference, as the article explains.

Spain made the first plant of this type in 2006, and Europe is usually ahead of the Americas in regards to alternative energy.

Re:Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Verenium, a company that is the recent product of Diversa and Celunol opened their pilot facility in 1999, and broke ground on a 1.4 Million gallon a year plant this year. Both are cellulosic ethanol producing faclities. I don't know if Verenium's is the first here in the USA, but it was certainly before the yet-to-be-built plant mentioned in TFA.

http://www.verenium.com/Pages/Biofuels/BiofuelsPro jects.html

Great!

[valderievaldera]

Do I understand correctly that this way the US will still be able to produce CO2, even when fossilised fuels have run out? Kyoto here they come..

Re:Great!

[ElBeano]

Your understanding is a little twisted. It isn't "producing C02", it's shortening the carbon cycle to the point where we are using plants that have grown as recently as a few months ago for energy. The carbon in the plants was removed from the atmosphere by said plants. There may be no net reduction in C02 in the atmosphere over time by using cellosic alchohol, but burning fossil fuels presents a dramatically different situation. The carbon in fossil fuels has been buried for millions of years. This process took a very long time. Burning the fuels releases the carbon sequestered over a period of millions of years in a matter of decades.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I understand correctly that this way the US will still be able to produce CO2

It takes CO2 to make the cellulose. In theory, you could have no net CO2 production (or you could even bury some of the celluose underground permanently and be taking CO2 out of the atmosphere). Essentially, ethanol from cellulose is a form of solar energy where your intermediate storage is ethanol (and to some extent cellulose) rather than electric batteries.

I wonder what the emissions are like?

[Anonymous Coward]

People were just decrying the permits issued to BP for a plant to crack Canadian oil.

The ethanol plant uses a two-stage process to turn cellulose into gas, and then crack the gas into ethanol. Bet the emissions might be interesting.

Do we hold these guys to the standards we expect out of the oil companies, or do they get a pass because they are "greener."

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[wolfgang_spangler]

People were just decrying the permits issued to BP for a plant to crack Canadian oil. Actually that wasn't what people were upset about. People were upset that the state of Indiana gave BP a waiver to dump extra amounts of ammonia and heavy metal sludge into Lake Michigan.

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference, fellow Anonymous Coward, is that there is no net carbon gain on ethanol production (assuming the plant isn't being powered by coal, fuel-oil, natural gas, etc). Whether or not there are other emissions like oil and coal have, NOx, NH3, etc, this plant doesn't contribute CO2.

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[JimboFBX]

ammonia and fertilizer cause algae blooms. They should figure out a way to turn algae blooms into energy and we'd be all set!

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[drgruney]

You honestly believe that only one group can be pissed off at BP at a time? Now I live in the USA (so I'm not an evil European saying "hey, we're important too")... but come on do you not understand that there are other countries (Canada in this case) that have problems independent of the USA?

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[TooMuchToDo]

But lets be honest, the waiver simply said they could pollute up to the limit permitted by law. Polluting is usually bad, but in the amounts we're talking about for the BP plant, it would be like pissing in the ocean to make it salty.

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[Anonymous Coward]

People were just decrying the permits issued to BP for a plant to crack Canadian oil.

Actually that wasn't what people were upset about. People were upset that the state of Indiana gave BP a waiver to dump extra amounts of ammonia and heavy metal sludge into Lake Michigan.

ammonia and sludge are the specific waste products resulting from the refining of heavier, sulfur & nitrogen-rich crudes, such as those from Canadian oil sands. Most US refiners are set up for light/intermediate crude from Texas, GoM/Venezuela, and west Africa. If you're in Indiana, though, it's much easier to get crude from Canada (which is actually where we get most of our imported crude oil) than from any ship that unloads in Louisiana.

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[wolfgang_spangler]

Of course I realize that.

The poster made mention of the recent story on slashdot in which he said people were griping about BP cracking Canadian oil. That is an inaccurate description of the relevant discussion and so I pointed that out.

Re:I wonder what the emissions are like?

[wolfgang_spangler]

But lets be honest, the waiver simply said they could pollute up to the limit permitted by law. Polluting is usually bad, but in the amounts we're talking about for the BP plant, it would be like pissing in the ocean to make it salty. It waived them from state requirements and allowed them to pollute to federal standards. The Great Lakes are (supposed to be) protected further by state law and agreement between the common states and portions of Canada.

It doesn't make sense to dump mercury and other heavy metals in concentration into the largest freshwater system in the world. Even if you don't destroy the lakes as a whole, the local shoreline and local water impact is pretty dang significant.

DOE has funded five others

[gregor-e]

DOE has ponied up $385 million to six different cellulosic ethanol plants, one of which is Range Fuels.

Skeptical

[Bombula]

You have to be careful of these kinds of companies' claims. I remember getting interested in a biodiesel-from-algae-grown-vertically project run by an outfit called Global Green Solutions (www.globalgreensolutions.com). They claimed to be able to get 150,000 gallons per acre per year, which is 1000 times the output of oil palm and other biodiesel crops - and 15 times more than other folks' projections for regular algae ponds. It all sounded great, until the basic calculations showed that their 'projections' would have meant converting 85% of the TOTAL solar energy directly into stored energy in the fuel - a physical impossibility. I called their bluff, and they just shrugged and said, "our 100-million-gallon-per-year plant will be open next year and then you'll see." Well, it's now next year, and you can imagine what happened. Nothing.

Re:Skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

The plant is in Georgia, they probably going to feed it kudsu, hope the plant can keep up with all the kudsu, but I am skeptical about that.

Re:Skeptical

[noidentity]

I'm especially skeptical about their claim that "The new plant will be online in 2008". Is that the new Internet 3.0 I've been hearing about?

Re:Skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's now next year, Whoa. I thought I felt older.

Re:Skeptical

[Smidge204]

I think your math was off...

1 gallon of BioDiesel is about 130,000 BTUs or energy. 150,000 gallons is thus 19,500,000,000 BTUs.

Realistically, sunlight energy at ground level is about 100 watts per square foot, plus or minus. At 43,560 sq.ft. per acre, that's 4,356,000 watts per acre of raw sunlight.

Assuming a cautious 5 hours a day, every day, of sunlight at that wattage, a year will net you 4356000 watts * 365 days * 5 hours/day * 3600 sec/hour = 28,618,920,000,000 total incident joules of sunlight.

19.50E9 is only about 0.07% of 26.62E12

Of course, you can't realistically use 100% of an acre for collection area, you won't get 5 hours of perfect sunlight every single day of the year, you won't get 100% absorption of the sun's energy, or 100% conversion to algae oil, or 100% BioDiesel conversion efficiency, and there's probably some kind of mixing/circulating thing going on so no single algae cell gets a full day's exposure anyway... but 0.07% theoretical is way, way off your 85% figure. I'm curious as to how you arrived at that, actually...
=Smidge=

Re:Skeptical

[Bombula]

Here's another calculation:

The energy contained in 150,000 gallons of diesel @85% = 150,000 gallons/year x 133,000 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 5.8MMkwh/year acre. The energy falling on one acre of land = 5kwh/m2 - day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4MM kwh/year - acre. 5.8/7.4 = .78. That is about 78% efficiency in converting sunlight to liquid energy.

I incorrectly remembered the 85% figure, which is a different measure, but it's still in the same neighborhood.

Looking at your calculation, you seem to have forgotten to convert BTUs into joules. 1 BTU = 1,054 joules. That put your calculation out by a factor of 1000. You got 0.07%, when the actual number is closer to 70%.

I wish you were right though.

Re:Skeptical

[Smidge204]

Looking at your calculation, you seem to have forgotten to convert BTUs into joules

D'oh.

I hereby promise; no more maths after my third drink of the night. My apologies, as that accounts the difference.
=Smidge=

Re:Skeptical

[GrEp]

Ditto. Their process doesn't seem to add an enzyme to break down the cellulose. Instead they seem to be burning the stuff and then binding the CO2 to something else down the pipeline. Why not just co-fire it in a coal plant? Heck, instead of cellulose it seems you could use coal in their process and get better results.

Re:Skeptical

[mdsolar]

The usual claim is 10,000 gal/acre: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html. GreenFuel is getting about 6000 gal/acre biodiesel 5000 gal/arce ethanol with their pilot plant in AZ.
--
Solar power with no rate increases for up to 25 years: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Skeptical

[mdsolar]

The news is that the Government has granted a permit. This means that things can get going. It also means that things were ready enough to get going that a permit application could be submitted.

The company I sell for is a start up as well and it is currently going through a transportation study. To do that, the full plant design has to be available so that the needs for shipping in and out, numbers of worker and their shifts can be integrated into the study. Things are pretty advanced at this stage. Financing has to be solid as well or why would the state engage in the study? So, the ethanol plant will be built and produce. It may not make a profit, something could go wrong, but I'd expect it to be built.
--
Register your home for solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Skeptical

[RGRistroph]

The electric service you promote in your link apparently has MLM characteristics in the sales structure. Is this true ? If I sign up "under you" do you somehow get a cut, and then I can sign up more people ?

I realize that even if it is true, that does not mean it's a bad deal. Will I come out financially ahead even if I don't bother with the sales aspect of it, and just get the panels on my house ?

Also, if lighting strikes and destroys all the panels, do I pay to have them replaced or does the company ?

Re:Skeptical

[Dr. Cody]

I'm doing my thesis at a power plant in the US after three years of study in Sweden.

Right now, I wish I could deprecate the British thermal unit with a handgun.

Re:Skeptical

[mdsolar]

The electric service you promote in your link apparently has MLM characteristics in the sales structure. Is this true ? If I sign up "under you" do you somehow get a cut, and then I can sign up more people ? The company is controling marketing costs to 16% of revenue by using network marketing so there are commissions for personal sales and smaller percentages that come from the sales of people you help to train. If you register for a system, you can take advantage of a program where you can get 5% of the bill of a person you refer off of your bill, but this is not sales. You can get involved in sales without getting a system for your home http://www.powur.com/mdsolar and there is some effort but no cost to do this. There is an initial test which requires about four hours of study and then once you've passed that you can start selling and building a network of your own. Customer support includes explaining how the systems work and where the company is at, preparing contracts and helping customers to make changes as needed. There is a cost of printing and stamps in this. There is only small compensation until systems are actually installed (10% payouts on bonuses; see compensation at the right of the above link) and this only after customers are independently verified by the company to be both the homeowner and the utility customer. There is no money really to be made right now! Nor is any money collected until the panels are ready.

I realize that even if it is true, that does not mean it's a bad deal. Will I come out financially ahead even if I don't bother with the sales aspect of it, and just get the panels on my house ? In some places, like where I live in Maryland, you'll start saving as soon as the system is intalled and working. This is because the company is offereing rates that attempt to match the rates utilities charged in 2005. As it happens, in Maryland, they missed the distribution charge so everyone saves a little while for utilities that have raised rates people can save a lot. Baltimore Gas and Electric is and example http://mdsolarpower.com/. In other places, especially where electric rates are complicated (tiered or time-of-use) people may end up spending a little more initially. Many of my customers are pretty energy conscious and so under tiered rates more of their bill is under the lower rate than the average which are what the company's rate calculations reflect. If you assume utility rates will go up, then the savings over time for the fixed solar rental rate could be substantial. There is a calculator that assumes a 2% per year utility rate increase at the bottom of http://www.jointhesolution.com/mdsolar that you can use to make an estimate.

Also, if lighting strikes and destroys all the panels, do I pay to have them replaced or does the company ? The company is responsible for damage caused by the system and the customer is responsible for damage to the system (including your example, lighting). Some insurers are planning to cover the systems at no additional cost, but some are not sure or have said they won't. In cases where there is no possibility of the homeowners policy covering the system, the company will offer coverage but the details are not yet available.

Hope this helps and thanks for asking. I'm facinated by the potential of this model for a rapid transformation of how we produce energy. There are, however, real risks in getting involved in a startup. Risks for the customer are minimal, but getting more involved can lead to effort without payoff if the company is not successful. Remember that you can work with other slashdot users listed at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html. None of those currently active are on my team (aside from me).

Re:Skeptical

[RGRistroph]

Thanks for your informative response.

How many installations has the company done so far ? Or is it still in start-up mode, not having installed any ?

Re:Skeptical

[mdsolar]

It is still in startup mode. The site for the factory is selected and there is a transportation study started now. The timeline for starting installations was first quarter of 08, but I do not know how much can be done in terms of getting the pilot production line going while the study is ongoing. There is also a need for beta systems both to shake out the billing system and for UL approval. The modules for these will be built using cells from a third party supplier so only a portion of the line is needed for this. Since the CTO sits on the panels that write the standards, there shouldn't be an issue meeting them, but the line does have to exist. It is possible the schedule could slip as it has once already when the plant location changed owing to better state incentives.

Back to the Future?

[moosesocks]

Sure, it's not Mr. Fusion, but this technology sure as heck sounds cool.

On the flipside, I wonder what sort of waste products this plant is going to produce...

Re:Back to the Future?

[Anonymous Coward]

not much. The excess lignin and hemicellulose are burned to catalyze the cellulose reaction. The C02 released from this was C02 in the air 20 years ago, as the source of the cellulose will be pine trees-- very abundant around Soperton, GA, where the plant will be located.

Anything like this is a good thing

[mlts]

This is a good step, but what is needed is work on thermal depolymerization technologies. These can turn waste, be it plastic bottles, dead goats, papers, or pretty much any organic item and turn it into usable crude oil.

Long term, its still just a patch... what is really needed are batteries with far more energy density than what we have now, and more research into fission, fusion, solar, and other energy generating technologies that don't spew carbon into the air.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[jandrese]

The problem with thermal depolymerization is that it requires a tremendous amount of energy compared to what you get out of it.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Travelsonic]

That, and it will continue our reliance on crude oil.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Vader82]

I don't mean to be contrary, but spewing carbon into the air isn't a bad thing. Its introducing EXTRA carbon into the air that hasn't been there for millions of years thats a bad thing. If we stopped pumping oil out of the ground today and instead used biofuels of whatever variety you like (biodiesel, ethanol, etc) that would be enough. The carbon in the air would get sucked up by plants as they grow, we would harvest said plants for the energy they have locked up, and we would use it.

The carbon-hydrogen class of molecules have excellent energy storage properties, from methanol (CH4) up to octane (C8H18). Some have higher energy density, cleaner burning, etc. Humanity has around 100 years of investment into the internal combustion engine and it would be wise not to do away with that until we've found something SIGNIFICANTLY better. And by significantly, I don't mean 20-30%. I'm thinking more like 100-300% before it really looks worthwhile.

Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Martin Blank]

How is it inefficient? The primary plant in Carthage, MO, is running at about the efficiency ratio predicted early on, where 85% of the energy content that goes in comes out as high-grade fuel oil. Looking at it from a different perspective, that's 15 parts energy use resulting in 85 parts energy in the oil, or a factor of ~5.7.

There are some numbers that are off about the technology -- the amount of waste usable as input, for example -- but it seems to be an effective method of fuel production.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Skreems]

And that's only 85% if you consider industrial waste from a turkey processing plant to be "usable energy". If you consider the fact that they can run off of completely useless waste products, and feed 15% of their output back into the plant to power it, this is essentially free energy, AND a reduction in landfill contents.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[monkaduck]

Hear, hear. That's some of the sanest talk I've seen on here lately.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[cdrguru]

It's great as long as there is only one of these plants. After that, well...

The problem is that when there is no market for turkey processing waste it is free or extremely low cost. When the second plant comes online there is now a bidding process that is going to happen (one way or another) for the raw materials - see, they aren't waste anymore. They are valuable raw materials now.

Same thing happens with used vegetable oil. It is cheap and works fine as long as there is no market. Once there is a market, all bets are off.

Without government price controls (unlikely) we have no idea where the price for such materials would fall.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[bluephone]

Carbon is turned into carbon black and sold to ink manufacturers and such. The water is converted to steam (and that steam is actually recycled through the system to heat other parts of the process) and the water ruynoff from that is either reused in the process or discharged as clean water. The methane and butane gases are captured and either used in plant to power the plant, or sold. Metals and such are sold on the open market. Ditto with the calcium and other minerals. It's incredibly efficient and clean.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Martin Blank]

The plant is paying for the turkey offal, in a way. Turkey offal can still be ground into agricultural feed, so they take a hit there in that they turn it into fuel oil instead of selling it.

However, as mentioned above, they can run a lot of other things through it, including tires, vegetable waste, wood chips, and I think even manure. We'll find out how viable those are when additional plants come online.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[greeneggs2000]

"Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming." Not really. The time for 500 to 600 ppmv of CO2 to decay back to 300 ppmv is between 500 and 5,000 years.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[gronofer]

Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming.

It's well known that the composition of the atmosphere affects global temperature. A comparison of Earth, Venus and Mars will demonstrate this. If there really is a non-CO2 cause of warming, then that's still a problem for humanity, even if it's "not our fault". Even in that case, we should be considering reducing the level of greenhouse gases to compensate for the problem, not adding extra which can only make things worse.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[bluemonq]

Well sure, but the point is if it's a human-caused, and you could somehow auto-magically change all fossil fuel to ethanol/biodiesel/etc, at the very least the CO2 concentration shouldn't rise as much as it has prior to the switch.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Vader82]

I'm not arguing against that. But what I am suggesting is that it is *possible* that CO2 isn't to blame here. Not overly likely, mind you, but I think even a few percent chance merits mention.

The crux of my argument is that discontinuing to introduce more carbon into the surface carbon cycle will do one of two things: confirm suspicions that we've been causing surface temperatures to go up slightly, or negate them. If we find out that CO2 level wasn't to blame, we still MIGHT have a problem on our hands, but we've eliminated one of the possible causes.

I think thats one of the big reasons that politicians are so reluctant to pursue any kind of alternative energy seriously, there are well known and measurable disadvantages coupled with the POSSIBILITY (how realistic is completely irrelevant to these people) that CO2 levels aren't the cause anyhow. How would you feel knowing that people lost their jobs over a decision you made that turned out to be wrong? Worse still is that when the economic impact is measured in billions of dollars, that could be a great many jobs. Especially when sea levels have yet to rise to a significantly measurable amount.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[MacDork]

The carbon in the air would get sucked up by plants as they grow, we would harvest said plants for the energy they have locked up, and we would use it.

Gigatons/yr produced by fossil fuels: 4-5
Gigatons/yr produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion: 61-62
Source [montana.edu]

Assuming crop production happened without plows, lime, or nitrogen fertilizer...

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting about the spatial element. It's all well and good to have zero NET carbon emissions like you say, but it doesn't matter how much carbon the plants in Iowa are sucking in if it is being produced in New York City. That just gives you peachy nice air over Iowa, and a big ol hole in the ozone layer over NYC.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[TooMuchToDo]

I hate to break it to ya, but we've already dumped huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that was sequestered for millions of years. Not only do we have to eliminate our CO2 output from fossil fuels, we also need a method to use renewable energy to start pulling that CO2 out of the atmosphere to sequester it again.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

CH4 is methane. Methanol is CH3OH.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Richthofen80]

A comparison of Earth, Venus and Mars will demonstrate this. If there really is a non-CO2 cause of warming

There is a non-CO2 cause of warming (or cooling.) Its called how far your planet is from the sun. Secondary causes include how thick of an atmosphere you have. Third might be cloud-cover / water vapor. Then maybe CO2.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[gronofer]

There is a non-CO2 cause of warming (or cooling.) Its called how far your planet is from the sun. Secondary causes include how thick of an atmosphere you have. Third might be cloud-cover / water vapor. Then maybe CO2.

Yes, these are what determine the global temperature. But I haven't heard of any theory that warming of the Earth is caused by a change in its distance from the sun, or by the thickness of the atmosphere. If cloud-cover or water vapor are changing, what would be causing it? CO2 is measurably increasing.

Re:Anything like this is a good thing

[Richthofen80]

If cloud-cover or water vapor are changing, what would be causing it?

The amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface? The strength of the Earth's magnetic field? Just because there is more CO2 does not mean its a slam-dunk that CO2 is causing warming. It could very well be an effect. Correlation does not equal causation. Climate is a lot more complicated than 'more CO2 = bad'.

CO2 has become a panacea that everyone blames the world's ills on anyways. Do you feel guilty that you're breathing out CO2? You're destroying the planet! Stop breathing, please.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

In the context of nations, USA is America. Despite what a bunch of under educated Spanish speakers may think, it isn't used in English to refer to other countries. I know posting these types of things probably makes you feel intellectual, but it doesn't.

It amazes me that this was modded as such and not what it really is, offtopic or flamebait.

In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[benhocking]

In theory, the CO2 that is released from burning the ethanol is reabsorbed by the plants used to make the ethanol, so there's no net CO2. This is why ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists. In practice, there are other CO2 costs involved, such as (probably) fertilizer, transportation costs, conversion costs, etc. (By "costs" here, I'm referring to CO2 output and nothing else. Of course, there are other costs involved as well.)

Still, it's probably much better than burning fossil-fuels with respect to CO2 output.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[mdsolar]

When you use forest waste products there is no fertilizer involved so this really reduces the amount of fossil fuel input. They do need quite a lot of heat input for their process so they may be less efficent than enzyme processes, but they are ready to go into production now.
--
Solar power without the permit hassles: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[timmarhy]

C02 isn't significant in the green house effect anyway. you've been mislead into thinking it. the only emissions significant with cars are the noxious gases that are suplhur based. diesel is really bad for this.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[gregorio]

In theory, the CO2 that is released from burning the ethanol is reabsorbed by the plants used to make the ethanol, so there's no net CO2

In theory, the place where you are growing corn or sugar cane was already occupied by CO2-absorbing plants, either natural ones or food-destined ones. If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground.

This is why ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists.

No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others (*). They don't give a crap about the environment and they would gladly defend taking out a lot of the amazon forest just to grow sugar cane and replace those big corporations. They are the same ones who complain about global warming while they protest against nuclear (emission free) and try to convince us that replacing dinodiesel for biodiesel is good, while it's just about trading one CO2 source for another one.

(*) Why? Because back in the 70's, when global warming was not a hot agenda yet and they were "fighting" oil spills, made by the big oil companies, both sides got excessive and people died, got bankrupt, jailed, fired, etc. That's their motivation: plain old revenge. They spent decades braiwashing the alternative youth against those companies and now their political system reached the self-sustaining state.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground.

You do realize that a oil wells, pipelines, refineries and all the other related infrastructure is going to destroy a lot more natural plant life than a farm, right?

And since lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up, using that land for fuel crops would probably be a good idea.

They don't give a crap about the environment and they would gladly defend taking out a lot of the amazon forest just to grow sugar cane and replace those big corporations.

Why clear rainforest when we've got lots of good, unused farmland here?

More to the point, somebody is going to have to distribute that ethanol to consumers. Now, who out there has lots of experience distributing a flammable liquid to millions of consumers using hundreds of thousands of distribution centers all over the US? Biodiesel and ethanol won't destroy Exxon, et al. They'll just distribute a different product. And you know what? Environmentalists know this. Re-using as much of the existing infrastructure as possible is the only way we'll switch from fossil fuels to biofuels.

and try to convince us that replacing dinodiesel for biodiesel is good, while it's just about trading one CO2 source for another one.

And here you completely fail to understand the difference between fossil fuels and biofuels. Burning ethanol and biodiesel releases CO2 that was just recently fixed by a plant. Let's say you burn 1 gallon of ethanol in your car. Now consider the CO2 level over a year-long timeframe: the CO2 level is the same.

Fossil fuels are releasing CO2 that was sequestered. Over that same year, the CO2 level rises because you burned that gallon of fossil-fuel ethanol.

They are the same ones who complain about global warming while they protest against nuclear

Nuclear power is not "emission free". Sure, it produces no CO2, but it produces lots of nasty stuff that we have to pack away for a few thousand years. And even if you reprocess the fuel itself, there's still lots of other material that becomes irradiated that must be disposed of.

You also fail to mention any way that nuclear power would actually work as a motor vehicle fuel. Battery technology won't let us all drive electric cars, trucks and semis. So we're left with bringing the power plant along with our vehicle. There's no way in hell we can put nuclear reactors in every car, truck and semi on the road.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[dbIII]

Nuclear power is not "emission free". Sure, it produces no CO2

It's not that either. People forget that it's made out of rocks and not magic beans. The enrichment process involves heating Uranium up until it becomes a gas - which requires a bit of fossil fuels but overall wiht the best Uranium ore the CO2 emissions will end up less than a third of what you would get if you burnt natural gas to make electricity.

The biggest barrier to it's use if of course that it is an expensive way to boil water and only at huge sizes do you get any sort of decent return - thermal power often gives you more than twice the befefit for twice the size. Having to plan a decade ahead and have a vast amount of money for the capital cost of building the things is a bigger barrier to nuclear power than any conspiracy theory blaming things on hippies.

An almost total lack of R&D effort doesn't help either - what you could buy today from Westinghouse to get built in a decade is effectively a 1950's white elephant painted green. South African nuclear technology is far in advance of that (pebble bed) and Indian technology may be deliver some of the promises (accelerated thorium). There are other reasons for nuclear reactors and that's why We have seen a few small ones built, notably in North Korea, Iran, Indonesia and Egypt. Want some Plutonium for a weapons program? CANDU!

Going back to the poster a few posts above - lay off the hippy conspiracy theories - they really do not have the power you credit them with and do not have some highly organised revenge plan.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[timmarhy]

"lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up"

let me guess, it's all a conspiracy of the big corperations? call me crazy but i don't see high food prices in america. atleast you aren't hiding your anti capitalist agenda.

"And here you completely fail to understand the difference between fossil fuels and biofuels"

no i don't think you understand how biodiesel is produced (yet you seem to support it so vigarously?) a key component of biodiesel is the amount of fertiliser used to produce the crop which uses a lot of - you guessed it - OIL.

"You do realize that a oil wells, pipelines, refineries and all the other related infrastructure is going to destroy a lot more natural plant life than a farm, right?"

err i think his point is that we already have plenty od inferstructure in place for oil production - why chop down MORE tree's to produce biodiesel?

"Nuclear power is not "emission free". Sure, it produces no CO2, but it produces lots of nasty stuff that we have to pack away for a few thousand years. And even if you reprocess the fuel itself, there's still lots of other material that becomes irradiated that must be disposed of. You also fail to mention any way that nuclear power would actually work as a motor vehicle fuel."

firstly, nuclear power produces water vapour which IS a significant greenhouse gas, thought the actual volume is a drop in the bucket. the nasty stuff you refer to is the spent fuel rods, which is easy enough to store. i'm not sure what makes you think why something being irradiated means it's dangerous, it merely means it's been exposed to radiation. not that it's dangerous. i think you are confusing irradiation with CONTAMINATION, which means radiactive material is present on/in something.

lastly your statment about having no way of using nuclear power - ever been on a tram/train/subway before?

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

let me guess, it's all a conspiracy of the big corperations? call me crazy but i don't see high food prices in america. atleast you aren't hiding your anti capitalist agenda.

No conspiracy theory required. The US government literally pays farmers to not farm. Food prices would be quite a bit lower if agriculture was a free market.

a key component of biodiesel is the amount of fertiliser used to produce the crop which uses a lot of - you guessed it - OIL.

Oil is burned in the production of fertilizer, not as an ingredient. We could use another source of heat.

You're also pretending that I don't want any oil production whatsoever. That's quite impossible, given our need for materials like plastics and lubricants. However, if we don't burn the oil, then we will avoid a lot of pollution (including a lot of chemicals that are not CO2).

the nasty stuff you refer to is the spent fuel rods, which is easy enough to store.

We've been trying to find a place to store it since the 1950s. If it was easy to store, then it would be done already. Fact is, high-level nuclear waste is very, very, very hard to store because of the time frame involved. And as I said, the "clean" way to deal with the fuel is to reprocess it.

i think you are confusing irradiation with CONTAMINATION, which means radiactive material is present on/in something.

Many materials, when exposed to high levels of radiation, become radioactive themselves. Hence, irradiate is the technically correct term. If contamination were the only issue, then it would be possible to wash the radioactive material off and store the runoff with the fuel rods.

lastly your statment about having no way of using nuclear power - ever been on a tram/train/subway before?

So your plan is to electrify every single foot of the millions of miles of roads in the US. Are you seriously suggesting that? Do you ever stop to wonder why we have no electrified rail outside of the "downtown" areas of a few of our major cities? Do you even comprehend the distances involved? The Interstate highway system alone is about 50,000 miles. The US highway system is more than double that, and then there's all the state and local roads, which is many times larger than that.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[msevior]

"It's not that either. People forget that it's made out of rocks and not magic beans. The enrichment process involves heating Uranium up until it becomes a gas - which requires a bit of fossil fuels but overall wiht the best Uranium ore the CO2 emissions will end up less than a third of what you would get if you burnt natural gas to make electricity."

All this stuff has been fully worked through. Nuclear Power emits around 1% the CO2 of a fossil fuel plant. It's CO2 footprint is about the same as wind power. Storm and Smith are way out of date.

See:

Donnes et al. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessments, 10, P 10-23 (2005)

Propaganda by Greenpeace is still propaganda.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[Anonymous Coward]

> Oil is burned in the production of fertilizer, not as an ingredient. We could use another source of heat.

Actually, it is a reducing agent in the haber-bosch process. You could not just replace this with a source of heat. I don't know why nitrogen and oxygen can't be directly reacted with heat to form NO2 like they are in a car, perhaps it is more efficient to go via ammonia.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[MacDork]

And since lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up, using that land for fuel crops would probably be a good idea.

I don't follow. How would putting fallow land into crop production help you reduce CO2 in the atmosphere....

Gigatons/yr produced by fossil fuels: 4-5
Gigatons/yr produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion: 61-62
Source

Aside from the whole "let's burn food!" aspect of it.... maybe not such a good idea, eh?

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

They're making ammonium nitrate, NH3NO2. That way they get 2 N's per molecule in the fertilizer.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

I don't follow. How would putting fallow land into crop production help you reduce CO2 in the atmosphere....

Because the CO2 "produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion" doesn't change if the cropland is fallow or active. However, converting to biofuels greatly reduces the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels.

In addition, the CO2 "produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion" is recently-fixed CO2, and thus not a net CO2 producer. That CO2 is offset by the entry "Incorporation into biosphere through photosynthesis". It's the long-sequestered CO2 from fossil fuels that's creating a problem.

Or did you not notice that the net increase in CO2 in your source is very close to the CO2 released by fossil fuels? (and equal to fossil fuels + deforestation?)

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[timmarhy]

"We've been trying to find a place to store it since the 1950s"

no, it is really easy to store it. only problem is fear whipped up by hystericals like yourself has successfully prevented it happening even in the most remote area's, such as here in australia.

example. pick a geologically stable area (australia), pick some where really really remote where there is nothing else valuable and people won't ever want to live there (middle of australia), seal up spent rods in multiple casings of various non reactive materials, dig a big mother fucker hole in an area well outside of any water table, fill it in.

"Many materials, when exposed to high levels of radiation"

yes. only they tend to keep those to a minimum, because you know, they know what they are doing when they build these things.

"So your plan is to electrify every single foot of the millions of miles of roads in the US"

oh please, show me where i said that? now you are having to resort to making shit up. my very subtle point was that if you actually want an oil free world, it's more then likely you are going to need to give up your personal car.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[dbIII]

Nuclear Power emits around 1% the CO2 of a fossil fuel plant.

I mention the study that optimisticly put it at less than one third of natural gas turbines and that wasn't enough - people reply with myths and legends. I suggest you answer with an example of a real nuclear plant and not a theoretical fusion thing from 2050 and compare it to a specific type of thermal plant. In my opinion the only people that say nuclear power is a solved problem are those selling antiquated plant or those that have been conned by them - learn a few things about it from a physics or engineering perspective instead of marketing and you will see what I mean.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[FireFury03]

The enrichment process involves heating Uranium up until it becomes a gas - which requires a bit of fossil fuels

Why can't you use energy from fission instead of fossil fuels to do this?

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[msevior]

The reference I quoted was a peer reviewed paper from 2005 which examined a current (1980's generation) nuclear power plants in Switzerland. It was performed by an independent scientific team.

Look it up.

It makes sense once you do a back of the envolope calculation. A 1 GW coal fired power burns 9000 tonnes of coal per day, emitting around 25000 tonnes of CO2 every day.

A 1 GW nuclear power plant consumes around 30 tonnes of nuclear fuel per year. That derives from 200 tonnes of natural uranium. The lowest grade mine in the world is Rossing in Namibia.

See here: http://www.altonsa.co.za/rossing/reports/Rossing%2 0Stakeholder%20Report%202004.pdf

Rossing produces 3000 tonnes of Uranium at an energy cost of 1 PetaJoules per year. That's enough for 15 GW worth of Nuclear Power per year. 15 GW of nuclear power per year is 15*30 = 450 PetaJoules. So 1 PJ of energy to mine, 450 PJ worth of energy, 0.2% of of the CO2 output. The conversion to UF6, enrichment to 5% U235, energy construction cost of the plant, decommisioning of the plant and disposal of the waste takes it up to 1%.

I invite you to do your own sums and your own research.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[gregorio]

You do realize that a oil wells, pipelines, refineries and all the other related infrastructure is going to destroy a lot more natural plant life than a farm, right?

No, you're wrong. Oil infrastructure is measured in thousands of square foot, instead of ACRES, like farms. It sure sucks to have an industrial city, filled with refineries, but they're not that big and a few hundred thousand sq ft worth of refineries can be enough for an entire state, while a few hundred thousand sq ft worth of farm will not be able to provide fuel even for a small city.

And since lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up, using that land for fuel crops would probably be a good idea.

Economy-wise? Sure? But it will have a net effect of 0% on the environment.

Why clear rainforest when we've got lots of good, unused farmland here?

Well, not in Brazil. In the name of "sustainable energy" and "saving the environment from petroleum", they're destroying a lot of the amazon forest, just to sell ethanol to the US.

And here you completely fail to understand the difference between fossil fuels and biofuels. Burning ethanol and biodiesel releases CO2 that was just recently fixed by a plant. Let's say you burn 1 gallon of ethanol in your car. Now consider the CO2 level over a year-long timeframe: the CO2 level is the same.

There is no such difference. Let's think about two parts of the carbon "cycle", ok? The first part is the emission of carbon: here both kinds of fuel have the same effect. The second part is the absorption of Carbon: dino-fuel certainly doesn't help here, but bio-fuels aren't helping either. To grow sugar cane or corn, you'll have to remove whatever was occupying that land before you came, and even "unused" land contains a lot of plants. So you have a zero increase in your absorption capacity, as you're just replacing one plant for another one.

So we have a zero decrease in emissions and a zero increase in absorption: there ya go, no such thing as carbon neutral. You're releasing the same amount of CO2 onto the atmosphere, while you're not doing anything to improve the planet's CO2 absorption capacity. That's not helping at all.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[rufty_tufty]

"In theory, the place where you are growing corn or sugar cane was already occupied by CO2-absorbing plants, either natural ones or food-destined ones. If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground."

I would argue that that depends on what you do with the farm, if it is sustainable farm, then I believe you would still be overall neutral.

The error to me comes from people see forests as oxygen sources, which I believe is false, for example I believe that the rainforests are in fact a carbon neutral piece of land.

Lets take a simplified system and consider where the oxygen I breathe comes from and how farming would work. Let's simplify things assume i only eat apples. I buy all my apples from farmer Bob down the road.
When an apple is growing the tree is taking water and carbon dioxide (and sunlight) to make sugar, starches and cellulose. this forms the basis of the apple. When I eat the apple my body takes the sugar and starches and reacts this with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and water.
All the oxygen I am breathing therefore comes from the crops that have been planted to produce the food I eat.

Now if I am an idiot and cut down some forest and burn it for fuel, and then let what was the forest turn to scrub/desert then the amount of CO2 in the air has increased. Likewise if I drive my car to get to farmer Bob's then the dead Dino that I burn is added to the CO2 in the air.
However If I cut down a part of forest to heat my house, and let it grow back as fast as I cut it down, then I am neither adding nor reducing the amount of CO2 in the air (excluding the area that has been cut down and is in the process of re-growing).

If I cut down a forest, burn it, then plant a farm however then I have done a one shot release of Co2 into the air (assuming the farm has a smaller mass than the forest which is likely). However from this point on the farm as a unit (assuming no powered vehicles) by definition becomes a source of oxygen because the plants that it grows are converting carbon dioxide and water into food & oxygen. Alternatively it is a farm that produces fuel and oxygen; either way as long as more energy/food/fuel comes out of the farm than goes in in imported products/fuels then the farm becomes an oxygen source which the forest wasn't.

I don't understand where this concept that forests are oxygen sources comes from. If that were true, then you could not have a stable forest because its mass would be either increasing or decreasing. Now I'm not saying we should cut down forest just to have more farms because supply has to match demand for this to work, and I'd MUCH rather have a forest than a desert, in fact provided everyone is fed and we've got fuelled transport, I'd rather have forest than a farm, but i think one of us here either misunderstands the other, or misunderstands how the biological cycles work here.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[gregorio]

In theory, the place where you are growing corn or sugar cane was already occupied by CO2-absorbing plants, either natural ones or food-destined ones. If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground."

I would argue that that depends on what you do with the farm, if it is sustainable farm, then I believe you would still be overall neutral.

The error to me comes from people see forests as oxygen sources, which I believe is false, for example I believe that the rainforests are in fact a carbon neutral piece of land.

Yes, forests are not oxygen sources, as most of the produced oxygen is consumed by the local ecosystem, with lots of animals and other oxygen-consuming members, like fungus, bacteria and stuff. But that was not my point, though. Bio-fuel advocates are always talking about how the "carbon cycle" is what makes bio-fuels the only "eco-friendly" solution available. That's not true.

Yes, corn and sugar cane do absorb CO2, but (repeating it for the Nth time) the plants that were there before also did the same thing. So bio-fuels are only a different method of creating CO2-emitting fuels. They are not a solution to global warming and they are not helping the environment at all, as you'll be dumping shitloads of fertilizer on the soil and using more land than the usual (growing just food).

Eco-activists had decades to brainwash the masses and now everyone hates oil companies and believe that oil is bad just for being oil. But taking fuel out of underground caves is much better than destroying the environment by growing it with fertilizers and destroying forests.

It's impossible (and stupid, or ill-motivated) to help defeating global warming by hating Nuclear (Greenpeace and others) and promoting bio-fuels. Most people will fall for the useless "carbon neutral" argument because they will not think about the net effect of using bio-fuels, they care only about politics and feel-good decisions, not about the real world.

The thing is, I really believe Greenpeace and others are promoting bio-fuels, while complaining about CO2 emissions, just because they think that it's much better to get fuel from somewhere else than from the big corps that they all hate, because of (revenge against) everything that happened in the past. Some of them do that while knowing what they're doing, while the rest does not really think much about anything they defend, as long as it's against the establishment.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[nasch]

You also fail to mention any way that nuclear power would actually work as a motor vehicle fuel. I can mention one, then. If the electricity is cheap enough, it becomes feasible to electrolyze water to produce hydrogen for vehicles. Yes, this process would end up using more energy. But if we can solve the waste problems of fission, or better yet figure out fusion, then it would be worth it because you end up with almost no pollution of any kind, end-to-end (except for whatever is produced by the power plant, which I stipulated that we figured out how to deal with). Fission would have us still relying on imported fuel since I don't think we have enough in the US, but it would be better than importing oil since at least Australia has a bunch of it. And of course fusion would be a means to energy independence.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[dbIII]

I mentioned natural gas and not coal - please pay attention. Also not I ignored the CO2 produced during construction of the plant because I did not wish to split hairs - but since you are consider concrete and how much of the stuff you need. I give you the nuclear industry a compliment and they still push it furthur into fantasy. Zero emissions is a myth everywhere guys - live with it.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[msevior]

1. I'm not the nuclear industry.
2. Gas is a factor of 2 better than coal, not a factor of 10.
3. Concrete is included in the calculation.

Look at the peer reviewed papers on this stuff.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[dbIII]

4. The article is about ethanol from cellulose but that still brings out the nuclear trolls.

I have looked at a few papers but sadly they were worthless becuase they all described nuclear technology that was "just around the corner" but is not installed anywhere and not the existing tweaked 1950s white elephants. There were also gems like the one you can see on the ORNL website that assumes pollution controls are a black box that let out a certain percentage of absolutely everything and use that to make monumental claims about radioactive fallout - however I'm getting way offtopic too.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[msevior]

I totally agree about being off topic and I'm all in favour of research into cellulistic ethanol.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[MacDork]

Because the CO2 "produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion" doesn't change if the cropland is fallow or active.

So the dust bowl in the 1930s never happened. Invented by the government just like the moon landing. Got it!

In addition, the CO2 "produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion" is recently-fixed CO2, and thus not a net CO2 producer.

So it's ok to oxidize organic matter if it was fixed in the last couple hundred years, but if it was fixed over a million years ago, that's bad! You really don't see it, do you? How do you think fossil fuels got into the ground in the first place? Where do you think they came from? Oh, I get it... slamming oil companies for oxidizing organic matter is in vogue, but slamming farmers for doing the exact same thing isn't fashionable. Sorry for my faux pas!

Or did you not notice that the net increase in CO2 in your source is very close to the CO2 released by fossil fuels?

When the net increase *increases* thanks to a poorly thought out corn/bio-fuel scheme du jour, I'll gladly say "I told you so." It didn't take millions of years for CO2 to become fossil fuels. It took millions of years for soil organic matter to become fossil fuels. That soil organic matter got there through regular ol' year long growing seasons. Whether you oxidize it as soil or as coal makes no difference.

I'm sure you're right though. The whole scheme is backed by George W Bush because he cares about the environment. He's demonstrated this many times before. He cares about the environment and issues like Global Warming. His support for this scheme wouldn't have anything to do with winning support for the Republican party in the midwest by raising the price of corn with increased demand due to bio-fuels. He cares! He really does!!

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

example. pick a geologically stable area (australia), pick some where really really remote where there is nothing else valuable and people won't ever want to live there (middle of australia), seal up spent rods in multiple casings of various non reactive materials, dig a big mother fucker hole in an area well outside of any water table, fill it in.

A) Australia is not willing to take the United States's nuclear waste.

B) The "water table" isn't the problem, groundwater is. While soaking nuclear waste in the water table would be worst, groundwater flowing through the ground to the water table can also pick up nuclear waste. That's why dealing with groundwater is a major problem at Yucca Mountain.

C) "Remote" areas of the United States, such as Nevada, are on top of the aquifer that supplies water to virtually the entire central US.

yes. only they tend to keep those to a minimum, because you know, they know what they are doing when they build these things.

And yet the materials do exist, even though they are kept to a minimum. So they still have to be dealt with.

oh please, show me where i said that?

So, what exactly did you mean when you referred to subways and other electrified rail? What, exactly, is your plan to use nuclear power in motor vehicles?

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

So the dust bowl in the 1930s never happened.

No, the dust bowl is just irrelevant in regards to long-term CO2 production.

So it's ok to oxidize organic matter if it was fixed in the last couple hundred years

Your time scale is off. The only plant life that lives that long are some species of trees. The rest die off in at most a few years, and decay pretty quickly. Most plants live about a year.

but if it was fixed over a million years ago, that's bad! You really don't see it, do you?

No, I understand the biology completely. Unfortunately, you appear to be looking at this through an ideological lens. Plus you don't seem to understand where that 'soil-produced' CO2 comes from.

Soil-produced CO2 comes from bacteria and fungi that break down plant and animal matter. It does not come from plants.

Anyway, there used to be a balance between carbon fixed by plants, carbon released back into the atmosphere by damn near everything, and carbon that was sequestered underground. Exactly the same quantity of carbon left the atmosphere as entered it (within a reasonable degree of precision).

That 'sequestered' carbon is plant and animal material that did not decay into CO2 and was buried deep underground. That carbon eventually formed coal, gas and oil. By burning these fossil fuels, the sequestered carbon is released into the atmosphere, and we've upset the balance.

but slamming farmers for doing the exact same thing isn't fashionable

Farmers aren't oxidizing organic matter. Farmers are fixing CO2. If growing plants created more CO2 than plants fixed, our atmosphere would not have any oxygen, since plants produced the majority of the oxygen.

When the net increase *increases* thanks to a poorly thought out corn/bio-fuel scheme du jour, I'll gladly say "I told you so."

Imagine this: we measure the C02 level in the atmosphere. Then I spend 9 months growing a few billion acres of wheat. That wheat takes CO2 out of the atmosphere in order to create the plant matter that makes up the wheat. Then I burn it all in a wheat-fueled incinerator, I get complete combustion, and we measure the CO2 level in the atmosphere again. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the same as it was at the beginning of this 'experiment'.

So how, specifically, could biofuels increase CO2 in the atmosphere? Please describe exactly how it would happen, assuming we've replaced all fossil fuel usage with biofuels.

That soil organic matter got there through regular ol' year long growing seasons. Whether you oxidize it as soil or as coal makes no difference.

Yes, it makes an enormous difference. As I said before, there's 2 ways carbon leaves the atmosphere, fixing into plants, and sequestration. The sequestered carbon becomes fossil fuels. Releasing that carbon is what upsets the balance and leads to a net increase in CO2 level.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

produce hydrogen for vehicles

To quote myself from another reply:

For hydrogen to replace gasoline/petrodiesel, we'll need some significant advances in fuel cell technology (to commoditize them), as well as replace virtually all of our current fuel distribution system.

OTOH, biofuels can be burned in the same diesel and gasoline engines we're using today, and re-use most of the existing gasoline/petrodiesel infrastructure.

Hydrogen is a great idea in about 20 years or so. We could be using biofuels today.

Fission would have us still relying on imported fuel since I don't think we have enough in the US

Actually, the US has a significant chunk of the world's Uranium deposits. Because of how long the fuel lasts, we wouldn't have to import anything.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

There is no such difference. Let's think about two parts of the carbon "cycle", ok? The first part is the emission of carbon: here both kinds of fuel have the same effect. The second part is the absorption of Carbon

And the third part, which you've left out, is the sequestration of carbon.

Plant and animal matter that does not get eaten by fungi, bacteria or other animals ends up deep underground, where it's out of the atmosphere (obviously). It then becomes coal, gas or oil. By burning that carbon, we release it back into the atmosphere, and upset the balance of the carbon cycle.

To grow sugar cane or corn, you'll have to remove whatever was occupying that land before you came, and even "unused" land contains a lot of plants.

The plant density on a farm is far greater than the 'natural' plant density. As such, farming previously fallow land increases the amount of CO2 fixed by the plants on that land.

You're releasing the same amount of CO2 onto the atmosphere, while you're not doing anything to improve the planet's CO2 absorption capacity

You need to spend a minute thinking some more about this here. You're claiming that if we all used 100% biofuels, we'd manage to release more CO2 than the plants fixed before we turned them into biofuel. Besides violating thermodynamics, where does the extra carbon come from?

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[nasch]

I didn't say anything about fuel cells, though that is one possibility. We can also make hydrogen-burning internal combustion engines now. And as for replacing the infrastructure, if my plan comes to fruition that could consist of an electrolysis station and hydrogen tank in your basement, with a refueling hose in the garage. I might pay a few thousand dollars to never have to go to a gas station again. :-)

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[MacDork]

The rest die off in at most a few years, and decay pretty quickly.

Bingo! What do you think is trapped in decayed plant matter? Hydrocarbons.

No, I understand the biology completely. Unfortunately, you appear to be looking at this through an ideological lens. Plus you don't seem to understand where that 'soil-produced' CO2 comes from.

No, you're still missing my point. Fallow land looks like this:

CO2 -> live plant -> dead plant -> soil organic matter

This goes on for hundreds of years. Lots of carbon builds up in the ground that way. Sometimes that carbon gets buried for millions of years turning it into fossil fuels:

soil organic matter -> buried millions of years -> fossil fuels

You are complaining about the combustion of fossil fuels because it releases CO2:

fossil fuels -> oxidation -> CO2

Plowing exposes soil organic matter to natural weathering which results in erosion/oxidation and releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. Therefore, a plan to take land not currently in crop production to grow corn for bio-fuels looks like this:

soil organic matter -> oxidation -> CO2

Look familiar? I'm not talking about the CO2 that is in the air that you plan to recycle. I'm talking about the CO2 already captured in the ground where it will stay until you start your plows. Putting more land into crop production will release that CO2. You're essentially burning tons of fossil fuels before they become fossil fuels.

Besides that elementary fact about the carbon cycle... Keep in mind that farmers use lots of lime to raise the pH of acidic soils rich in organic matter.... CaCO3 + H -> Ca + OH + CO2. Then there's nitrogen fertilizer, used abundantly in corn production... yielding acid rain, smog, holes in the ozone, and greenhouse gases. Hooray!!

The sequestered carbon becomes fossil fuels.

Not if you oxidize it before it gets there.

Releasing that carbon is what upsets the balance and leads to a net increase in CO2 level.

And that's exactly what will happen with this retarded corn bio-fuel scheme. Releasing billions of tons of sequestered carbon that lived happily as soil organic matter until you decided to plow land it was trapped in. I'll assure you the people advocating this scheme know this. They only care about themselves and their corn prices. Starving people be damned, lets burn food!

If you really cared and wanted to reduce CO2, you'd be advocating no till farming. Maybe algae based bio-fuels would accomplish the goal of reducing CO2. Personally, I don't see CO2 as a problem, but if you do, you should at least know that this scheme is a really bad idea on a number of different levels. Sorry if any of this sounded condescending, but having to explain this stuff over and over again to people who've been misled by the talking heads isn't very rewarding. Don't let people with hidden agendas (Bush, realclimate.org, etc) lead you around by the nose.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

You're forgetting the storage problem.

H2 leaks through everything when stored as a gas. Chilling it or compressing it to liquid form takes a lot of oomph. Not to mention the gigantic storage tank you'd have to strap to your car, in order to carry enough H2 for a decent range.

As I said, hydrogen holds promise after lots of R&D. Biofuels work now, in the vehicles we already drive.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[jeff4747]

CO2 -> live plant -> dead plant -> soil organic matter This goes on for hundreds of years.

No, it doesn't. The dead plants decay very quickly back to CO2. As in under a year in a warm, wet climate and a grassy plant. Carbon does not build up in the soil. If it did, we would find fossil fuels everywhere.

Unless the organic matter falls into a swamp, bog, or other oxygen-poor environment, it will decompose quickly. If it does fall into a swamp, bog, etc, the organic matter will end up as a fossil fuel.

I'm talking about the CO2 already captured in the ground where it will stay until you start your plows.

There is no such captured CO2. Carbon sequestration is relatively rare, compared to decomposition.

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[MacDork]

So NASA is full of shit. They don't know what they're talking about. Got it! Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Why don't they burn the wood chips

[flyingfsck]

boil water and produce electricity? That should be a lot more efficient than turning it into moonshine.

Re:Why don't they burn the wood chips

[Courageous]

Because they are specifically looking for a liquid fuel that can be used in internal combustion motors.

I know, I know, you're thinking: electric cards, electric semitrucks, electric tractors, electric everything. Well it's not so easy.

Liquid fuel appears to be a better energy sink than batteries at the moment by a long shot.

C//

Free energy

[davidwr]

One unit in, 16 out, wow, I think it's source of free energy!

Re:Free energy

[Terminal Saint]

That's for one unit of energy WE use to produce it; all that solar power that goes into it is what we're getting out.

Re:Free energy

[Dogtanian]

That's for one unit of energy WE use to produce it; all that solar power that goes into it is what we're getting out. Well, of course. Short of breaking the laws of thermodynamics, the energy is always going to come from *somewhere*. However, as things stand at present, we can consider this as a free and almost unlimited source of energy that is just not as convenient to get at as we'd like.

Sweet

[N8F8]

Time to grab the chainsaw! Stop the bastard neighbor's tree from dropping leaves on my lawn AND fill up my car.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, you do not speak English very well at all. Therefore, I forgive you for not understand that in the English speaking world, the United States of America is ubiquitously abbreviated to just "America". No other county, and not even North or South America is referred to simply as "America". Thus, there is never any confusion about calling the USA "America" when speaking in the English language. When referring to all of North and South America, "The Americas" is correct, for each continent seperately one would refer to the people there as "North Americans" or "South Americans". Unfortunately, you perhaps do not understand enough English to understand what I have just said. Perhaps you can find someone who does to translate for you.

Anyway, I will fix your post for you, using proper English and incorporating also the way your intention comes across.

Subject: I feel insulted because of the way foreigners use their language!

Body: Somewhere else in the Americas there's a plant like this already. So we can't all be inferior in the way that everyone, including ourselves, thinks.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it strike anyone else as odd that "America" is smaller than either North or South America?
Just a thought.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why they are refered to as "The Americas" then huh?

What is the energy net gain?

[philpalm]

If a corn farmer needs to use say 200 gallons of gas to produce 200 gallons of ethanol, you might figure it is a no net gain enterprise. Whatever carbon dioxide used to make ethanol is canceled out by the same amount of carbon dioxide gas made buring gasoline. However with more experience and practice the equation may be changed with efficiency and pipelines added to reduce costs and buring of gasoline.

Uniquely in California the mash leftover, after making ethanol, the wet mass is fed to the cows eliminating some of the waste products of producing ethanol.

As more cellulose is converted into ethanol, more of the cellulose waste is disposed. California is hoping their process will eliminate the ricestalk waste left over from rice producing. Inefficient though the early processes may be, with practice they hopefully will become more efficient and not need subsidies. Not all processes will be an economic winner or an ecological achievement but unless tested who knows if they could possibly become a wining process?

Re:What is the energy net gain?

[mdsolar]

Combining feedlots with ethanol distilleries is not unique to CA. This is becoming pretty standard. Remember, when you have mash left over, you are not converting cellulose (much). It is the sugar starch and caorbohydrate which is being used.
--
Solar power with no system purchase: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

This is great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Rape and Pillage the price of Corn? I THINK NOT, SIR

No, you idiot.

[MrTrick]

X amount of raw cellulosic product in, plus 1 unit of energy to power the process.
The output is enough ethanol to generate 16 units of energy.

In practice, these plants often loop part of the output back to power itself, so the process is simplified to:
X of raw cellulosic product in, 15 units of energy out.

Which is pretty cool.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[MightyYar]

So, what do you call people from the USA? U-S-A-ians? Unite-ites? States-ians? Of-ins? Like it or not, we have the word "America" in our name, so people the world over call us "Americans". It's not like we claimed the name out of conceit - it's how everyone refers to us. Fortunately, there is no other North or South American country with "America" in the name... so I don't know why people keep bringing this up. It's not like we're stepping on someone's toes.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

"educated Spanish speakers may think"

That's a bit rich coming from an Yank isn't it? I can just see you there with your big fat belly shouting "U S A! U S A!" and waving your little flag.
LOL! Ignorant warmongering racist wanker.

Corn is still a good plant to process there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Throw in the whole thing. we have a major corn glut here in the USA. so much that we destroy it by the semi truck load daily.

too bad it's illegal to send it to countries where people are starving, because most of the US corn crop has been tainted by the Monsato patented disease and has been deemed unfit in the rest of the world.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that *is* why they are referred to as "The Americas", and not "America".

Wan' some rye?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Course you do!

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

America is one huge continent. The USA is the only country that splits it.
Why do you think there are 5 rings in the olympic symbol? The 5 continents: America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Continental_mod els.gif

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what do you call people from the USA?

Gringos.

Re:Corn is still a good plant to process there.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that disease was false propaganda spread by PETA to keep genetically enhanced crops out of Africa?

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll drink to that!

Carbon neutral?

[TopSpin]

If we can create carbon-neutral fuel from waste economically... I've heard the carbon-neutral claim about *anol fuels before. The assertion is that because the fuel is realized from a biological source the net increase in environmental carbon is zero. Either I'm missing something or this is muddled thinking.

Plants mine soil for carbon. Petroleum is widely used as fertilizer due to this. If I dump oil on the ground (or not; perhaps I happen to have rich soil somewhere,) dig it back up with plants, make a liquid from it and burn it in an engine, is this considered carbon neutral? Oil fertilizer or not, carbon that was sequestered in the ground is now in the atmosphere.

Seems fishy to me.

Anyhow, it would be nice to stop bombing atavists for gas; carbon neutral or not there are plenty of reasons to pursue this.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[timmarhy]

nicely put. it does take fertiliser to achieve enough growth to make a decent amount of bio fuel. rich soils don't stay rich with intensive farming. the only way to break the hold of oil on our energy needs to is to completely remove oil from the cycle. you might be able to do that by using fertiliser from another source such as human waste composted by worms or other animal waste.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[Ari1413]

Actually, plants get carbon from the air, and they do it for "free" (solar energy by way of photosynthesis). It's nitrogen that's the issue. It takes energy (and quite a bit of it) to reduce atmospheric nitrogen to a form that plants can use for protein. Fertilizer supplies nitrogen. That's where the carbon "footprint" comes in, since industrial fertilizer production burns carbon (or some alternative energy, of course).

Re:Carbon neutral?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plants absorb CO2 from the air. Where were you during high school biology?

Re:Carbon neutral?

[edbosanquet]

Plants get a lot of their carbon from CO2. That part of the process would be carbon neutral. If the farmers supplement the soil from other sources then its not completely carbon neutral. Plants harvest atmospheric CO2 to make oxygen. If you grow a plant from purely atmospheric CO2 then burn it, you are completely carbon neutral.

If nothing else it is more carbon balanced than simply using fossil fuels.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[mutube]

Plants mine soil for carbon. Petroleum is widely used as fertilizer due to this.

Carbon is from the air (CO2). Fertiliser provides nitrogen in the form of nitrates.

It doesn't change you're argument, it's just information.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[jeff4747]

Plants mine soil for carbon.

There's your problem, right there.

Plants mine the air for carbon. They literally suck up CO2 in their leaves and use sunlight to break it into C and O2. (Technically the 02 from CO2 is turned into glucose, and two Os from H2O are released as O2)

Plants mine soil for other minerals they need to grow, mostly nitrogen to make amino acids.

Petroleum-based fertilizers are primarily Ammonium nitrate, which contains no carbon at all. In fact, carbon would be an undesirable contaminant in fertilizer.

In addition, there are bacteria that are able to get nitrogen out of the atmosphere, and several species of plants incorporate these bacteria in a symbiotic relationship. If you use the bacteria, you don't need nearly as much fertilizer.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[Cadallin]

Wrong! Wrong WRong!

Plants utilize atmospheric Carbon Dioxide as their Carbon source.

Fossil Fuels are used in fertilizer production as an energy source to manufacture Nitric Acid and Ammonia. Because plants mine the soil for Nitrogen, NOT Carbon dioxide.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[Swervin]

Some plants like soy beans fix nitrogen from the air, so they don't need as much fertilizer. Part of the reason why crops are rotated, to cut down on fertilizer usage.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Plants mine soil for carbon. Petroleum is widely used as fertilizer due to this. If I dump oil on the ground (or not; perhaps I happen to have rich soil somewhere,) dig it back up with plants, make a liquid from it and burn it in an engine, is this considered carbon neutral? Oil fertilizer or not, carbon that was sequestered in the ground is now in the atmosphere."

Plants obtain most of their CO2 from the atmosphere or sometimes a fraction is from CO2 in the tiny air spaces in the ground (most of the CO2 there from the decay of other plant material by aerobic bacteria, so, ultimately, most CO2 is still coming from the air, even if indirectly through decay of dead plant material in the soil). Practically all the carbon in a plant is derived from the atmosphere.

The use of "petroleum" as "fertilizer" relates to both the energy for processing fertilizer, delivering it, and as the source material for making certain types, but it is irrelevant as a carbon source for plants. Most fertilizers are addressing other nutrient needs, such as not enough potassium, calcium, trace metals, fixed nitrogen, etc. Generally speaking, there is no CO2 supplementation for plants in an agricultural setting, with the exception of certain types of greenhouses (where they pump in extra CO2 to enhance the growth, but this only works for some types of plants and when other factors are not limiting the growth). Doing this in an open field would be futile, and oil wouldn't make a speck of (positive) difference to such an effort, because it's the CO2 concentration in air that matters and the carbon in oil is mostly trapped in various molecules that would be indigestible to a plant.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[timmarhy]

he is slightly off on his botanical anatomy, but he is still right. significant oil and natural gas is required to produce the fertiliser to grow the plants. bio fuel is not the carbon free fuel it is toughted as.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[jeff4747]

significant oil and natural gas is required to produce the fertiliser to grow the plants. bio fuel is not the carbon free fuel it is toughted as.

As I touched on in my post, there are alternatives to fossil-fuel based fertilizers. As such, biofuels can be carbon-neutral. But even if we use fossil fuels for fertilizers, that will still release a very tiny fraction of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[Cadallin]

Actually those species have a symbiotic relationship with Nitrogen Fixing bacteria that grow in what are usually nodules in the root system. Exceptions include Carnivorous plants like the Venus Fly trap, which consume insects to digest their protein as a nitrogen source. But that's beside the point. The post I was replying to originally claimed that Plants absorb Carbon from sources in the ground which is absolutely wrong. Plants respire, and absorb Carbon Dioxide from the air (or water, for freshwater or marine algae). Plants obtain Carbon from Carbon Dioxide absorbed through their leaves. Plants absorb water, Nitrogenous nutrients, and salts and minerals through their roots.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[the plant doctor]

Side note to the topic at hand. The reason for rotation has much more behind it than just fertilizer. Mainly it cuts down on diseases, and other pests like insects or nematodes. You are correct though, rotating corn or wheat after soybeans does have the benefit of requiring less N.

Re:Carbon neutral?

[Red Flayer]

So plant nitrogen-fixers (like beans) in with whatever you want to use for fuel. The nice thing about cellulose reduction is that monoculture isn't necessary for efficient yields. Sure, the yields will be slightly lower, but beanstalks are made of cellulose as well...

Kudzu?

[q2k]

Finally, a use of all that damn kudzu that is taking over GA

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

You can call yourselves Americans.
But the continent was always America, and not Americas or North and South America.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Dogtanian]

America is one huge continent. The USA is the only country that splits it. Wrong; they are called "North America" and "South America" in the UK, and probably many other countries too.

Why do you think there are 5 rings in the olympic symbol? The 5 continents: America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Let me tell you something; at its thinnest point, the connection between North and South America is significantly narrower than that between Africa and Asia.

More significantly, I have *never* seen a truly convincing argument or explanation as to why Europe and Asia are (or were ever) considered separate continents- it seems to be a cultural distinction, which has nothing to do with physical geography. At any rate, North and South America are *far* more separate then Europe and Asia are.

Ironically, you can see this in the picture that you linked to.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like we claimed the name out of conceit . . .

Actually, I am pretty sure it was claimed out of conceit, manifest destiny and all that.

Nice to see Georgia in some positive news

[mooncaine]

Nice to see Georgia in some positive news for a change. Here's hoping it inspires Georgians to other innovative ideas in the future.

Re:Nice to see Georgia in some positive news

[Evil Poot Cat]

I know. Even if it's the same back-slapping, "shower federal dollars on the faithful" type of deal that goes on around here, at least it might eventually result in something useful.

And there's plenty enough waste from the paper industry out that way, to feed an ethanol operation indefinitely.

Thermochemical?

[purduephotog]

The only thermo-chemical method of producing alcohol from cellulose that I know of uses concentrated sulfuric acid. If this is what they're doing...

And their explanation of expensive enzymatic reactions? Hogwash. Enzymes work for 1000's of turnovers (at a minimum) before they become poisoned and lose their efficiency. They don't go to ethanol solutions, they go to starch solutions, which then get converted to sugar (think beer), and THEN get converted to ethanol.

That goes into a refluxing column, add a couple of zeolites or corn grits to dry it to 100% Ethanol, and you've got Fuel!

Enzymes are where it's at.

Re:Thermochemical?

[mdsolar]

They are actually going to gasification first: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process. The enzymes are expensive (and proprietary) http://www.iogen.ca/cellulose_ethanol/what_is_etha nol/process.html. The extra heat used here probably make the whole thing less efficient, but it may still be less expensive. So far as I heard in May, the enzyme based method is not profitable yet.
--
Solar power is even more efficient: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Thermochemical?

[joto]

The only thermo-chemical method of producing alcohol from cellulose that I know of uses concentrated sulfuric acid. If this is what they're doing...

Yes, if that is what they're doing, so what? Please complete the sentence, as it seems that you have some objections to it, and I seriously fail to understand what's so horrible about using sulphuric acid in a chemical plant. Actually, I would prefer sulphuric acid to be found inside chemical plants, to just about any other place.

And their explanation of expensive enzymatic reactions? Hogwash. Enzymes work for 1000's of turnovers (at a minimum) before they become poisoned and lose their efficiency.

Why is it relevant how many times the enzymes work? It the enzymes are expensive enough, even 1000000 times aren't enough. If using enzymes requires a more delicate setup, as opposed to an industrial process that just boils everything, it can also be expensive. I'm sure there are other possible reasons. If you are so sure this is hogwash, please explain it better, because at this point, I'm more inclined to believe the people behind the company, who have invested their money in it, as opposed to a random slashdot besserwisser.

Re:Thermochemical?

[purduephotog]

How many times and enzyme can be activated is very relevant. The number of 'turn overs' is critical for planning a plant. If an enzyme can snip at the reversed linkage on cellulose only 1000 times before becoming poisoned that means, approximately, 2000 molecules of starch. 200 molecules of starch yields 4000 molecules of ethanol. That's 1:4000, which means a heck of alot of enzyme is going to be needed.

Another place this is very relevant is actually in crude oil cracking. The number of turnovers a catalyst can provide before needing regeneration is critical to the efficiency and profitability of the plant.

(As for sulfuric acid I simply wanted to point out that it's a very destructive, exothermic process)

Re:Thermochemical?

[joto]

No. Unless you also have other data, such as cost of enzymes, estimated cost of the plant, estimated lifetime of plant, estimated costs of running plant, estimated production of plant, estimated cost of raw materials, and estimated market prize of ethanol, and you put it into a formula, it's completely irrelevant.

You were arguing against the claim that enzymes weren't (as) cost-efficient (as the process used in this new plant), and to argue against cost-effectiveness in a complex process such as this, a single datapoint about enzyme turn-over is completely irrelevant. Sure, once you have decided that you are going to use enzymes, enzyme turn-over can be a very interesting number (if enzymes are expensive), but untill you have taken that decision, it's just one number among many, and for comparing the different options, a single number is useless (unless it's expressed in currency/amount ethanol)

Hemp Contains the Most Cellulose

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to other North American crops, such as corn or switchgrass, HEMP contains the highest percentage of cellulose.

This is yet another reason to re-legalize industrial hemp in the US.

This great annual crop, grows in even the most arid lands, virtually anywhere in North America, without the use of pesticides, or herbicides, and can be baled like hay for easy transportation. It can be used to make:

• paper
• rope
• building material
• ethanol
• methanol
• bio-diesel
• hemp-seed oil
• hemp can also be made into plastic.

Why is this crop illegal in the USA? Oh yeah, because politicians and others confuse it with marijuana, and demigog it to death. HEMP is NOT marijuana! You cannot get high from smoking hemp!

Re:Hemp Contains the Most Cellulose

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this crop illegal in the USA? Oh yeah, because politicians and others confuse it with marijuana, and demigog it to death. HEMP is NOT marijuana! You cannot get high from smoking hemp!

No, you can't. But it won't happen until genemod single-generation low-THC varieties that are glyphosate-resistant can be cranked out by the likes of Monsanto and Du Pont. Low-THC and glyphosate-resistant so the public can be convinced that they're not smokeable and that the "bad" natural varieties (low- AND high-THC alike) can be killed through mandatory spraying, and single-generation to ensure that their glyphosate-resistance doesn't spread to other varieties AND to ensure that farmers have to buy their seedstock from the chemical companies instead of retaining some from the last crop.

I could be wrong... and I hope I am... but if I was a soulless multinational that's exactly how I'd play the game. Hey, Big Chem! Got any openings for Regional Directors of Evil? I think we could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Re:Hemp Contains the Most Cellulose

[Anonymous Coward]

As a government research engineer working on cellulosic materials and in-particular working on cellulosic ethanol research I have to question these numbers. Cotton actually contains the highest amount of cellulose and it is the most pure source of cellulose. Hemp is broken down into 2 areas in your numbers, the core and the bast. The bast are the long stringy fibers. Switchgrass is commonly pushed above hemp because of the ease of harvest and the slightly reduced overall lignin content. The lignin content is a beast to work around. Harvest methods are important though, the more difficult the harvest technique the higher the cost of input and therefore the lower overall returns, both in money and energy.

Re:Hemp Contains the Most Cellulose

[hey!]

Well, to be fair, marijuana is the same species as hemp, just as a pekingese is the same species as a pit bull. Like any other domesticated species, the cultivars of hemp have been manipulated to produce some things that we want, at the expense of things we don't. Marijuana is not very good fiber, and "hemp" doesn't produce enough THC to get high on.

A simple licensing system should be enough to enable hemp production without significantly affecting the supply of drug quality cannabis on the street.

Re:Hemp Contains the Most Cellulose

[Culture20]

because politicians and others confuse it with marijuana, and demigog it to death
It's probably more likely that it's because marijuana can be very easily hidden in a field of Hemp than in a field of anything else.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[MightyYar]

I think that it's a pretty safe bet that the continent was not known as "America" by the pre-Columbus inhabitants. Which continent are you talking about, anyway? North or South America?

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[MightyYar]

I never claimed we weren't conceited, only that the whole English-speaking world seems to refer to us as Americans - it's not our own nickname. We also respond to "Yanks".

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[MightyYar]

You mean like a jackass that posts the exact same joke as the guy two messages up?

Nip / tuck

[Zombie]

Hmm? America making fuel from cellulite? What a good idea. There's certainly plenty of it.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, Mexico is not South America, and yes people in Central America (and elsewhere in this hemisphere) do consider themselves part of the Americas.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[MightyYar]

Well played.

Re:Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the "Hardware" sec

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you go with that definition, almost all stories could fit in hardware. Software? Runs on hardware. Politics? Well, they use computers to run the government. Science? There's a lot of equipment used in modern science, too. You have to draw a line somewhere. Slashdot hasn't updated their FAQ on sections since 2004, so it doesn't include Hardware.

I know nothing about chemistry, but...

[mekane8]

Does this mean I should switch my home-brew moonshine still to using compost instead of sugar? Will I get more "bang for my buck" fermenting some cellulose? Or am I missing the point completely?

Ethanol from Kudzu?

[Soong]

just sayin, that'd be awesome.

Re:Ethanol from Kudzu?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudzu destroys nutrients in the soil, sadly. It would never last...

Re:Ethanol from Kudzu?

[Dr. Cody]

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke's remarks on the "Baghdad battery":

If we had developed the technology for converting kudzu to energy in the 19th Century, we would now have colonized all the visible stars in the night sky.

What is the environmental impact, in comparison?

[r_jensen11]

I know that the existing ethanol production systems have enormous tolls on our groundwater supply. How does using cellulose compare? Remember: there is more to the environment than just emissions. One of the last things we need is the Great Plains to become The Great Dunes

I'm worried

[bagsc]

If cellulosic ethanol works, say goodbye to things that are mainly made of cellulose, like rainforests. You think Indonesia gives a shit where the ethanol they sell you comes from? There's something much worse than global warming, and that's deforestation. If this technology works, its more dangerous than nuclear power to the ecology, and we need to be very careful who learns how to use it.

Re:I'm worried

[pkbarbiedoll]

See your point, and I share in your general concern. However cellulosic ethanol, as produced using Range Fuel's proprietary technology, can be produced from just about any green biomass.. including corn stalks, cobs, switchgrass, sugar cane, agricultural waste, pig shit and wood chips/sawdust.

What encourages me about this is we will be able to produce a very efficient, clean burning fuel domestically. As will just about any country that can grow wheat straw, corn or whatever else. Remember this is just the first wave of technology. Soon we'll be making fuel from algae. :o)

Re:I'm worried

[Philotic]

How is this any different from chopping down rainforests to grow corn for traditional ethanol production?

Re:I'm worried

[syncrotic]

So it's more dangerous than one of the safest energy sources in the world? You fail at hyperbole.

As long as you're around...

[StarKruzr]

Care to explain why someone might have tagged this story "badnews?"

How could this be bad news in any context?

Re:As long as you're around...

[Ajehals]

Presumably its potentially bad news if you are an oil producing country and want to still be selling oil to the states in 50 years time (at whatever ridiculous rate). Its also potentially bad news if you currently produce ethanol from corn and want to continue to supply it in the future.

Although I agree with you its good news from, an economic, geopolitical and environmental point of view at least.

Re:As long as you're around...

[ivan256]

They're building it across the street from him?

And he used to have an ocean view?

And he owns an energy company who lost a competing bid for the permit?

Re:As long as you're around...

[Gibbs-Duhem]

I mean, it's bad news if the research is fraudulent and money that could be spent on better technologies is being diverted into shareholder pockets.

But in order to make one really big breakthrough, an awful lot of money has to go into studying things that do not work and never will work. It looks like in this case, it's privately funded, which seems to frequently mean that it's more likely to be a commercial success (although still far from guaranteed... I'm comparing this to DARPA's perpetual motion machines).

Re:As long as you're around...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ethanol is very dirty to burn.
It's bad news if we believe that, because ethanol's set of pollutants is different than gasoline's set, ethanol is cleaner than gasoline somehow.

Re:As long as you're around...

[Breakfast Pants]

Bad news for corn farmers?

Re:As long as you're around...

[MillionthMonkey]

Care to explain why someone might have tagged this story "badnews?"

I figured it was because this plant will generate a third of a gallon of ethanol per year for each of us. That will get you about one trip to the local store. I hope this is just a proof of concept.

Re:As long as you're around...

[Firethorn]

Considering that it is the 'first in america', I'd call it a proof of concept - and test of profitability.

It turns enough of a profit, they'll spring up all over the place. I mean, we'd only need like two thousand more of them if they prove out. At 1000 jobs each(estimated), that'd be 2 million jobs for a substantial portion of our liquid fuel consumption.

Now, I have a problem with the idea that they're going to be fueling it with wood chips(not exactly an annual crop), but I'm sure that can be adjusted.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[mechsoph]

More significantly, I have *never* seen a truly convincing argument or explanation as to why Europe and Asia are (or were ever) considered separate continents

Well, I had always assumed they were different tectonic plates separated by the Urals, but apparently that's not the case.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Zzzoom]

> America is one huge continent. The USA is the only country that splits it.

If by "splitting" you mean having shores on both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, then by "only" you mean Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Chile.

How does this meme get propagated?

[StarKruzr]

The existence of advocacy for both cellulosic ethanol and algae-derived biodiesel shoots your ridiculous envirowhackery full of holes.

Biodiesel is not a carbon SOURCE. Petrodiesel is a carbon source in that it takes carbon that was NOT part of the biospheric carbon cycle before and MAKES it part of the carbon cycle.

This is not hard to understand. Try retaking 9th-grade earth science, chief.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[timmarhy]

maybe you should retake it to while your at it.

you don't just push a seed in the ground and it grows you know, it takes lots of ammonia nitrate to grow crops on the scale you are talking about, the production of which requires lots of oil and gas.

all you are doing is fooling yourself into thinking there's no oil being burnt, when really you are just pouring the oil (in another form) on the plants then burning the plants.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[fredklein]

you don't just push a seed in the ground and it grows you know,

Um, yes it does. Beleive it or not, plants were around long before fertilizer ('ammonia nitrate') was created.

Now, if you are talking about 'forcing' the plants to grow faster and bigger, then YES, farmers can and do use a lot of fertilizer. But fertilizer can be made of other things than ammonia nitrate. Imagine fields fetrilized by human (and other animal) waste. Since it's not a food crop, there is no health issue.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[MadAhab]

Funny, I must have missed the black helicopters dumping fertilizer on the forests and fields next to my house.

The whole point of cellulosic plants is that we don't have to use craploads of fertilizer and pesticides to push production of one single overengineered monoculture of corn...

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mate, stop giving australians a bad name. Humanure has been used for millenia in sustainable cropping in numerous civilisations. If you are only removing carbohydrates and nitrogen then any number of nitrogen fixing species will provide a sustainable crop.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[Alioth]

That's the whole thing about cellulosic ethanol. It can be made from weeds on marginal land, without requiring fertilizer. That's why it's so much superior to corn.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[lahvak]

and no, you can't just pour human waste on fields to fertilise crops, food crops or not. significant processing is required to even think about using human waste. it would not be a practicle solution.

Dumping raw unprocessed human and animal waste on fields certainly works. It has been used for thousands of years by farmers all around the world. It does have some problems: if you use it on a food crop, you run a risk of spreading all sorts of diseases. Also, it really really stinks.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[gregorio]

The existence of advocacy for both cellulosic ethanol and algae-derived biodiesel shoots your ridiculous envirowhackery full of holes.

The existence of "advocacy for both cellulosic ethanol and algae-derived biodiesel" shoots my argumentation about the reason behind some of this advocacy? Are you nuts? My whole argument is about the advocacy you just mentioned.

Some people are bio-diesel advocates because they want to make money, some are because of other reasons, and some are because they just hate oil companies.

Biodiesel is not a carbon SOURCE. Petrodiesel is a carbon source in that it takes carbon that was NOT part of the biospheric carbon cycle before and MAKES it part of the carbon cycle.

Sugar Cane and Corn are not carbon neutral. Unless you're removing houses and buildings to replace them with sugar cane, you're not helping the environment at all. Is doesn't matter that sugar cane will get CO2 from the atmosphere, because anything growing at the same spot will achieve the same effect.

By replacing dino-fuel with ethanol, we're throwing the same amount of CO2 onto the atmosphere, while the fact that growing the fuel "captures" CO2 is irrelevant because some other plant was already doing that before you removed it to plant sugar cane. So the NET EFFECT of using bio-fuels is ZERO. In fact, it's even worse, because removing natural forests to plant sugar cane is just stupid.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[rufty_tufty]

Crop rotation!

Now if it is profitable to do this under current agricultural economic conditions is a question/discussion I don't know much about. However I know from my history classes they used to do this in medieval England with much success. I'm lead to believe even "The greatest story ever mistook for fact" (The Bible) has something to say about this subject too. (Yes I do appreciate the irony of citing that reference here).

So don't mistake 'economic in the current environment' for 'sustainable'.

Not sure about human waste, but 'round my parents house animal waste is routinely flung onto the fields (shit spreaders) from what is collected in the cow sheds without any pre-processing. I'm sure some human waste could be mixed directly into this without any processing - not sure this would scale on one single farm, but if every farm did a little bit it would soon add up.

You don;t have to save the whoile world at once, just everybody do a little better

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[hickory-smoked]

So the NET EFFECT of using bio-fuels is ZERO.

Yes. Hence the term carbon neutral.

And you're still ignoring the existence of algae tanks, increased bio-mass production though agriculture, and the carbon storing properties of switchgrass roots. I think you're being deliberately misinformed.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[TheRaven64]

The continents I was taught were:

• Eurasia.
• Africa.
• North America.
• South America.
• Australasia.
• Antarctica

According to Wikipedia, Australasia is actually a part of Oceania, although the only time I've seen the term Oceania used before has been in 1984, to refer to the the Americas, the British Isles, Australia, and a few other scattered bits of the world.

In the linked map, this is the '6 continent' model, although their map calls the south-eastern continent 'Australia,' rather than 'Australasia,' which can't make inhabitants of New Zealand very happy...

Soylent fuel is people

[symbolset]

These can turn waste, be it plastic bottles, dead goats, papers, or pretty much any organic item and turn it into usable crude oil.

So it works on people too?

Re:Soylent fuel is people

[jeff4747]

So it works on people too?

Yes.

Soylent electricity is people! It's People!

Re:Soylent fuel is people

[HTH NE1]

So it works on people too?

Yes.

Soylent electricity is people! It's People!

Sure gives new meaning to the term "green fuel".

First?

[dbIII]

Hang on - I'm way over in Australia and more than six months ago I heard a radio interview with people running an ethanol plant on cellulose in the USA (North Dakota or Montana - not sure which state). Australia's ABC science show ran the story but the podcast and transcripts have most likely gone by now.

Re:First?

[catprog]

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2007/ 1839140.htm

Podcast gone
Transcript still there

Re:First?

[dbIII]

It looks like I got more than just the states mixed up. From the transcript linked above:

So Hill is studying another fuel alternative, one that even President Bush is talking about - making ethanol out of the cellulose in plants. For that, you have to go to Canada.

The next program in the series dealt with the cellulose ethanol in Canada. Forgive me North Americans for getting the USA and Canada mixed up here.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[mutube]

More significantly, I have *never* seen a truly convincing argument or explanation as to why Europe and Asia are (or were ever) considered separate continents- it seems to be a cultural distinction, which has nothing to do with physical geography.

Arguably, any distinction would be culturally (or nationally) based. I'm sure the people of Central America have very different ideas about which bit they lie in than the rest of us.

Europe is another area where regional definitions are being stretched. At school I was taught that Europe was a continent, but that's a status I have difficulty assigning to it. We're firmly in the West bit of Eurasia. Thankfully, the EU, if nothing else, will allow us to use the designation of "political entity" once it spreads far enough.

On another point... Isreal in the Eurovision Song Contest?

Too. Far.

Whatever happened 2 fuel cells?

[heroine]

The fuel cell laptop was supposed to appear a few years ago. Still waiting for that one. Coal liquefaction was supposed to appear a few years ago. Still waiting for that one. Now a startup is promoting cellulose liquefaction.

Re:Whatever happened 2 fuel cells?

[Alioth]

Coal liquefaction showed up in World War II - that's how Nazi Germany were powering their war machine towards the end, when they had no oil.

Re:Whatever happened 2 fuel cells?

[Xeth]

It turns out that the proton exchange membranes used for the Hydrogen/Oxygen/Water fuel cells get mucked up pretty easily long-term. Other technologies haven't matured yet.

Re:Whatever happened 2 fuel cells?

[Dr. Cody]

"Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, they had some cool-ass shit."

Craptastic lead, no guts

[Ancient_Hacker]

First the story's lead is total crap. The State of Georgia could print licenses for Interstellar Fusion Drives, for what it's worth. Which is nothing.

So ignore the lead.

Now for the meaty guts of the story..... cellulose to alcohol. Searching, searching, ...... Nope, not the teensy tiniest clue re : how they're doing it. Usually you'd see some words like "chemical process", "patent pending", or names and links to competent colleges, scientists, or chemical companies. Not a one.

As to actual verifiable facts, here's only one, and it's non-sensical:: a 100 million gallon a year pilot plant.

So lacking the tiniest foothold, and plenty of nonsense, we'll have to assume this is all PR crapola.

Re:Craptastic lead, no guts

[Quiet_Desperation]

The State of Georgia could print licenses for Interstellar Fusion Drives, for what it's worth. Which is nothing.

Yeah, but I'd still totally want one for my office wall at work. :)

Re:Craptastic lead, no guts

[MadMidnightBomber]

You need to improve your google-fu. Second hit for "celluose to sugar". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol

Re:Craptastic lead, no guts

[Ancient_Hacker]

>You need to improve your google-fu. Second hit for "celluose to sugar". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol

Just like I said. The article was crappy-- the writer was too lazy to even do a Googling to provide background or links.

And some of us, after trying to get anything meaty or balanced out of Wikipedia, have pretty much given up on Wp as a source of anything more reliable than reviews of every Simpson episode. Even there, I'd rate the episode where Homer sees a Japanese commercial with his image on it much higher. :)

In particular the aforementioned article is long on big chemical words, very short on any balanced holistic economic analysis.

Gasification and Subsequent Fuel Synthesis

[RGRistroph]

I have been doing some armchair research on gasification for a while. My original goal was to make a gas synthesizer that would be attached to a vehicle or small generator, as people did in some places during WWII. I have become less enthusiastic about that project, as I have come to realize it will be difficult to make any device that doesn't have the potential to kill you with carbon monoxide.

If you are interested in the chemistry and thermodynamics behind gasification you should obtain and read "Synthetic Fuels" by Ronald F. Probstein and R. Edwin Hicks, published by Dover (1982, 1990, 2006), ISBN 0-486-44977-7. The first portion of it deals with gasification. The later parts of it deal with taking the "synthesis gas" and forming it into bigger molecules of methane or even liquid fuels. The amount of energy consumed, and the heats and presures and sometimes expensive catalysts, are fairly depressing to the backyard hobbiest.

However, it might be possible to build something that gasifies waste into hydorgen and steam and carbon dioxide, which would then be burned in an engine. A recent slashdot article about a gasification procedure that uses microwaves seems hopeful, because if you gasified in the presense of steam with no oxygen you might have less carbon monoxide. Usually, oxygen has to be present because a portion of the waste is burnt in the same chamber as the gasification occurs, to provide the heat needed.

Of course, playing around with a microwave magnetron has it's own dangers as well.

I believe it is possible to build an apparatus about the size of two shipping pallets and 6 feet high that would take in household garbage and yard waste and produce a considerable amount of electricity. Whether it would be economical, except in places where grid electricity is not available, is a different matter. Having it produce a liquid fuel suitable for storage and use in an internal combustion engine seems like a big leap, but that's what I would like to aim for.

This will disappear

[SilverBlade2k]

Watch how this plant will either not be finished or 'amazingly run out of funds'.....curiosity of OPEC.

opportunity costs

[falconwolf]

What they fail to figure is the opportunity cost of turning all of that cellulose into ethanol vs. its current use, which is largely animal feed and compost that is used to make products, as cover for off seasons, and to enrich soils for another season of crops. What is the energy cost of destroying your soil or offsetting the loss in other areas of the economy?

Actually there still is residues left after converting cellulose to ethanol and that residue can be used as fertilizer. Better is that what's left is fiber which can be used to make stuff like paper, cordage, and clothing. And if the foodstock used is edible the fiber may be edible as well, and everyone needs fiber in their diet.

The big energy inputs are equipment, water, and soil enrichment.

Take the residue left from the conversion and mix it with manure from factory farming of cattle and pigs, which are currently creating Dead Zones along the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, then compost it. It'll make an excellent soil additive.

Falcon

Re:opportunity costs

[mdsolar]

In this case, the residue is ash because the material is turned into a gas. This can still be used as a fertilizer but it is not the same as returning carbon to the soil: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process.
--
Solar power with no performance worries: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:opportunity costs

[Mateorabi]

Fertilizer is more about giving the plants nitrogen, potasium, and phosphorous than energy from chemical bonds. They get their energy from fusion 8 minutes away. We're after the chemical bond energy in the form of C-H bonds. The plants can have the rest back.

Re:opportunity costs

[mdsolar]

Yes, the main thing about having organic rich soil is that water is retained in way that is generally good for roots. It can also help to retain bioavailable nitrogen rather than having this leach out to the water supply. Putting charcoal in the soil tends to stablize the carbon (it does not rot to CO2 so quickly) while performing a similar service. Here are some other folks in Georgia working on this: http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ecoss/presentations/NH A/Poster_Handout.pdf.

HEMP!!

[PinkyGigglebrain]

Industrial Hemp is a great source of cellulose, yielding almost 4 times more usable cellulose per acre than trees. The same crop could also provide food and textiles. Plus it would be better for the soil with its deep roots preventing erosion, the plant is drought/pest resistant and does not need artificial fertilizers to thrive, unlike corn.

Get the facts at http://www.votehemp.com/hemp_is_hip.html

And please, no lame jokes about how you can smoke it too, I've heard them all and they only show how little you know about the subject.

Re:HEMP!!

[grolschie]

If you can't smoke hemp, why is it always pot smoking hippies that most want to legalize it?

Re:HEMP!!

[Quiet_Desperation]

And please, no lame jokes about how you can smoke it too, I've heard them all and they only show how little you know about the subject.

Exactly! You can bake it into brownies, too!

Re:HEMP!!

[PinkyGigglebrain]

Maybe because they know something you obviously don't.

Sorry the deadpan doesn't work here

[davidwr]

Try to make a deadpan slap at the perpetual-motion crowd. This is Slashdot, I really should've known better than to try.

I figured the photosynthesis link would've been enough. I guess I was wrong.

Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[falconwolf]

If we stopped keeping sugar prices artificially high, and especially if we let Cuban sugar in, it would be amazingly cost-effective.)

Cuban sugarcane is one reason the trade embargo hasn't been ended long ago, and why Brazilian sugarcane isn't being imported into the US. US sugarecane farmers, centered around Lake Okeechobee, FL, hold a lot of political clout.

Falcon

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[Propaganda13]

Two issues
1. Traded dependency on foreign oil to foreign sugar cane
2. Sugar cane crops being wiped out by natural or artificial means would instantly cause problems with the economy and fuel supply.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[sr180]

Many Australians were Irate that we were walked over by the US in our recent free trade agreement. The US decided that free trade doesn't apply to Sugar or Beef, two of Australia's major exports.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[mrchaotica]

1. By and large, sugar cane-producing countries tend to be more politically stable. than oil-producing ones at the moment.
2. At least sugar cane is renewable -- even if one year's crop gets wiped out, another can be planted and prices will go back down.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[Propaganda13]

1. This might be because sugar cane isn't used for fuel yet.
2. No fuel (or a limited supply) for a year is not a good idea. Also you're assuming a disaster limited to one growing season. Crops failures have gone on longer than that. Human caused failures such as defoliants and insect infestation are other possible causes of failures.

We have corn and sugar beet crops that could be used for the regular process. Not sure if soy would work for that also. I do think having a cellulosic ethanol plant (if it works as advertised)is a better option because it should work with a variety of US sources.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[Firethorn]

We have corn and sugar beet crops that could be used for the regular process. Not sure if soy would work for that also. I do think having a cellulosic ethanol plant (if it works as advertised)is a better option because it should work with a variety of US sources.

Soy is best used for biodiesel, if you're going to convert it into a motor fuel. Would probably also be a good base for synthetic lubricants. You could certainly get some ethanol out of the remaining plant, and the rest ends up as feedstock for animals.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[StarWreck]

Well, this plant runs on cellulose and not sugar. So I'm assuming its going to be using Kudzu instead of Sugar Cane.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[indifferent children]

You don't to grasp this "free trade" concept. *You* are *free* to buy *our* government-subsidised products. *We* are under no obligation to accept *yours*.

Next week's lesson: "Globalization, the new mercantilism".

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[tjw]

... why Brazilian sugarcane isn't being imported into the US. US sugarecane farmers, centered around Lake Okeechobee, FL, hold a lot of political clout.

Actually, I think it's more complicated than that. Most of the sugar we use in the US is not cane sugar at all. The primary sugar in processed foods here is made from corn (high fructose corn syrup) which is the main reason why our soda tastes like crap compared to soda bottled in Mexico where they use cane.

However replacing sugar with corn syrup is a relatively new phenomenon. Before this, and the reason that cane sugar is largely absent from our diet in the US, is that the sugar beet industry lobbied to legislate it that way. What most Americans identify as "sugar" is actually made from beets.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[mikkelm]

Trade isn't really free if certain products from foreign countries have prohibitively high tariffs. Just like people aren't really free if they risk getting shot trying to get past the prison walls. Sure, you -could- risk jumping the wall, but you'd be a wanted fugitive for life. Sure, you -could- buy the foreign products if you were so inclined, but it would be at the cost of your business' ability to compete with its rivals.

When you're forced into only having one realistic option, you aren't really free in any sort of way. Same applies to trade.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[mr_mischief]

Which is even better, because kudzu is fairly high in cellulose, grows very quickly, and will grow pretty much everywhere you want it to grow (and lots of places you don't).

Another really good, fast-growing source of cellulose is hemp, but don't hold breath for that in the US. It looks like it could be pot, just like powdered sugar looks like it could be cocaine. So the timber and cotton industries ^W^W^W^W DEA people keep making sure it's illegal to grow here.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[Anonymous Coward]

> What most Americans identify as "sugar" is actually made from beets.

That's as much sugar as anything else. And if you bake your own sweets, you're almost certainly using cane sugar.

And if Jarritos is the standard of Mexican soda, I'll stick with the corn syrup (actually I prefer the "Kosher Coke", easy to spot with the Hebrew on the can, but it's virtually impossible to get outside of NY around Passover)

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[schweinhund]

I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with not funding a repressive totalitarian regime or anything... I'm as suspicious for corporate conspiracies as the next guy, but we should not send our capital to Fidel and his minions for any reason.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[Brickwall]

Most of the sugar we use in the US is not cane sugar at all. The primary sugar in processed foods here is made from corn (high fructose corn syrup) which is the main reason why our soda tastes like crap compared to soda bottled in Mexico where they use cane.

This is true, but the reason for the switch from cane sugar to HFCS was the increase in sugar prices due to the strength of the sugar lobby.

Before this, and the reason that cane sugar is largely absent from our diet in the US, is that the sugar beet industry lobbied to legislate it that way. What most Americans identify as "sugar" is actually made from beets.

Interesting, in that according to the UNFAO statistics (www.fao.org/es/ess/top/commodity.html), the US produced more sugar cane in 2005 than it did sugar beets. However, the 2002 Farm Security and Rural Investment Act (FSRI) Act reinstated allotments. Beet sugar is allotted 54.35 percent of expected domestic consumption and cane sugar is allotted 45.65 percent. So, it's pretty close to half and half beet and cane, and that's just on domestic production. The US remains the world's largest importer of cane sugar from other nations, despite high tariffs.

More interesting facts about the politics of sugar are at: www.opensecrets.org/pubs/cashingin_sugar/sugar02.h tml

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[falconwolf]

Most of the sugar we use in the US is not cane sugar at all. The primary sugar in processed foods here is made from corn (high fructose corn syrup) which is the main reason why our soda tastes like crap compared to soda bottled in Mexico where they use cane.

All too true. Because of the high high fructose corn syrup in prepared foods the diet is poor for too many in the US. Though not successful I try to stay away from it, the only tyme I willingly use it is when I brew. I use it for beer, bock, or lager but I prefer fruit and maybe a bit of honey for wine.

What most Americans identify as "sugar" is actually made from beets.

It's still sugar, just not from sugarcane. There are many types of sugar, both complex and simple sugars. And with starchs, they are carbohydrates.

Falcon

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[AndersOSU]

Illustration #47 of how the US is China's bitch.

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[gstoddart]

Many Australians were Irate that we were walked over by the US in our recent free trade agreement. The US decided that free trade doesn't apply to Sugar or Beef, two of Australia's major exports.

Free trade with the US is a suckers game.

As a Canadian, we've observed for quite a long time that the US refuses to adhere to the definition of 'free' or 'trade' in most contexts. Even in light of WTO rulings, they basically don't care. To them, free trade means they have access to your markets, and you can sell them products as long as you're not undercutting their own domestic industry. (ie. they'll take cheap goods and new export markets, but won't accept competition).

The current administration (and, to be fair, the previous few) have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be very protectionist. Unfortunately, they've been pushing fair trade with everyone and then side-stepping the treaty whenever they wish because their own domestic industries have too much clout.

But, at least in the process, you got their DMCA and other IP laws to protect the interests of their multinationals. So, you've got that going for you. :-P

Cheers

Re:Brazilian and Cuban sugarcane

[mudetroit]

It is a catch-22 for the US. There are two problems you run into with the concept of free-trade, and honestly hit is an across the board problem for a number of countries not just the US. The two prime areas where lesser developed countries can tend to compete directly with a major power are agriculture and manufacturing. They tend to lag behind in engineering, banking, and other service based industries, mostly for educational or capital reasons. The problem that develops is that these are two areas that are dangerous for a country to give up. They are both vital to national security. A nation that cannot produce it's enough food to feed itself is always in a dangerous place. Manufacturing, in particular heavy manufacturing, is vital for a country's national security also, in times of war the inability to produce steel or build planes or tanks can lead to a very quick defeat. These two industries are also in a lot of ways the cornerstones of a productive economy. Manufacturing jobs in particular tend to form the core of a middle class in a productive country. Free Trade in the long term, when everyone gets to a relatively equal standing in economic abilities. The problem is how do you get there? How do you build the abilities of the poor and generally less developed countries while keeping the powerhouses strong also? Wish I could say I had an answer, but it is a very difficult question.

I'm sorry, we're going to have to ask you to leave

[StarKruzr]

Common sense on Slashdot is not permitted.

Can we feed it junk mail?

[J.R. Random]

That is by far our most perpetually renewable resource.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[hmccabe]

You forgot Poland

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[BigFoot48]

Hey! Don't make me come over there!

*gasp*

[Doomedsnowball]

So... we can kill all plant life to destroy the atmosphere? Great! But wouldn't it be faster to just burn all the forests and cut out the middleman? We are already doing that? For McDonald's hamburger meat to have grass to graze? Great! Why is this news? Is getting better at planet-wide suicide news? It is? Great!

How would hemp do?

[falconwolf]

In 1892 Rudolph Diesel designed his engine and ran it on vegetable oil. He used hemp oil amoung them. Then in the 1930s Henry Ford built a vehicle not only using hemp in the construction but was fueled with alcohol made from hemp, hemp he grew on his Iron Mountain Estate. Hemp was found to be a good source for fuel. Also in the 1930s MIT did a study showing an acre of hemp produced more paper than an acre of forest. Eventually some who felt threatened by hemp's industrial uses pushed to make it illegal and via the 1937 Marijuna Tax Act and between them they were successful.

Falcon

Re:How would hemp do?

[kamapuaa]

Hemp isn't used for paper in China, where I reside, either. Hemp is not cultivated as anything more than a niche item in any country, even though the 1937 law you mentioned only affected the US.

It seems the only people in the US who care about it are people who have a problem with the US's drug policy, and their chief argument centers around an law that doesn't even apply for the vast majority of the world.

Re:How would hemp do?

[Xolotl]

Hemp isn't used for paper in China, where I reside, either. Hemp is not cultivated as anything more than a niche item in any country, even though the 1937 law you mentioned only affected the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#Major_hemp_produ cing_countries says you're wrong:

Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany all resumed commercial production in the 1990s. British production is mostly used as bedding for horses; other uses are under development. The largest outlet for German fibre is composite automotive panels. Companies in Canada, UK, US and Germany among many others process hemp seed into a growing range of food products and cosmetics; many traditional growing countries still continue to produce textile grade fibre.

Hemp is illegal to freely grow in the US ... hemp is imported from China and the Philippines. ...

In 2006, hemp was Canada's most profitable crop ...

Re:How would hemp do?

[falconwolf]

Hemp isn't used for paper in China, where I reside, either. Hemp is not cultivated as anything more than a niche item in any country, even though the 1937 law you mentioned only affected the US.

Ne how, You're right hemp is basically only used in niche markets now. However prior to the 1937 act it was widely cultivated in the USA. Thomas Jefferson along with other Founding Fathers of the USA grew it on their farms. TJ even wrote the Declaration Of Independence on paper made from hemp. At one tyme he wrote farmers should be required to grow hemp, he couldn't follow through with proposing such a law though because he knew it would interfer with their rights.

As for other countries, Canada is working on being a big exporter of hemp or hemp products, headed by Alberta. Romania is a big grower and exporter of hemp, and in Europe governments subsidize hemp farmers. Audubon Magazine says it's grown in 32 countries and asks why isn't it legal in the US.

In the US the reason told to the public hemp is be made illegal is that it was called the devil's weed and it made people violent, take a look at "Reefer Madness" which depicts marijuana users as violent and going "mad". However other countries like the Soviet Union made it illegal because, as every study I have ever heard of confirms, marijuana does the opposite. It calms people down and makes them lethargic, "chill babe" or "chill dude". The SU couldn't have it's military unwilling to fight in battle.

Falcon

Re:How would hemp do?

[Suicyco]

That is because there are still the same industrial pressures all over the world. China has a huge chemical production industry. Lets take paper manufacture as an example. To reduce hemp fiber for use as a paper product, a mechanical mill is used, a device invented in America earlier this century which makes hemp use for paper very economical. To reduce tree fiber for paper use, a chemical process is used. This process uses vast quantities of sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid is a consumable which must be continually purchased in order to make the paper. Since china is a very large capitalist society, the chemical industry has a need to keep its product in high demand in order to keep making profits. The paper industry is much smaller than the chemical industry, and thus must bow to their wishes (stated very simply.) It is highly likely that the paper industry in China isn't even aware of the usefulness of hemp paper, since the industrial technology being used is based on American paper production techniques from the 1930's and 1940's on up.

Do you think China is somehow completely seperate from the industrial pressures of the rest of the world? Do you honestly think that industry is a nationalized thing and not a global entity? It has NOTHING to do with the war on drugs. It has everything to do with competing low level products and processes for large scale industrial uses. Hemp is just one example. Paper can be made from flax, corn, straw, etc. using the same process. It is environmentally friendly, and eats heavily into the profits from existing infrastructural industries, which BTW were created as a solution seeking a problem. Large scale chemical production only started this century. These giant companies (whose roots were from oil money, publishing and other large money pre-existing monopolies) have every reason to keep their products in use.

That is just the paper example. Lets not mention biodiesel, etc.

Did you know the diesel engine was invented to run on unmodified vegetable oil? Hemp oil being one of the chief producers of this oil? Do you really think oil companies want competition from some farmers with a lot of land, some tractors and a bunch of field hands?

Quit thinking nationally, start thinking globally. China is just another cog in the world wide capitalist machinery, all professing of "communism" aside. In fact China is one of the more successful capitalist societies on the planet.

pointless

[steveaustin1971]

It doesn't really matter whether we are able to produce alternative fuels, I mean we have had alternatives to internal combustion altogether for years, but the people that make money from the oil and autoparts have literally crushed (really... literally crushed then busted into tiny pieces) the beginnings of a great program that produce fast, zero emission electric vehicles, and they have forced "hybrid" vehicles on us in their place. Unfortunately whats good for earth, and the people is NOT good for corporate bottom lines, and until we are completely out of profitable sources of oil (about 2090 is my estimation)there will not be a viable alternative to gasoline engines in the US. Oil peaked in the mid 90's, but you won't really notice the slide for about 20 more years, but boy will you notice it then.

Now we have to tag this !perpetualmotion

[dch24]

Who tagged this perpetualmotion ?

Are you afraid to back up your accusation?

hemp and switchgrass

[falconwolf]

Switchgrass is one of the better ones. It grows everywhere and is very disease, drought, etc resistant.

Hemp shares those same characteristics. It also has medical uses as well as can be used for bioremediation to cleanup toxic spills and such. Bioremediation can be defined as any process that uses microorganisms, fungi, green plants or their enzymes to return the environment altered by contaminants to its original condition. In this, switchgrass might also be usuable, I don't know.

You can store the wood for a long time or just leave the trees planted. You don't have that option with switchgrass or hemp -- you can't store the stuff or it will start decomposing.

You're mistaken here, hemp can be left alone to grow on it's own. A long tyme ago I knew someone who's family owned land out in the middle of nowhere South Carolina and they had trees of hemp growing. They had one photo of her standing under a hemp plant towering over her. According to this, hemp fibers can get up to 15 foot long, so I'd image hemp can grow much higher.

Besides, as with any type of farming, the best yields will come from a variety of crops rotated to preserve the land as much as possible.

Agreed!!!

Falcon

Re:hemp and switchgrass

[nasch]

It seems like just recently I'm seeing a lot of people here write "tyme" instead of "time". Or maybe it's just Falcon over and over again, I don't know (no offense Falcon). Is this the new "loose"?

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

Oceania is how that continent is known in most (AFAIK all) of the non-English speaking word. Australasia sounds like a perfectly good name for it, too.

fertilizer

[falconwolf]

In this case, the residue is ash because the material is turned into a gas. This can still be used as a fertilizer but it is not the same as returning carbon to the soil:
http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process

Thanks, I didn't realize it was gasified, maybe I missed that in TFA. Yeap, I did: Range biofuels uses a more straightforward thermo-chemical process to gasify the cellulose and then convert it to ethanol.

Falcon

Re:fertilizer

[timmarhy]

again your ALL displaying how little you understand about what your mouthing off about.

if you were going to farm for bio fuel, it's not going to happen in a forrest which has an eco system to support your 1000 year old tree. Its going to happen on a large plantation with nothing but the most optimal plant you can grow for your purpose, in an attempt to get the max yield per square metre. if you didn't, in order for bio fuel to be a real contender to replace oil you'd end up deforresting 1/2 your land mass (which is WAY worse then using oil)

the draw back to this, is that repeatedly growing crops on one patch of soil depletes it quickly, especially when using fast growing crops. this is because thier is no bio diversity in a plantation, no way other then external fertiliser to replenish the soil.

so, if you can't understand the problem now, well sorry but your just plain thick.

Re:fertilizer

[Urkki]

if you were going to farm for bio fuel, it's not going to happen in a forrest which has an eco system to support your 1000 year old tree. Its going to happen on a large plantation with nothing but the most optimal plant you can grow for your purpose, in an attempt to get the max yield per square metre. ...and you yourself just stated, that soon you don't get any yield, if you just grow one plant, harvest it, and don't fertilize. So it doesn't exactly sound as the optimal production method.

Have you considered, that the only elements that we want to extract from biofuel plants are carbon and hydrogen (and oxygen, if ethanol production doesn't use atmospheric O2, I'm not sure how it is). All these come from water and carbon dioxide, which plantes take from the atmosphere, not the soil material (water as rain to the soil first, of cousre.)

Now, if you harvest the plants, put the biomass through ethanol or biodiesel creation process, and return the residue to the soil, then nothing is removed from the soil, so you can keep the production up indefinitely without extra fertilizers (as long as sun is shining, (rain)water is available, and there's CO2 in the atmosphere).

Ideally, the biofuel creation process would add some atmospheric nitrogen to the residue, so the residue would work as a fertilizer directly. This is probably doable in a way that increases total production, even if the nitrogen adding step itself is endothermic.

Also, if some biodiversity increases the fuel-convertable biomass production, then certainly biodiversity will be allowed and optimized to get the maximum production.

In summary, you are wrong. Even if growing plants for food can deplete the soil (because material from the soil is eaten), growing biomass for biofuel does not, as long residue is returned to the fields.

Re:fertilizer

[DarenN]

I cannot believe that the parent post got repeatedly modded troll. Clearly, it was by someone who's never heard of crop rotation or any of the history of agriculture.

If you are only using one crop, or even similar crops, to create your biofuel, and if you want to do it in large scale, it will involve the massive use of fertilizer, which can cause local eco-system problems as well as water table pollution. On top of that, there's the scale problem, which hopefully this cellulite extraction method will help with. The estimates of the land required to produce enough fuel for the States alone is quite daunting. This paper[PDF] estimates that upwards of 50 million acres of forests would have to be cleared, and "the only large reservoir of underused cropland in America is about 30 million acres of land--too dry for corn--enrolled in the Conservation Reserve." Other publications, such as "Energy and American Society - Thirteen Myths" have entire chapters devoted to this problem. So a 13 fold increase in efficiency is certainly welcome. and may help to mitigate these problems

Please note that I am typing this from a terminal with access to a number of subscription based academic services, so if the PDF link doesn't work, sorry!

Re:fertilizer

[falconwolf]

again your ALL displaying how little you understand about what your mouthing off about. if you were going to farm for bio fuel, it's not going to happen in a forrest which has an eco system to support your 1000 year old tree.

And your displaying how little you know. Trees can be used as a source of cellulose as well. And where do you thing all the wood pulp to make paper comes from? A lot of it comes from clear cuts of forest, which isn't sustainable. As for farming, there are Tree Farms and there are fast growing trees. Grow fast growing trees on tree farms and you have a source of cellulose. Of course these tree farms will probably do as much if not more damage to the environment as using petro does. Grown in a monoculture like conventional farmers grow food crops, these trees will need a lot of chemical inputs. However using organic methods and permaculture these chemical inputs won't be needed.

Its going to happen on a large plantation with nothing but the most optimal plant you can grow for your purpose, in an attempt to get the max yield per square metre.

Why use conventioanl agricultural methods and plant a monoculture when on the same land you can grow a mix of crops. Organic farmers don't plant monocultures, they use companion planting. Different food crops can be grow alongside crops for ethanol, much as is done for shade grown coffee, "the bird friendly coffee".

Oh, I see you mention fast growing crops. At the same tyme you mention bio diversity, which I handle above. Instead of growing a monoculture grow different crops together. Shade loving crops, like coffee, can be grown under taller trees. It takes more work but the yield per acre is higher.

so, if you can't understand the problem now, well sorry but your just plain thick.

It seems you're the one who doesn't understand. That or you're a troll.

Falcon

Re:fertilizer

[Moridineas]

wow, I am shocked you got modded troll when the moron you're arguing with so clearly doesnt have a clue!

the moderation system on slashdot is out of control... I'm tired of EVERY article, no matter if it's political or not becoming some kind of ideological slugfest in the comments. What's up with that??

Re:fertilizer

[gregorio]

Now, if you harvest the plants, put the biomass through ethanol or biodiesel creation process, and return the residue to the soil, then nothing is removed from the soil, so you can keep the production up indefinitely without extra fertilizers (as long as sun is shining, (rain)water is available, and there's CO2 in the atmosphere).

It doesn't work like that. At least not with sugar cane. The "residue" does not return from the tanks intact. It will return as a different substance than you had before processing, which already was a different substance than you had in the soil. They're not just bags of atoms, they're complex molecules, processed by the plant's cells (after extracting it from the soil) and the factory's processes (after extracting the fuel).

So it's not as simple as putting it back. And you don't want to throw away precious and expensive sugar. =]

Re:fertilizer

[gregorio]

However using organic methods and permaculture these chemical inputs won't be needed.

Sure they won't, but additional millions of acres (and also millions of immigrants) will be necessary for those methods. The agro-industry doesn't avoid organic methods them because they're just plain evil, they avoid it because it's not the best option available.

Re:fertilizer

[Urkki]

I was talking more about making fuel from cellulose. If I understand correctly, then it does not matter that much what plants you grow, or at least you have a lot wider selection of suitable plants. So you can have more biodiversity to optimally utilize all nutrients in the soil, and you can select plants that are not too fussy about soil quality.

Also, even with sugar cane and other sugar producing plants, if putting the biofuel extraction residue directly back to the fields does not work, then just pile it up and let it decompose for a few years. And *then*, when it's ready-made fertile new soil, then put it back (possibly adding suitable material like chalk to adjust pH). So you'd need enough space for a few years worth of decomposing residue piles, which I don't think would be a problem.

Re:fertilizer

[gregorio]

If I understand correctly, then it does not matter that much what plants you grow, or at least you have a lot wider selection of suitable plants.

Sure, if cellulose is all the processing system needs, then you're right, they can just rotate the crops (plant something different every single time), to avoid exaustion of specific soil nutrients, and keep going.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when does Chile have shores both in the Pacific and the Atlantic?

Mmmmmm Kudzu

[zoomshorts]

Actually I am waiting for the bio-engineers to modify Kudzu genetically as follows :

Insert Cannabis genes for buzz and fiber
Insert Tomato genes for fruit

and let it escape in to the wild. THAT would be bio-engineering !!!!!

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[ancientt]

I am a quiet man, but I laughed so loud at this, my neighbors might have heard.
Thank you.

growing plants

[falconwolf]

you don't just push a seed in the ground and it grows you know, it takes lots of ammonia nitrate to grow crops on the scale you are talking about, the production of which requires lots of oil and gas.

I think you've never gardened. I have since I was little and most of the tyme I've had a garden that's exactly what I did. As for nitrates, there are a number of Nitrogen Fixers such as the various Astragalus species, soya, and the various clover species.

Falcon

Re:growing plants

[timmarhy]

i have a herb garden and i grow organic fruit and veg in my back yard. i also own a worm farm. I've probably done a shit load more gardaning then you.

you see, while i grow organic produce for myself, i'm not going to fool myself into thinking it would work on a commercial scale. your nitrogen fixers take months to repair the soil, and in that time you can't grow anything on that plot while they restore the soil.

the method you are reffering to is rotation planting, and you would require 3x the farm land. in effect you would be cutting down an aweful lot of the eco system your attempting to protect.

Re:growing plants

[falconwolf]

while i grow organic produce for myself, i'm not going to fool myself into thinking it would work on a commercial scale.

So, there are no organic farms? Funny, Willing Workers on Organic Farms has 80 farms in Haiwaii where people can volunteer to work. Local Harvest list 269 organic farms in my area. My coop, The Wedge, which is 5 minutes walk for me is supplied by a number of these organic farms. The same with my other coop, Lakewinds.

the method you are reffering to is rotation planting, and you would require 3x the farm land. in effect you would be cutting down an aweful lot of the eco system your attempting to protect.

Other than using nitrogen fixers I didn't say anything about any methods in the post you replied to, I did mention in other posts that organic farmers use companion planting though. And using companion planting can increase the yield of a given amount of land can produce.

Falcon

fertilizer

[falconwolf]

sure you can just lay seed for the first 2 - 3 years, after that your crops won't grow because the organic matter in the soil will be completely used up.

If plants from seeds die after 2 or 3 years how in the world does a tree live for 1000s of years?

Falcon

Re:Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the "Hardware" sec

[Anonymous Coward]

it's the context that matters. hardware is what makes this story possible, it's the science and the hardware that was missing previously.

Getting past the blogodreck, it's a minor step.

[Animats]

OK, first we get past the blogodreck from some site that wants traffic, and look at the Range Fuels site.

This is funded by Kosla Ventures, which is Vinod Kosla's venture capital fund. That's a good sign; he has a decent track record as a VC. (He was one of the founders of Sun, but he later invested in Excite.) Anyway, they're not looking for money; they've got that.

People have been working on cellulostic ethanol for a while. It's not that hard to do; it's hard to do cost-effectively. Here's an overview of the known approaches. Range Fuels uses a heat-driven process, which of course takes energy to run, but is standard chemical engineering. There's other R&D underway to develop a bioengineered enzyme that will digest cellulose at commercially feasible rates. Such enzymes have been created, but they're too slow and making the enzymes costs too much. Work continues.

Anyway, this doesn't look like the big cellulostic ethanol breakthrough. But it's progress.

I think they're missing something.

[jfekendall]

When they can run cars with the cellulose pumped out of fat American asses then they would be onto something!

Mushrooms that brews beer

[mdsolar]

I've linked to a paper that talks about brewing beer in a mushroom here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/07/toadstools.htm l. It is linked at the word "recursive".
--
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Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[rdoger6424]

You gotta look real south. It's there, trust me

Flight is hard w/o high-energy liquid fuels.

[Kadin2048]

One of the reasons biofuels might still be worth it is as an "energy converter". Liquids are very desirable as fuels from a materials handling standpoint -- they're storeable, they're pumpable and flow through pipelines easily, they're directly measurable, they allow for readings of the quantities sold or stored, they have a fairly high energy density, most of them are stable enough, and they're already well understood by people. We already have a giant liquid fuel infrastructure in place (tankers, trucks, pipelines, storage tanks and filling stations.) And we already have millions of engines designed to burn liquid fuels.

All very true. Add to that one other reason why liquid fuels are very desirable, which doesn't get mentioned often: flight.

There aren't a lot of other sources (none, that I'm aware of) that approach the energy/weight and energy/volume that liquid fuels and liquid-fueled engines do. Most modern electric battery systems are either heavy or take up a significant amount of space for the energy they carry. Compressed or cryogenically-liquefied fuels require much stronger, and thus heavier, storage tanks than room-temperature liquids (although these are probably the next-most-attractive option). And while nuclear-powered aircraft are technically feasible (the USAF played around with the concept in the 1950s or 60s), the amount of shielding you have to remove from the reactor makes them more a form of cheap contraception than transportation. (You end up with "shadow shielding," with a lot of radiation going everywhere but into the pilots, IIRC.)

If we as a civilization want to retain the ability to fly (heavier-than-air craft, anyway) cheaply from place to place, then preserving some sort of production and distribution network for high-energy liquid fuels is a must, at least in the short- to medium-term.

Not unlimited

[mdsolar]

Rooted plants are not that efficient at converting sunlight to energy we can reuse. So, when you try to replace our liquid fuel use this way you end up only being able to do 20% or so. You can do better with algae but it seems to me we get better conversion efficiency using photovoltaics. There are two things going on. Algae may be able to get up to about half the efficiency of current PV panels but since the fuel will be used in a heat engine you take a hit that electricity does not run into. So, you need about 6 times more area for algae as for PV to make a car go the same distance. For rooted plants it is about 600 times more area than for PV. But that is land area we are already using for food for the most part so you end up with a limit on production owing to low efficiency even though there is plenty of energy coming in.
--
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NO WAR FOR SUGAR!

[SnowZero]

sorry, couldn't help myself. As far as price instability, I don't think there's an OSEC yet.

fallow land

[falconwolf]

"lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up"

let me guess, it's all a conspiracy of the big corperations? call me crazy but i don't see high food prices

In case you didn't know, the government does or did pay farmers not to plant. Though this study doesn't say this specifically a study from Reason Foundation, "Free Mind and Free Markets", does have this to say about idle cropland:

E. Farm Output, Land Prices, and the Real-Estate Market

If farmers can grow more food on less land, more land is available for other uses such as open space, commercial development, or housing. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently found that, although cropland acreage has undergone little net change since 1945, whether cropland is harvested, idle, or lays fallow depends on federal programs and economic markets. Strong export markets fueled expansions of cropland in the 1970s and 1980s, but cropland fell as millions of acres were diverted into federal programs. Idle cropland, for example, has varied from 20.5 percent of the total used for crops in 1987 to 5.5 percent in 1982. In 1992, 56 million acres, or 16.6 percent of the total amount used for crops, was idle. An analysis of the causes of farmland loss between 1949 and 1992 by Ohio State University agricultural economist Luther Tweeten found the "lack of farm economic viability rather than urban encroachment" was the principal reason for cropland loss.

And the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau says this:

Acreage Reduction Program The acreage reduction program (ARP) is a voluntary land retirement program administered by the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). A farmer may idle a set portion of their crop acreage base of wheat, feed grains, cotton, or rice. They are not given a direct payment for ARP, but may be eligible for benefits such as CCC loans and deficiency payments. Participating farmers are sometimes offered the option of idling additional land under a paid diversion program that gives them a specific payment for each idle acre. ARP program was eliminated by 1996 Farm Bill.

The Purdue University Department of Agricultural Economics has this to say:

Acreage Reduction Program
From the 1930's, the U.S. has attempted to avoid excess supplies of grain and raise grain prices and farm income by encouraging farmers to voluntarily take some land out of production. The effect of a restriction on land for corn would be to shift the U.S. supply curve to the left.

So yes, the government did encourage farmer to not grow crops. And that's besides the billions of dollars give farmers in subsidies.

no i don't think you understand how biodiesel is produced (yet you seem to support it so vigarously?) a key component of biodiesel is the amount of fertiliser used to produce the crop which uses a lot of - you guessed it - OIL.

Petro based fertilizers aren't need to grow crops. I've been gardening for more than 30 years and not once did I use them. Though al I have right now is a postage stamp sized garden, I'm growing acorn squash, pickling cucumbers, onions, 4 different pepers, 4 tomatoes, and tomatilos. Organic farmers don't use them either. Admittedly though in order to grow feedstock, crops, to produce enough biofuels to replace even a small part of the petro used now without clearcutting forests you need to use petro based fertilizers.

the nasty stuff you refer to is the spent fuel rods, which is easy enough to store.

Forgetting about mining uranium, where are you going to store spent fuel, Yucca Mountain? If you think it's a good place to store nuclear waste I bet you didn't know Yucca Mountain is in a

Re:fallow land

[dwye]

> From the 1930's, the U.S. has attempted to avoid excess supplies of grain and
> raise grain prices and farm income by encouraging farmers to voluntarily take
> some land out of production.

Actually, that is corn (or wheat, or cotton, or whatever used to be grown there) production. I have a relative (father's cousin's husband, to be exact) who uses such land to grow furniture trees (cherry, oak, etc), harvesting a certain portion every 5 years or so. The return isn't as high as wheat, but it is fairly close.

The point being that the so-called idle land isn't just going to waste (except when farmed by idiots or city folk looking for a nice weekend place [his description]); it is being used for something (sometimes just the trees to break up would-be Dust Bowl winds, but something).

> Acreage Reduction Program (stuff omitted)(last sentence is:)
> ARP program was eliminated by 1996 Farm Bill.

Gone 10 years ago. Quit talking about it, now.

> Forgetting about mining uranium, where are you going to store spent fuel, Yucca Mountain?
  (skipping)
And the salt just stays there, rather than washing away, why?

Also, there is always Hawaiia Volcano Nat'l Park. Just dump it into the molten lava and let it emerge as rock in a few years. Let Pele earn Her keep :-) There are large subduction zones around the world, as well. Vitrify it and just leave it around to eliminate idiots, for that matter. The waste can be dealt with, and as someone up sorting mentioned, a coal-fired plant produces more radioactive waste than a nuclear plant, then blows it into the air.

Re:What is the environmental impact, in comparison

[mdsolar]

Much of the water use for ethanol production comes in the form of irrigation. For forests this is not an issue. For fermentation you use about 10 times as much water as you produce in fuel because yeast does not tolerate a very high alcohol content. Portions of this water can be reused in principle since it is not all evaporated upon distilation. Wet mashes are being used more an more for feedlots located adjacent to distilleries. That is water reused for other purposes.

In this case, only enough water to produce syngas is used and this is eventually encorporated into the fuel http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process. So, the water use is substantially less.
--
Switch to solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Three sub-continents

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually is divided in North America, Central America and South America.

Re:Three sub-continents

[Dogtanian]

Actually is divided in North America, Central America and South America. As far as I am aware "Central America" is a political description. Yes, it's useful (and valid) when discussing countries and so on, but I've never heard it referred to as a continent... the only geographical basis for that I see is that it is on a separate tectonic plate.

Plant != plant

[vincnetas]

When first reading i found this sentence confusing : The new plant will be online in 2008. Because plant != plant. ;) As in: plant that produces energy from plants.

two rum to room two two. Try to say it fast and you will find your self singing

freetrade

[falconwolf]

Many Australians were Irate that we were walked over by the US in our recent free trade agreement. The US decided that free trade doesn't apply to Sugar or Beef, two of Australia's major exports.

Freetrade did not mattered to the US government through the 1900s. US businesses and the politicians in thier pockets don't want freetrade, they want the government to raise the prices of thier foreign competitors and give them subsidies. It raises tariffs on imports such as beef and sugar while it hands out billions of dollars to US companies, many of which are really multinational corporations or private equity firms. And both sugar and beef are major Brazilian exports as well.

Falcon

Squeal like a pig!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but Deliverance ruined Georgia for me forever.

Sugar

[Mark_MF-WN]

Thanks for not reading the article... or even the headline. The article is about CELLULOSIC ethanol. You know, cellulose? The stuff that isn't sugar?

You can make cellosic ethanol from grass clippings, those bags of leaves that everyone is getting rid of each falls, fallen tree branches, corn husks, not to mention the tonnes of produce that each and every grocery store throws away every single day because it couldn't be sold.

Corn?!

[Mark_MF-WN]

Where is all of this gibberish about corn coming from?! The article is about cellulosic ethanol -- it's right there in the title. No corn is required. You can make cellulosic ethanol from grass clippings, from tree branches, from discarded copies of Atlas Shrugged, etc. I'm pretty sure those things don't require fertilizer... except maybe the grass, and even then it's only to satisfy the needs of people with so little to entertain them that their sole joy in life comes from getting grass to grow as fast as possible so that they can mow it a little more often.

petro and plastic

[falconwolf]

You're also pretending that I don't want any oil production whatsoever. That's quite impossible, given our need for materials like plastics

Actually petro oil isn't needed to make plastic. Plastic was originally made with the same thing as what this new plant uses to make ethanol, plant cellulose. Eastman Kodak, the camera company, has a good description on making plastic from trees:
From Trees to Plastic

as I said, the "clean" way to deal with the fuel is to reprocess it.

Reprocessing nuclear fuel is not clean. It produces highly toxic waste and the radioactive waste left is even hotter. IEEE's Spectrum magazine had an article in the Febuary 2007 issue on France's, who has gone the farthest on it, reprocessing program "Nuclear Waste Land" . In it the writer, Peter Fairley, goes over the problems the French have with reprocessing, and "the basic problem of waste remains unsolved."

Falcon

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Rakarra]

My understanding is most of the objections of the term "America" come from folks in Quebec who don't like being compared to the non-French-speakers.

Laughter...

[Mark_MF-WN]

No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others

I just had to laugh when I saw this, given that Shell in particular is investing in both ethanol and biodiesel.

I hate to toss around insults, but what a fucking retard you are!! Ethanol is the darling of farmers who want to make money because they're capitalists. See how that works? They turn corn husks and straw into ethanol, sell the ethanol, and make money. Of course, they could just keep living off of government bailouts the way they do right now... but I thought we were trying to get away from that kind of shit.

Biodiesel, meanwhile, is the darling of big industrial companies, who want to use the technologies that they developed for oil refining to turn cheap feedstocks -- like the offal from slaughterhouses, waste plastics, and so on -- into oil. They want to take cheap stuff, turn it into more valuable stuff, and sell it for money because they're capitalists. See how that works?

You communist types make me sick. You think that everyone on earth just goes around subscribing to your stupid little ideologies. Sorry, it's not the case. Most of us are a bit more pragmatic, and would like to make some money rather than your solution of just weeping like a spanked child everytime everytime you gas up your hummer and while paying the Islamic fundamentalist oil-masters.

Oh, and where do you think that the carbon in plants COMES from? That's right -- the air. It's called a cycle -- the carbon cycle. Plants consume CO2, plants die, plants rot / burn, CO2 gets released. Seriously, you ARE a retard. Possibly an inbred one, but there's no way to be sure. How do you not KNOW these things?!? Do you live in a cave? Are you a convict? Have you spent your entire life in a church basement hiding from the Great Science Conspiracy that wants to destroy you with evil notions of evolution and thermodynamics?

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

I just had to laugh when I saw this, given that Shell in particular is investing in both ethanol and biodiesel.

Except that they're doing it for money. They need a plan-B in case their conventional oil operations gets fscked up, as they don't give a crap if they're making money selling oil, coal or magic fuel. They're in the business of making money delivering plastics (a considerable share of their profits) and gas/liquid-state (they're fixed at that because of all investiments on ducts and filling stations) energy.

I hate to toss around insults, but what a fucking retard you are!! Ethanol is the darling of farmers who want to make money because they're capitalists. See how that works? They turn corn husks and straw into ethanol, sell the ethanol, and make money. Of course, they could just keep living off of government bailouts the way they do right now... but I thought we were trying to get away from that kind of shit.

Sure, we have farmers trying to get money from ethanol. Except that they were not the subject, I was talking about the motivations of a specific group of enviro-nutjobs.

Biodiesel, meanwhile, is the darling of big industrial companies, who want to use the technologies that they developed for oil refining to turn cheap feedstocks -- like the offal from slaughterhouses, waste plastics, and so on -- into oil. They want to take cheap stuff, turn it into more valuable stuff, and sell it for money because they're capitalists. See how that works?

Same thing. You completely failed to get the specific context of that discussion. You're just throwing aroud random, unrelated facts.

You communist types make me sick. You think that everyone on earth just goes around subscribing to your stupid little ideologies. Sorry, it's not the case. Most of us are a bit more pragmatic, and would like to make some money rather than your solution of just weeping like a spanked child everytime everytime you gas up your hummer and while paying the Islamic fundamentalist oil-masters.

I'm not a communist, retard, I'm a conservative. Not far right, but a proud right-wing person. You're talking about Islamic oil: that's one reason to run away from oil, ok. But I was not talking about that, I was talking about the environment, about the whole "using biodiesel helps the environment" shit-talk.

Oh, and where do you think that the carbon in plants COMES from? That's right -- the air. It's called a cycle -- the carbon cycle. Plants consume CO2, plants die, plants rot / burn, CO2 gets released. Seriously, you ARE a retard. Possibly an inbred one, but there's no way to be sure. How do you not KNOW these things?!?

YOU are a retard. The cycle is irrelevant if you're removing one plant to grow another one. You're not increasing the carbon-capture effect, as you're removing ONE KIND of plant (sometimes natural forest) for ANOTHER one, giving you an extra 0% worth of carbon-absorption capacity. At the same time, you're trading ONE source of carbon (dino-fuel) for ANOTHER one, giving you a whole 0% worth of carbon emission savings.

Re:Laughter...

[Mark_MF-WN]

At the same time, you're trading ONE source of carbon (dino-fuel) for ANOTHER one, giving you a whole 0% worth of carbon emission savings.

How exactly will ethanol involve trading the one for the other? We don't have closed-cycle ethanol production yet, but that's because this kind of mass-scale ethanol production is still being developed. There's absolutely no reason at all to think that cellulosic ethanol can't be produced entirely using energy from the feedstock, and maybe electricity produced using solar, wind, nuclear, or hydroelectric power.

I'm a conservative. Not far right, but a proud right-wing person.

No, you're a proud retard. I've met real conservatives and talked to them about these issues. They're not like you. They try to actually understand science, rather than just going around whining about how the hippies want to take away their SUVs. They also don't use retard terms like "right-wing".

You're not increasing the carbon-capture effect, as you're removing ONE KIND of plant (sometimes natural forest) for ANOTHER one, giving you an extra 0% worth of carbon-absorption capacity.

Who said anything about trying to increase carbon capture? The goal is to create a mobile energy source for vehicles that is carbon-neutral. Not carbon negative, just carbon neutral.

Except that they're doing it for money. They need a plan-B in case their conventional oil operations gets fscked up, as they don't give a crap if they're making money selling oil, coal or magic fuel.

...

No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others

... Remember saying this? My point was that ethanol and biodiesel aren't just being pushed by environmentalists -- they're being pushed by basically everyone except insane retards who fear change and deliberately misunderstand science to try and support their deranged fears. Oil companies, environmentalists, politicians (including conservative, Republican ones), scientists, etc. The only ones who oppose the idea are people who somehow tie renewable power to evil hippy conspiracies against them personally.

I stand by my clain that you are a retard. You don't know jack-shit about how the carbon cycle works, and you've completely dismissed a very promising set of techologies just because a few people that you dislike happen to be among the innumerable masses who support it. It's no different than me saying the Jesus is the darling of maniacs who bomb abortion clinics -- it would be a deliberate misrepresentation of Christianity on my part. Yet that's exactly the position you're taking here.

The stupidest thing is, you're suggesting that whack-job environmentalists love ethanol because it will destroy oil companies ... who are themselves invested in ethanol. Do you understand how retarded that sounds? It's almost as retarded as when you claim that using less petroleum is awful, because we'll kill some plants along the way. And still not as retarded as your drivel about how not increasing global carbon levels is somehow the most evil plan ever devised by man... despite completely overlooking the fact that the oceans will still act as an enormous carbon-sink. Ethanol and biodiesel plans will only put just the tiniest little dent in the carbon sequestration part of the carbon cycle.

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

How exactly will ethanol involve trading the one for the other? We don't have closed-cycle ethanol production yet, but that's because this kind of mass-scale ethanol production is still being developed. There's absolutely no reason at all to think that cellulosic ethanol can't be produced entirely using energy from the feedstock, and maybe electricity produced using solar, wind, nuclear, or hydroelectric power.

I wasn't talking about using oil to product ethanol. Re-read my message.

Who said anything about trying to increase carbon capture? The goal is to create a mobile energy source for vehicles that is carbon-neutral. Not carbon negative, just carbon neutral.

But what about global warming? Aren't bio-fuels the holy solution to that big problem created by those evil Bush voters? Isn't that what "you people" have been preaching all those years while talking about bio-fuels?

No, you're a proud retard. I've met real conservatives and talked to them about these issues. They're not like you. They try to actually understand science, rather than just going around whining about how the hippies want to take away their SUVs.

You're just making shit out. I didn't even mentioned SUVs or talked about hippies. You really suck.

They also don't use retard terms like "right-wing".

When you used the retarded "communist" term, I assumed that you're a fan of old-fashioned, polarized terms, so I just followed your trend. I was just using normal retard-speak, as my audience (you) doesn't seems to be very smart or polite.

You don't know jack-shit about how the carbon cycle works.

No, you don't are the one that doesn't know shit about it. Youre whole theory about ethanol depends on growing sugar cane or corn on top of concrete or at the bottom of the ocean, because replacing forests or other crops with sugar cane does not help at all with the global warming CO2 issue.

Re:Laughter...

[Dr. Cody]

Holy shit, did you just call him a Communist???

In my lifetime, we've had Seventies retro and Eighties retro come in and out of style, but you're the first one I've met who's into Fifties retro.

Re:Laughter...

[Mark_MF-WN]

But what about global warming? Aren't bio-fuels the holy solution to that big problem created by those evil Bush voters? Isn't that what "you people" have been preaching all those years while talking about bio-fuels?

Using biofuels doesn't sequester carbon ... but it also doesn't increase carbon emissions. I'm not sure what it is that you don't understand about this very simple concept. That's why we use the term carbon neutral . Not positive, not negative, but neutral. They even provide a nice buffering system, since any unused biomass can simply be left in place (for forest biomass) or reduced to charcoal and plowed back into the land as fertilizer (for agricultural biomass).

Let's review:

• Step 1: limit the use of petroleum.
• Result: CO2 levels stop rising so quickly. This will at least give the biosphere a bit more time to adapt, and provides a longer window of time in which to research more long-term solutions. After all, the supply of petroleum IS finite, and it would be nice to stretch it out until we've also found ways to make our favourite plastics from cheap, renewable sources.

• Step 2: start using biofuels, to provide a mobile source of energy for vehicles. The global population is expected to peak, so the global demand for vehicle fuels should also peak. Almost everything else can just run on electricity -- but for now, vehicles need hydrocarbons.
• Result: we (you, technically, since I live in a nation with an oil surplus and don't drive anyway) no longer have to pay huge amounts of cash to countries that hate us. Fuel prices are somewhat more stable, because there are many different feedstocks that can be used. CO2 emissions don't increase as a result of this, because biofuels are carbon neutral .

• Step 3: expand the use of nuclear power dramatically (and anyone who says something stupid about nuclear waste gets sentenced to spend the day in the smokestack of a coal plant with a geiger counter; they also get to write an essay on why America's ban on reprocessing nuclear fuel is backwards and paranoid), to supplant at least some of the world's fossil fuel reactors. The remaining fossile fuel reactors are upgraded to be cleaner and more efficient.
• Result: enough electricity to keep our industries humming along, and to supply the power for producing hydrogen (assuming that hydrogen vehicles pan out), as well as for powering electric cars (for those people that can get by with one), yet CO2 emissions level off and the ecosphere gets some time to adapt and balance itself.

• Step 4: laugh at the folks who whined about how evil and terrible biofuels are.
• Result: good times are had by all, except the aforementioned folk, who will probably STILL be convinced that everything was wonderful in the past and that everything is terrible now, no matter how much more peaceful, safe, free, and prosperous our society has become.

Do you understand now?

Maybe you're still confused about WHAT we'll be making biofuels FROM. You still think that we'll be turning corn into ethanol, don't you! That would explain it... you've missed the entire point about cellulosic ethanol -- turning the low-value parts of the plant into something of greater value. It's a wonderful free-market idea. Ethanol is generally worth a lot more than straw, so turning straw into ethanol is a profitable and ecologically sound thing to do. So, we open a bunch of plants that turn cellulose into ethanol, and farmers can make up their own minds about whether to sell their straw, corn husks, diseased plants, etc, based on whether it's more useful for some other purpose or not. The free market sorts it all out. All that's been missing is the will to invest in the necessary science and technologies.

The same goes for biodiesel. Municipal dumps

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

Step 1: limit the use of petroleum.
Result: CO2 levels stop rising so quickly. This will at least give the biosphere a bit more time to adapt, and provides a longer window of time in which to research more long-term solutions. After all, the supply of petroleum IS finite, and it would be nice to stretch it out until we've also found ways to make our favourite plastics from cheap, renewable sources.

I think you mean "limit the use of fuels". Using petroleum will increase CO2 level as much as using biofuels. As I said an I'll repeat it again: both are CO2 emitters and growing biofuel where you alredy had plants in the first place will not make a difference.

Step 2: start using biofuels, to provide a mobile source of energy for vehicles. The global population is expected to peak, so the global demand for vehicle fuels should also peak. Almost everything else can just run on electricity -- but for now, vehicles need hydrocarbons.
Result: we (you, technically, since I live in a nation with an oil surplus and don't drive anyway) no longer have to pay huge amounts of cash to countries that hate us. Fuel prices are somewhat more stable, because there are many different feedstocks that can be used. CO2 emissions don't increase as a result of this, because biofuels are carbon neutral.

You're just playing with words here. Your usage of the word "neutral" is quasi-religious and doesn't mean anything at all. You think that saying "neutral" exempts you from explaining (and thinking about) lots of stuff. Someone told you it's "neutral" and that's it for you, problem solved.

If "the global demand for vehicle fuels" is growing, CO2 emissions will continue to grow no matter what kind of fuel you are using. As I said before: think about CO2 SOURCES and CO2 SINKS. What matters in real life are the RESULTS, not empty words.

The amount of carbon sinks is not affected by the use of biofuels (remove plant to grow another plant = null result), while the amount of sources is affected by the amount of carbon-emitting fuels burned, dino or bio, it doesn't matter. So more cars = more CO2, no matter what fuel you are using.

And while petroleum it's just something that we currently remove from underground caves, mass agriculture is extremely environment-agressive and increasing througput (we will now need food AND fuel from farms) always means some extra forest destruction. So the most important thing is to think about results, as needed in the real world, not playing with the word "neutral" or believing anything people tell you about.

So you alternatives you had to offer are: use less fuel, go nuclear and stop using islamic oil. Nothing new.

Re:Laughter...

[Mark_MF-WN]

My god, you are such a goddam idiot.

1. Plants absorb CO2 from atmosphere.
2. Plants get turned into ethanol.
3. The ethanol get burned.
4. The CO2 (which came from the atmosphere in the first place) returns to atmosphere, resulting in no net-change in CO2 levels.
5. GOTO 1.

Notice how the CO2 keeps getting recycled? The carbon sinks are the plants themselves. You can't release more CO2 from a plant than it absorbed in the first place (in actuality, you release less, since plants lose a portion of their biomass during development, and they produce quite a bit of underground biomass in the form of mycorrhiza and deep root systems that don't get recovered during harvesting). Every plant you grow only ever releases as much CO2 as it absorbed in the first place -- that's the neutral part.

Let's compare that to petroleum:
1. Petroleum is pumped from underground.
2. Petroleum gets burned, releasing sequestered CO2. CO2 levels increase.
3. GOTO 1.

Notice the difference?

The point here is that plants already absorb and release carbon dioxide (not to mention a huge amount of energy) in a natural cycle -- but bacteria and fungus harvest most of the energy stored in the plants, rather than us. Converting some of that biomass into ethanol lets US use it rather than them. When you convert plants to ethanol and burn it, the CO2 that is being released CAME FROM THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. CO2 released from petroleum was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago, and is no longer part of the carbon cycle.

Now, one can certainly have an interesting discussion about overly intensive farming, but that still doesn't change the fact that it's impossible for a plant to release more CO2 when burnt than it absorbed in the first place. There's no particular need to harm forests to make farms - although taking deadwood from forests is a perfectly good source of biomass. There is a lot of research going on to determine better ways to farm intensively without doing so much damage to the land; genetic engineering is already producing plants that require less fertilizer, fewer pesticides, and which are more nutritious.

Of course, many of the plants that are useful for producing ethanol just happen to grow wonderfully with virtually no effort at all. It's a major challenge to prevent hemp from growing -- just look at how much money the US spends trying to save America from the evils of prosperous hemp farms.

believing anything people tell you about.

Have you actually studied ecology, or trophic levels, or how energy is tranferred within food-webs, or anything even remotely related to biology or science of any kind? I have. It's actually my major in university (this is where the neoconservative typically starts babbling like a monkey with Down's syndrome about how godless and socialist anyone with a university education is). I've gone through the math, the research, the facts. As have many of the proponents of biofuels.

Most tellingly, you'll notice that even the critics of biofuels aren't stupid enough to claim that they are the same as petroleum -- anyone with an IQ over 70 understands that getting energy from plants is carbon neutral. That is, it doesn't cause a net-increase of atmospheric carbon levels, wherease petroleum DOES cause such a net-increase.

I'll state this again, so that you can realize the depths of your stupidity: even the scientists who most strongly criticize the concept of biofuels do so only because their analyses suggest that it will require using more energy from petroleum than the energy we will actually get from the biofuels. Now, if you were making THAT argument, you wouldn't be a fucking moron. But you're not -- you're making the stupid, idiotic argument that the carbon in plants was generated by magic, so burning them is no different than burning petroleum.

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

1. Plants absorb CO2 from atmosphere.
2. Plants get turned into ethanol.
3. The ethanol get burned.
4. The CO2 (which came from the atmosphere in the first place) returns to atmosphere, resulting in no net-change in CO2 levels.
5. GOTO 1.

O RLY?

It's more like this:

0. a) Plants are already absorbing X tons / day of CO2 from atmosphere.
0. b) You go there and replace them with sugar cane or anything else, absorbing X tons / day of CO2.
0. c) You end up with a 0% net gain of CO2 absorption.
1. Some plants get turned into ethanol.
2. The ethanol gets burned, just like petrol.
3. The CO2 goes to atmosphere.
4. GOTO 1.

Unless you're destroying downtown NY to grow your plants, meaning that you are creating more green areas (which you are not), burning more fuel will always result in more CO2 concentration. I even divided the problem in two parts, to help you understand the obvious, but you completely failed to even think about the issue.

I will repeat for you: it does NOT matter that you are burning fuel from plants that absorbed CO2, because you already had plants in your farm, doing the EXACT same thing, before you started to grow sugar cane / whatever. So keeping the same CO2 levels in the atmosphere will never be possible while burning MORE fuel, unless you create MORE GREEN AREAS.

That's not hard to understand, dude. Think about sinks and sources and where does bio-fuels will change emission and absorption figures.

Now let's go back to petrol:

0. You still have X tons / day of plant CO2 absorption.
1. Petroleum is pumped from underground.
2. Petroleum gets burned, releasing CO2, just like bio-fuels.
3. GOTO 1.

Seriously, THINK ABOUT THE ISSUE INSTEAD OF JUST DISMISSING WITHOUT SPENDING EVEN FIVE SECONDS CONSIDERING IT.

Re:Laughter...

[Mark_MF-WN]

I think the confusion here is that you're imagining that the carbon contained in any plants which we don't convert to ethanol / burn / eat gets sequestered. It isn't the case. The bulk of it is released as the plants decompose. So that CO2 is going to return the atmosphere anyway -- hence the "cycle". We're inserting ourselves into the cycle so that we can harness some of the energy involved.

Get it NOW? Biofuels release CO2 that would have been released anyway, when the plants got eaten by animals, decomposed by fungi and bacteria, etcetera.

If we ever start scouring the phytoplankton from ocean to serve as a biofuel, then you might have a valid point -- since oceanic biomass does have a tendency to become sequestered. Eutrophic lakes and swamps, sure. But forests and plains don't see much sequestration of carbon.

Seriously, THINK ABOUT THE ISSUE INSTEAD OF JUST DISMISSING WITHOUT SPENDING EVEN FIVE SECONDS CONSIDERING IT.

You see, this is the advantage of having a scientific education -- I've already been through all of this. You, meanwhile, seem to be distinctly ignorant. The fact that you're still babbling about sugar cane says it all; most serious biofuel plans for the US involve growing algae (minimal fertilizer required), switchgrass (minimal fertilizer required), hemp (no fertilizer required), etc, or using the waste products from crops that we already grow as food.

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

Get it NOW? Biofuels release CO2 that would have been released anyway, when the plants got eaten by animals, decomposed by fungi and bacteria, etcetera.

Oh god, shut the fuck up. I'm tired of having a civilizated discussion with such a moron as you. You spent lots of post-reply sessions not getting the obvious, and now instead of thinking about the issue, you just tried to find a way to dodge the situation. Instead of rationalizing, you just added new items to your standard answer collection, right next to "but it's neutral!!!".

So what are you proposing saying then, idiot? That we should replace the ecosystem with shitloads of biofuel plantation, as "we're giving a better use to all this CO2 what was already being emitted anyway". Killing those stupid CO2-releasing animals? STOP BEING SO GODDAMNED STUPID. STOP TREATING BIOFUELS LIKE A RELIGION. STOP BEING AN IDIOT. It's even worse: your pathetic attempt to compare fuel burning and natural events is also extremely wrong, as you said "But forests and plains don't see much sequestration of carbon". Sure they do, MORON, they're a giant mass of life that arised from nowhere. The forest is a sequestration itself, with CO2 creation and absorption taking place at the same time, unless some idiot replaces all of that beautiful ecosystem (killing all animals and plants) with sugar cane, to profit from his stupid fixation with bio-fuels.

Comparing decomposition and other natural events to burning fuel inside an automobile is STUPID AS HELL. In fact, it just proved what I was thinking about you since the beginning: you're a bio-fuels fanboy, a zealot, an idiot compromised by the politics that surround this issue.

You see, this is the advantage of having a scientific education.

You don't have any scientific education at all. Nobody with a good scientific background would keep bulshitting "but it's neutral" without even thinking about the issue. You're just an idiot like people from PETA, Greenpeace and other groups of idiots, that thinks it's smart and above everyone else. Just a stupid son of a bitch who had the nerve of comparing fuel burning with animals eating plants, or even worse, with plants with a lifespan of decades, such as a tree.

Re:Laughter...

[Mark_MF-WN]

Comparing decomposition and other natural events to burning fuel inside an automobile is STUPID AS HELL.

How exactly are they different in terms of the carbon cycle? Both take the carbon that was in a plant, and release it into the atmosphere, where it can be absorbed by plants again.

Here's a crazy idea: name a reputable biologist who supports your position -- one who states outright that converting agricultural waste and deadwood from forests into ethanol will increase levels of greenhouse gases just as much as using a comparable amount petroleum. Find a biologist who thinks there is a meaningful difference between the CO2 in prairie grass being released by a buffalo's metabolic processes and that same CO2 being released during the combustion of biofuel made from that prairie grass. Find a biologist who criticizes the concept of biofuels on those grounds.

Obviously, biologists who are criticizing biofuels on other grounds don't count... even that's what you'll most likely try to pass off as your evidence. They have to state that extracting energy from biomass has the same affect on atmospheric carbon levels in the long-term as extracting energy from petroleum, something that no one on earth believes ... except you, mystifyingly enough.

Biologists universally support the concept of carbon neutrality. The carbon released from the destruction of plants will be offset by further plant-growth, unless you prevent any new plants from growing or use petroleum to grow, harvest, or process the biomass. They support the notion that the amount of carbon in the carbon cycle isn't increased by burning plant matter, because that carbon is ALREADY part of the carbon cycle.

So there's your challenge: find a scientist who supports you.

Think about it though -- if we harvest and process a million tons of switchgrass this year, and release a proportional amount CO2 -- what happens next year when we grow another million tons of switchgrass? That's right; the same amount carbon is reabsorbed (although strictly speaking, you lose some carbon every year to sequestration) ... and then released again, etc. Hence the term "CYCLE". I'm not that sure you understand the cycling part (or any other part for that matter), but it's an important concept if you want to contribute meaningfully to discussions about ecology.

The forest is a sequestration itself

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the carbon in living organisms is -- by definition -- NOT sequestered (and "sequestration" is the process, not the end result). It's that kind of silly nonsense that discredits you and demonstrates that you've never studied any biology. Sequestered carbon is carbon that's no longer a part of the carbon cycle. Read that definition again to make sure you really understand it. Petroleum and coal are examples, as is limestone under certain circumstances. But carbon is in plants it is still part of the cycle, and will be back in the atmosphere sooner or later. As long as the amount of biomass on the planet remains relatively constant, atmospheric carbon levels will be unaffected.

So what are you proposing saying then, idiot?

Given that you don't understand basic scientific concepts like carbon-sequestration, or what a cycle is, maybe you should reconsider who call an idiot. Once you graduate from high school, get into college, and take a few science courses, you'll be in a much better position to discuss these things rationally.

That we should replace the ecosystem with shitloads of biofuel plantation

Who said that? How does using corn husks and stalks -- from corn that we're growing as food anyway -- require destroying ecosystems? How does using the waste from sugarcane plantations (which are already growing sugar NOW) for ethanol production require destroying ecosystem

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

How exactly are they different in terms of the carbon cycle?

Quantity, idiot, quantity.

Here's a crazy idea: name a reputable biologist who supports your position

What about NO? I don't give a crap about this subject. This is not my political agenda and it will never be. You braindead idiots can keep spending the rest of your lives agreeing with each other about this new global warming political trend, as I don't give a fuck about the hobbies of politicized retards.


And more: you can keep comparing the natural existance of plants with automobiles burning several gallons of CO2. I'm pretty sure you're enough of a retard to even consider that those two situations even belong to the same order of magnitude.

Do you want a simple example of how fucking wrong you are? Plant something (absorbing CO2), let an animal eat it. Do you know what's the next step? Yes, it is SHITTING. Plain, old, shitting on the middle of the forest. It's organic matter, lots of it, with shitloads of little carbon atoms connected to the molecules, and most of them will never be turned to CO2, as they'll just compose a dry piece of FECES standing on the forest's floor. And any CO2 generated by any process that touches this "piece of shit" will be absorbed by plants inside the same ecosystem.

You think that, just like fuel burning, the end destination of all carbon molecules composing organic matter is CO2. That's so absurd that your attempts to talk about "science" sound more stupid than before.

With biofuels you don't have "shitting" and "animals getting more fat" and "leafs falling on the floor" and all other kinds of storage of trillions of carbon atoms composing untouched organic molecules. With biofuels you will simply transform most carbon atoms to CO2.

So the next time you have the opportunity of being around ANIMAL SHIT, you can think about how stupid you were when you compared burning fuels with the natural existence of plants. You can remember when you completely forgot that burning fuels is a process that converts carbon atoms inside molecules onto CO2, while forests and farms are places where EVERYTHING AROUND YOU is a big carbon storage, on the form of ORGANIC MATTER.

If we really think about what you said, if we think about your last-minute excuse, you just said that CO2 is the only final form of carbon in nature, that even plants end up being all CO2, just like fuels. Next time, take a look at the soil, it will be very interesting for you to find that the world is not as stupid as it sounds.

The planet is really screwed with all those plants ans animals releasing quantities of CO2 comparable to plain, old, fuel burning! And with retards like you, walking around with "science" all over your political speech, things are much worse.

Re:Laughter...

[Mark_MF-WN]

What about NO? I don't give a crap about this subject.

Yet you keep responding...

In any case, this cop-out is basically an admission that you know science is against you, and that you're only arguing at this point out of some kind of stubborn childishness.

as I don't give a fuck about the hobbies of politicized retards.

That says it all right there. You believe that scientists are "politicized retards". Yet you're more than happy to use computers designed by scientists, and I'll bet you wouldn't turn down medications designed by scientists, or cell phones, or synthetic fabrics, or water filtration plants, or any of the other things you depend on every day that scientists worked their asses off to create for your benefit.

Do you want a simple example of how fucking wrong you are? Plant something (absorbing CO2), let an animal eat it. Do you know what's the next step? Yes, it is SHITTING. Plain, old, shitting on the middle of the forest. It's organic matter, lots of it, with shitloads of little carbon atoms connected to the molecules, and most of them will never be turned to CO2, as they'll just compose a dry piece of FECES standing on the forest's floor. And any CO2 generated by any process that touches this "piece of shit" will be absorbed by plants inside the same ecosystem.

Please, please, read a book sometime.

1. Before excreting that organic matter, the animal will extract a great deal of the energy from it and exhale the carbon dioxide. Anywhere from 50% to 75% of the carbon will be converted to CO2 in a matter of days. So you're already wrong. The shit contains just a small portion of the original carbon.
2. Feces don't just sit there forever -- they get consumed by other animals (particularly insects), who release ANOTHER 50-75% within a matter of days. So it's been a week and already 75-94% of the carbon from that plant has been turned into CO2.
3. Whatever is left gets consumed by bacteria and fungi, which are vastly more efficient than animals. They release 100% of the remaining carbon. This step might take a month or two to complete.
4. CO2 isn't confined to an ecosystem -- it's a light gas, and disperses into the atmosphere as fast as it's released. Any CO2 released anywhere, by any process whatsoever, is in the atmosphere, period. It doesn't stay in one ecosystem: it's part of the global carbon cycle.

Your confusion may be stemming from the mistaken notion that plants absorb carbon from feces -- they don't. Bacteria break down the feces, metabolize the carbon into CO2 (which flies away into the sky), and releases the nutrients back into the soil -- and those nutrients are what the plant absorbs.

With biofuels you don't have "shitting" and "animals getting more fat" and "leafs falling on the floor" and all other kinds of storage...

Those animals? They eventually die and rot, releasing every last bit of that CO2. And only 10% of what they eat actually gets turned into more animal -- the rest gets used for energy and the carbon is turned into CO2. Then they get eaten and digested themselves, releasing that last 10%. Leaves and shit falling on the forest floor? They get broken down by fungus and bacteria, and release their CO2. Almost every last bit of it gets released as CO2.

of trillions of carbon atoms

There are thousands of trillions of carbon atom in one skin cell. One leaf has over a trillion trillion carbon atoms. You'd know that if you didn't have a paranoid distrust of science, and go around accusing anyone who has the audacity to read a science text of being "politicized"...

With biofuels you will simply transform most carbon atoms to CO2.

Most carbon atoms get converted to CO2 already. That's the ONLY way to extract the energy from biomass, and nature is VERY efficient about salvaging every last bit of

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

You believe that scientists are "politicized retards".

Your impersonation of science is pathetic. You are a politicized retard. Not science.

I won't keep discussing with someone who compared burning fuels to the natural existence of plants.

Re:Laughter...

[gregorio]

Btw: I was already stupid enough to keep discussing with someone who calls other people "communists" and say "I bet you're a christian!".

But comparing burning fuels to the natural existance of plants, omg, that was stupid as hell.

Nuclear

[Mark_MF-WN]

Nuclear power is not "emission free". Sure, it produces no CO2, but it produces lots of nasty stuff that we have to pack away for a few thousand years. And even if you reprocess the fuel itself, there's still lots of other material that becomes irradiated that must be disposed of. You also fail to mention any way that nuclear power would actually work as a motor vehicle fuel. Battery technology won't let us all drive electric cars, trucks and semis. So we're left with bringing the power plant along with our vehicle. There's no way in hell we can put nuclear reactors in every car, truck and semi on the road.

Oh dear god no. I was with you up until this bullshit.

1. That nasty stuff? Coal produces more per megawatt. The only difference is that there's no way "to pack it away" -- it just goes out into the air where we have to breathe it. So if we BURNED our nuclear waste, it would STILL be cleaner than coal... and until we have enough altnerative power to dispense with coal, nuclear kicks the shit out of it.

2. Anything radioactive is, by definition, a power source. Reprocessing (which is illegal in the US... I guess your Congress LIKES nuclear waste) can allow the re-use of 95% of the "waste".

And how to power vehicles? You've heard of this "hydrogen" stuff people are going on about? Guess where we get the hydrogen? Hydrogen is a form of power storage; you can use electricity from any source to generate it, including nuclear.

Re:Nuclear

[jeff4747]

That nasty stuff? Coal produces more per megawatt

You're missing my point. The parent was saying nuclear is 100% clean. My point is that there are indeed pollutants from nuclear power. That is all. There was no statement about it's relative cleanliness to other power generation methods.

Reprocessing can allow the re-use of 95% of the "waste".

And yet there's still 5% that has to be dealt with somehow, over a very, very long time frame.

You've heard of this "hydrogen" stuff people are going on about

For hydrogen to replace gasoline/petrodiesel, we'll need some significant advances in fuel cell technology (to commoditize them), as well as replace virtually all of our current fuel distribution system.

OTOH, biofuels can be burned in the same diesel and gasoline engines we're using today, and re-use most of the existing gasoline/petrodiesel infrastructure.

Hydrogen is a great idea in about 20 years or so. We could be using biofuels today.

Re:Nuclear

[Mark_MF-WN]

You know, interestingly enough, one of the recent advances in Japan's nuclear fuel reprocessing program is the ability to lace the fuel with mercury during production, and then recover it as platinum during the reprocessing stage. And guess what we need more of to commoditize fuel cells? Supposedly, the value of the recovered platinum would completely cover the cost of the reprocessing. The recovered fuel and the lack of waste to dispose of would just be a bonus. It's a bit off-topic I suppose, but still cool.

And yet there's still 5% that has to be dealt with somehow, over a very, very long time frame.

Actually, the 5% that's left is very low-level waste. Any material that is radioactive is -- almost by definition -- a potential power source. That's the whole point of reprocessing. All the hard stuff is still a potential power source if you put it in the right kind of reactor. The low-level stuff can be disposed of in landfills, and will be indistinguishable from the low-level radiation that is present in all landfills anyway.

You're missing my point. The parent was saying nuclear is 100% clean. My point is that there are indeed pollutants from nuclear power. That is all. There was no statement about it's relative cleanliness to other power generation methods.

In that sense, "100% clean" is always a bit of a misleading statement. Even if you walk to work instead of driving, you're producing CO2, methane, sulfur dioxide, methyl mercaptan, and a host of other toxic gases. Only slightly more than if you'd sat on your ass... but still.

• Solar panels need to be produced using either semiconductor fabrication (highly polluting) -- or with more cutting-edge designs, organic synthesis (mildly to moderately polluting depending on the techniques).
• Wind turbines need to be made from metals that have to be mined, smelted, forged, etc. They also require electromagnets, which usually entails the refinement of lanthanides from metal ores to get the neodymium -- and those enormous multi-stage-metal-extraction operations do produce nasty byproducts.
• Hydroelectric plants damage the upstream ecosystems (although there are ways around that), flood valleys, and can actually produce quite a bit of methane gas under certain circumstances.

Etcetera.

But nuclear is so much cleaner than fossil fuel power sources that it's not even in the same league as far as pollution. Nuclear plants pollute on the scale that "green" power sources do.

For hydrogen to replace gasoline/petrodiesel, we'll need some significant advances in fuel cell technology (to commoditize them), as well as replace virtually all of our current fuel distribution system.

Actually, the nice thing with hydrogen is that there can be a smooth, continuous changeover. There are fuel cell designs that extract hydrogen directly from hydrocarbons -- like natural gas, which can already be distributed efficiently. That's not as silly as it sounds. Fuel cells aren't heat engines, so they aren't limited by the Carnot cycle and can be vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines. So converting natural gas to hydrogen and putting it through a fuel cell can be more efficient than just burning the gas directly.

Or stations could produce their hydrogen on-site using cheap electricity produced using nuclear power, allowing individual communities to invest in hydrogen technology at their liesure. Early adopters would probably include transit services and the like, since they could afford their own hydrogen production equipment. Hydrogen is awesome that way -- we wouldn't need any of this centralized bullshit; anywhere that there's electricity, people could make hydrogen. And since it doesn't need to be centralized, it doesn't require everyone to convert all at once.

Re:Nuclear

[dbIII]

Funny - the above poster labelled something bullshit and came up with a decent supply themselves. They did not bother to find out that pollution controls exist in every thermal plant, most which are really simple things using gravity and water. It got more bizzare with the bit about burning nuclear fuel - a bit of a hint there that coal is more radioactive than nuclear fuel perhaps or is it an even more bizzare fantasy? Commercial nuclear power is unfortuantely still stuck in the 1950s apart from a few small additions, some untested experimental designs and some complete dead ends that looked promising at times (fast breeders looked promising until one that should have been large enough to be useful got built - Superphoenix - and the problems that surfaced are not going to be easy to solve). I suggest paying attention to the news - things like the events today in Japan and the whole issue of constuction of nuclear facilities in Iran. Civilian nuclear power generation is a POSSIBLE solution but there is a lot of work that has to be done for it to be more than just an expensive way to boil water or a byproduct of a weapons program - we are not there yet.

Hydrogen is difficult stuff to deal with but it has all got political so funding for storage solutions is available. It shouldn't be considered as a power source and more as battery storage - since you will be losing energy you will need a lot more generating capacity and without some breakthough (perhaps accelerate thorium) nuclear is far too expensive. The trick of proposing to selectively tax fossil fuels and campaign against the expensive but still cheaper than nuclear alternatives of wind, solar etc may artificially make nuclear power look promising in areas where hydro is not possible - and if you pay attention to the news you will see those are the tactics in use. Personally I think the nuclear industry should bring back those people that were working on improvements in the 1960s before they all die and try to develop something useful and train a new generation instead of painting 1950s designs green and bribing people to convince governments to fund construction.

Re:Nuclear

[jeff4747]

There are fuel cell designs that extract hydrogen directly from hydrocarbons -- like natural gas, which can already be distributed efficiently

And they're currently FAR too expensive to put into a production car. At least, anything that isn't a high-priced car. More R&D, like your source of platinum, has to be done in order to make fuel cell vehicles purchasable by 'normal' people.

And since it doesn't need to be centralized, it doesn't require everyone to convert all at once

Why convert at all? If the problem we're trying to solve is CO2 emissions, biofuels solve that problem without any conversion. Well, nearly any conversion. Biodiesels need a fuel tank heater in cold climates, and non-flex-fuel gasoline engines would need a few sensors changed and a new program in the fuel injector computer.

Granted, H2 for 'fuel' has lots of up-sides, and the conversion will eventually be worthwhile, but to solve today's problem biofuels are better, IMO.

Re:Nuclear

[Mark_MF-WN]

And they're currently FAR too expensive to put into a production car. At least, anything that isn't a high-priced car. More R&D, like your source of platinum, has to be done in order to make fuel cell vehicles purchasable by 'normal' people.

Certainly. But when we're talking about replacing petroleum, we're talking on the time frame of decades. After all, petroleum is still much cheaper than the alternatives. And dropping a gargantuan carbon tax on gasoline purchases would not go over well, no matter well-intentioned.

Over the time frames that we're discussing, there's no reason to believe that the issues with fuel cells wont be resolved. Catalysts in particular are a subject that is being intensely researched, and with the kinds of computational-chemistry systems that are just now becoming available, a cheaper alternative to platinum may well be discovered sooner rather than later. But it's worth mentioning that biofuels (particularly ethanol) may very well be what ends up being used as the fuel for vehicle fuel cells -- after all, ethanol is vastly more tractable than hydrogen gas, and can be oxidized using nano-structured non-noble metals as catalysts.

If the problem we're trying to solve is CO2 emissions, biofuels solve that problem without any conversion

Unfortunately, most vehicles are powered by gasoline -- and there aren't any biofuel processes that produce an alternative to gasoline. Diesel? Sure -- and there are people already. switching over. I suspect that many bus fleets will be using primarily bio-diesel before the end of the next decade. And we can dilute the gasoline with ethanol to at least some extent. But until all the older cars are replaced by newer ones that can run on E85 or on pure ethanol, we can't really talk about bio-fuels as an immediate solution. Too many people still need gasoline, and we don't have bio-gasoline yet.

Nevertheless, I'd certainly agree that biodiesel's time is nigh. And it's time to start making E85 much more widely available ... and to let owners of newer vehicles know that their vehicles are most likely already rated for E85.

I just stumbled upon some references to butanol being a possible direct replacement for gasoline. Now that would be interesting to learn some more about. Any plan that lets us keep existing equipment (ie: old cars) is a plan that has at least a chance of succeeding.

can't wait till...

[master5o1]

I just can't wait till I can donate my body to alcohol production and be able to power some sort of engine all by myself. Another use for dead bodies other than burying/cremating? Let's just wait till they do have some animal body/fat to ethanol conversion thing ;) -- oo more use for those that had the lipo!

What kind??!!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Why it's cellutastic! Cellutastic, I cellu- er, tell you!

Ethanol is carbon-neutral.

[StarKruzr]

This is reason enough to use it all by itself.

What do you consider "dirty?"

Re:Ethanol is carbon-neutral.

[Anonymous Coward]

anal fisting?

fight club quote with edits

[jadin]

Tyler sold his soap^h gasoline to department^h convenience stores at $20 a bar^h gallon. Lord knows what they charged. It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.

Hollywood

[Dancindan84]

Along with plants, actresses will donate large amounts of the cellulose too be processed.

Don't listen to the voices in your head...

[benhocking]

It's one thing to think the environmentalists are wrong, but to attribute ulterior, nefarious motives to their actions is borderline insane. Please re-read what you posted, and if you still think it's rational, see a professional.

The same thing goes to people who think that Bush is *trying* to destroy America (or the rest of the World), to people who think ExxonMobil is *trying* to destroy the environment, etc. They may be *doing* these things, but those are side-effects and are not their primary motivation.

Might there be a very small percentage of environmentalists who want "revenge" on big oil companies? I suppose anything is possible, but if this percentage is higher than 1%, I'll buy you a gas-guzzling SUV.

Re:Don't listen to the voices in your head...

[gregorio]

It's one thing to think the environmentalists are wrong, but to attribute ulterior, nefarious motives to their actions is borderline insane. Please re-read what you posted, and if you still think it's rational, see a professional.

I was talking about SOME environmentalists. Re-read my message. And next time be more polite.

The same thing goes to people who think that Bush is *trying* to destroy America (or the rest of the World), to people who think ExxonMobil is *trying* to destroy the environment, etc. They may be *doing* these things, but those are side-effects and are not their primary motivation.

Except that some enviro-nuts are actually motivated to destroy oil companies. They're watermellon militants and they don't give a crap about the environmental issue.

Might there be a very small percentage of environmentalists who want "revenge" on big oil companies? I suppose anything is possible

Then you answered my message, in a very non-polite way, just because you're not able to read properly. Congratulations.

Where are mod points when you need them.......

[Dr_Barnowl]

That is an excellent hypothesis. Even if it's not true, I'll bet that if any Monsanto employee reads this, it will cease to be a hypothesis and become a business plan.

5 WHAT!?

[Bayoudegradeable]

5 continents? What horrible geography teacher did you have??

Better things to do

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unfortunate that they found time to do this, but can't be bothered to get Genarlow Wilson out of jail.

Wrong, and yet right...

[Overzeetop]

As many other posters have jumped on you for the carbon from soil thing, the point remains:

If you let a plant die, much of the carbon remains in the soil. If you burn a plant you release the carbon. So by using the plant as fuel, more carbon enters the atmosphere than would have done so in a non-fuel-burning ecosystem.

I have the same issue with using waste oil for biodeisel - it's not carbon neutral because the carbon locked in the hydrocarbon molecules would have been plcae in a landfill insteaed of liberated intot he atmosphere in a very short time period.

Not that this is bad - I think its great that alternatives to fossile fuels are getting traction; but this is no magical cure for global warming, it just gives us more fuel options.

Re:Wrong, and yet right...

[jstomel]

Actually, if you let a plant die, most of it's carbon is released through the process of decay. Only if the plant is buried in something like a peat bog or the ocean or some other preservative media will the carbon be preserved and eventually become coal or oil or some other fossil fuel. This generally only happens with very large plants that decay slowly.

A Step in the Right Direction?

[TheGrumpster]

Clearly there is a lot of noise being made on both sides of the ethanol issue, and I'm not sure that any of it is particularly helpful. The farmers will tell you that corn-based ethanol is the greatest thing ever, since it has done wonders for corn prices (which prior to ethanol, have remained relatively static for nearly 100 years). The oil companies and their paid mouthpieces will tell you that ethanol (of all varieties) is going to bring about the end of the world. I would argue that neither is true.

One issue that is frequently ignored in the gross energy input versus gross energy output argument is the utility of the final product. The sad reality is, most motor vehicles today need some form of high-energy liquid fuel such as gasoline or ethanol. Sure, electrically powered vehicles would be nice, but we're not there right now. For the next 20 to 50 years, it's really hard to imagine a vehicle that doesn't require something like gasoline. Given this, then perhaps it's OK to turn one form of energy that is inexpensive and abundant, like coal, into another that is more useful, like gasoline. Not that this is the example here, but you get the general idea. I'm willing to accept a fairly inefficient process, so long as the input is energy that I can't use to get where I'm going, in exchange for an output that I can use for this purpose. So that's one argument you rarely hear anyone mention.

A question I have for all the whiners is: where is your solution? It's OK to be against something, but only if you bring an acceptable alternative to the table. Simply advocating that we remain dependent on foreign oil forever isn't going to cut it. Neither is something outrageous like suggesting we just ban all automobiles tomorrow. There has to be a long term goal, a transitional plan on how to get there, and leadership at ALL levels of society to get there. Sadly, I think we are presently lacking all three of these, but there is hope. Make it your mission in life to press the important issues like this. Not by writing your senator, or starting a flame war, but by having intelligent conversations with everyone you know. Even if people don't agree with your ideas, at least let them understand the importance of the topic.

Corn-based ethanol is not the answer to our problems, but it is a small step in the right direction (away from oil). Cellulosic ethanol is another step in the right direction. Cellulosic butanol is an even better step in the right direction, though it is even further down the road than cellulosic ethanol. Hydrogen fuel cells consuming fuel produced using wind or solar based electricity are arguable the last step on the path, but we can't get there overnight.

And for the naysayers, there is another alternative to solving problems in a constructive manner. If everyone would simply kill one other person, the world's problems would immediately be reduced by 50 percent. Which option works best for you?

Energy positive != economical viable

[marcosdumay]

The main factor determining the economic viability of a product is how much labor it takes. The main factor determining the energy return of a product is how much fuel it takes. See the discrepancy?

Theoreticaly, for any energy positive fuel, there is a price for fuel (all kinds) for what it is economicaly viable. In practice, oil is cheap.

Re:Energy positive != economical viable

[rcastro0]

The main factor determining the economic viability of a product is how much labor it takes.

Not quite. This thinking is the theoretical basis of the Marxist school of thought, which drew from the "Labor Theory of Value" written up by David Ricardo (see here). But it is essentially a flawed point of view -- and has been superseded by the Marginal Utility Theory of Value. The shortest rebutal I know to the Labor Theory of Value/Marxist view is this: "Pearls are not valuable because people dive for them, people dive for them because pearls are valuable".

The main factor determining the energy return of a product is how much fuel it takes. See the discrepancy?

Well from your own point of view one would think any amount of fuel it takes could be translated in "amount of labor to create/extract that fuel", so there would be no discrepancy at all, right ?

In practice if one really could eliminate all subsidies/tax distortions *and* account for externalities (such as pollution) *and* assume a fairly competitive market (all three very hard to meet conditions, of course) *then* Energy Positive ~= economically viable.

Re:Energy positive != economical viable

[marcosdumay]

"Not quite. This thinking is the theoretical basis of the Marxist school of thought, which drew from the "Labor Theory of Value" written up by David Ricardo (see here). But it is essentially a flawed point of view -- and has been superseded by the Marginal Utility Theory of Value. The shortest rebutal I know to the Labor Theory of Value/Marxist view is this: "Pearls are not valuable because people dive for them, people dive for them because pearls are valuable"."

Ok, I was trying to keep things simple... But the main factor altering the COST of a good is the amount of labor it takes. Notice that I said MAIN, labor does not account for the entire cost, just for most of it. It is also a generalization, if you look hard enough, you'll find a few counter examples. Of all the production costs, labor is nowadays and on average the biggest one by far.

Of course, there are two factor affecting economical viability. Those are cost and value. If cost if smaller than value, the product is viable, otherwise it is not. Since the GP was talking about costs, I didn't talk about value, I tought that was implicit, maybe I was wrong.

And, Marxist?!? Me?!? Come on...

"Well from your own point of view one would think any amount of fuel it takes could be translated in "amount of labor to create/extract that fuel", so there would be no discrepancy at all, right ?

That is Marxist. And completely different from what I said.

You simply don't measure energy return and investments on labor. You measure it on energy (that is joules or BTU for you). Otherwise it would make no sense.

Getting that labor will take some energy (food, transportation), as all the capital inputs will also take energy (enthalphy and manufacturing). The products will be used to create work. The energy return over energy investiment is the amount of useful work done divided by the amount of energy from labor + capital.

In practice if one really could eliminate all subsidies/tax distortions *and* account for externalities (such as pollution) *and* assume a fairly competitive market (all three very hard to meet conditions, of course) *then* Energy Positive ~= economically viable.

No, it isn't. Energy positive != economicaly viable (I guess that by ~= you mean equivalent, it would make no sense otherwise). For why, read my post again.

Of course, if you don't take exeternalities/subsides into account, you can get fuels that are economicaly viable and not energy positive, otherwise that is impossible. But the main point is that a fuel can be energy positive and not economicaly viable.

Re:Energy positive != economical viable

[rcastro0]

Of course, if you don't take exeternalities/subsides into account, you can get fuels that are economicaly viable and not energy positive, otherwise that is impossible.

In the sentence above "otherwise that is impossible" means "if you do take externalities/subsidies into account, getting fuels that are economically viable and not energy positive is impossible".

That is precisely what I was trying to say with "Energy Positive ~= economically viable" -- nothing more, nothing less.

I'm worried too

[Anonymous Coward]

Only I'm worried that idiots like you are going to be taken seriously in this discussion.

Perhaps probably should've read possibly

[benhocking]

And perhaps I should've RTFA. I was just speaking on general principles with the fertilizer. My "(probably)" qualifier was intended to indicate that fertilizers aren't absolutely necessary, and with this new technology I suppose they won't even be the norm. As you point out, there might be other costs that offset this advantage, but it sounds like it's better than regular ethanol plants, which in turn are better than burning fossil fuels.

Re:Perhaps probably should've read possibly

[mdsolar]

Yes, I think this could be good. We'll still need to reduce consumption though it we're going to get to the point where we are covering our liquid fuel use through domestic production.

I can't take it anymore!

[benhocking]

I hate to be one of those that correct spelling, so I'm not going to correct yours, but please for the sake of our sanity, use the latest Firefox with spell checking! You're killing me here. Oh, and, speaking of which, understand the difference between "your" and "you're". You make that particular mistake a lot. Perhaps you can just stick to using "your" when you mean "that thing belonging to you" and "you are" when you mean "you are". You might think that it doesn't hurt the readability of your posts, but it does. It sometimes requires multiple parsings to tease out what you're saying. Using proper spelling and grammar would make that easier. It also hurts your credibility. Until you mentioned that you have a herb garden, I would have guessed that you hadn't yet reached 9th grade. I'm not saying that in order to demean you (and I hope you don't take offense), but I think you need to realize how it comes across.

We all make mistakes, but the patterns inherent in yours suggest that you don't know better. It will help you communicate your point more effectively if you are able to improve your writing skills. This is seriously intended as friendly advice, and I hope you take it as such.

Organic farming

[benhocking]

you see, while i grow organic produce for myself, i'm not going to fool myself into thinking it would work on a commercial scale

Yeah, that's why you don't see any organic commercial farms out there. Oh, wait...

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Obyron]

The mildly unsatisfying answer I always got in European History classes was that it got defined Eurocentrically because the ancients had to cross water to get to Asia minor, such as the Greeks sailing the Aegean to get to Anatolia, or Eastern Europeans crossing the Black Sea. This was pretty much the path followed by the Asian silk trade, as well as the general path Alexander the Great took to conquer "the world." I suppose it's just evidence that civilized Europe never bothered to ask the Scythians about geography. Even then it's mildly unsatisfying, since you can pretty much spit across the Bosporus Strait in modern day Turkey. As for why it continues to be that way, it's definitely cultural.

Conspiracies require secrets...

[benhocking]

lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up

let me guess, it's all a conspiracy of the big corperations?

First of all, it's not the big corporations, it's the federal government. Secondly, it's not a conspiracy if the government is up front about it.

Point number 1...

[benhocking]

Your first point is exactly the response I was going to make, but luckily I found that you had already made it. The only thing I have to add to that point is a link.

As for your second point, in a perfect world I would agree. Unfortunately, reprocessing that spent fuel also makes it more usable for nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, etc. I'm not against reprocessing, but honesty requires one to acknowledge the downsides to reprocessing as well.

Your last point almost went without saying. Almost, except for the fact that it hadn't seemed to occur to him.

Re:Point number 1...

[Mark_MF-WN]

I don't know about you, but I would expect governments to already be protecting nuclear power plants. The presence of a reprocessing center at those sites shouldn't make a difference.

For building a dirty bomb? Any terrorist who tried to get nuclear materials for a dirty bomb from a nuclear power plant would have to be insane. They could get suitable materials from hospitals and from chemical supply companies using just a fraction of the effort.

The only realistic concern with reprocessing is the possibility of making a nuclear weapon from recovered materials -- and that's rather outside the scope of what a terrorist group might accomplish. It's a rather non-trivial task to design, build, test, and deploy a nuclear weapon. It's something that nations do. And any nation that wants to reprocess its nuclear waste is already free to do so -- France, for example, reprocesses 30% of its nuclear waste. What are you worried about, that the US government might start reprocessing its nuclear waste and build some nukes from it?

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the answer to that one. It is based in the ancient Greek understanding of geography. As far as they were concerned, the middle of the world was the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, that is what the name means... Media means middle and Terra means earth. Three distinct landmasses surround the Mediterranean, which are Europe, Asia, and Africa. Each landmass comes close to each other. Europe and Africa almost meet, but are separated by the Straight of Hercules, which leads to a large body of water, the Atlantic. Asia and Africa are connected by land, but it is only a narrow strip and then they are again divided by the Red Sea, which leads to a large body of water, the Indian Ocean. And Europe and Asia are divided by the Bosporus Strait and Sea of Marmara, which leads (get the pattern yet?) to a large body of water, the Black Sea.

The Greeks did not know that north of the Black Sea, Asia and Europe were united. Or, at least, it was not common knowledge when their notion of the "continents" evolved. As far as they could tell, perhaps Europe and Africa also surrounded the Atlantic, and Asia and Africa surrounded the Indian Ocean somewhere... far beyond the furthest point explored. Even if it were true that ALL THREE were somewhere connected, it would not have changed their scheme, because it was not about the modern notion of a continent, but about the prominent landmasses in their local areas and how they related to that all important Middle-Earth Sea.

So basically, our later notion of a continent grew out of this early understanding, and never quite disentangled itself. Kind of like the whole "Is Pluto a Planet" phenomenon. No one had a complete view of world geography when the ideas evolved, and no union of geographers had a convention and declared a redefinition of continents!

How about ethanol from grass clippings?

[maillemaker]

What if neighborhoods collected all their grass clippings every weekend and took them to the local neighborhood processing plant, which entitled you to X gallons of ethanol every week?

Production costs and membrane failure

[xtal]

Nobody has figured out how to mass produce the membranes cheaply that don't fail. Or cheap enough that a short lifetime doesn't matter.

Don't hold your breath. File useful fuel cell technology up there with energy from the Casimir effect, until you see one for sale in walmart.

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey look! A frog decided to pipe up.

What's that frog, when they were teaching you so well in your superior schools, you somehow came to the incorrect conclusion that someplace other than the USA is known as "America"?

Guess what frog, just like the shite they feed you that makes you think Quebec isn't just a pissant territory in Canada, the information you seem to think you have about "America" is wrong too.

"America" is the term used colloquially for the USA. The fact that you think otherwise (or are simply too French to have the intelligence to know better) indicates how useless your opinions are.

And stick to French, your rengrish is horrible. (And I speak German fluently, so fuck you all who are going to try that tack, you bitches)

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Hwyman]

When referencing the rather outdated notion of the five continents, remember that it's the Americas...as in more than one (specifically two). People of this made up continent are Americasians. (My made up word...copyright!!!)

energy hierarchy same as digestion

[peter303]

Sugar (cane, beets) has more ethonal energy than starch (corn) than cellulose (wood, grass). The thrid case is so difficult that animals have evolved weird strategies for extracting enery - four sto If you believe otherwise, then I'll my deed to a bridge in NYC.

Some usually implies more than 1%

[benhocking]

If you meant a very small minority then you should have said so. Try reading your original post again, and see how it comes across. The point it sounded like you're trying to make was this was the norm. Let's start with the first word in your response to my statement: "No". That suggests that the idea of no net CO2 was not the reason "ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists". Take a moment and re-read those two sentences: what I wrote, and your first response. Sure, you said a "group of environmentalists", but by starting that sentence with "no", you make it sound like that group is representative of the whole. If you had begun your sentence with, "Yes, but" instead, it would have conveyed the message that you're now implying that you meant to convey.

Except that some enviro-nuts are actually motivated to destroy oil companies. They're watermellon militants and they don't give a crap about the environmental issue.

Possibly, where "some" equals a tiny, tiny minority. Using the phrase "enviro-nuts" also seems to give something away that you might not want to reveal.

Re:Some usually implies more than 1%

[gregorio]

What are you now, language-pedantic slashbot? A group, some, a fraction, whatever, those are just ways of citing unknown quantities. Is it more than 1%? Who knows? What are you, the environmental activist census director?

I believe they're even more than 10% of the whole activist "market". Lots of people turn to the environment cause just because they need a reason to live, because they can't seem to fit anywhere else and they hijack a very important cause just to fill a void.

Dirty bombs and nukes

[benhocking]

For building a dirty bomb? Any terrorist who tried to get nuclear materials for a dirty bomb from a nuclear power plant would have to be insane. They could get suitable materials from hospitals and from chemical supply companies using just a fraction of the effort.

It depends on how dirty you want your bomb to be. You can get enough materials from hospitals and chemical supply companies to scare people (perhaps even "terrorize" them), but if you want to really do wide-spread damage, I think you're going to need larger quantities. I'm no expert on this, so I could easily be wrong. It's not comforting that such material is already missing (or at least unaccounted for) from many Russian nuclear plants.

What are you worried about, that the US government might start reprocessing its nuclear waste and build some nukes from it?

Not really. If they want to make nukes, they'll make nukes. I think a concern is with other countries that don't make nukes and can't easily make nukes without the IAEA catching on. If nuclear reprocessing becomes commonplace, then I think it'd be easier to put one over on the IAEA. Again, I'm no expert, so I could be completely wrong. Mainly, I'm playing devil's advocate here, because I do think that we should be reprocessing our nuclear waste.

What's the reason for your anger?

[benhocking]

Is it because you know you're wrong, and you're mad at me for pointing it out? My main point wasn't the definition of "some". Sure, some can mean less than 1%, but in a meaningful, thought-out discussion, one would make a point of clarifying the "some" comment, if that were the case.

I believe they're even more than 10% of the whole activist "market". Lots of people turn to the environment cause just because they need a reason to live, because they can't seem to fit anywhere else and they hijack a very important cause just to fill a void.

I have no doubt you believe that, which was the reason for my first response to you. That you believe this came across in that post I responded to. You have now confirmed the assumption you later seemed to be implying that I had erroneously made. Turning to the environment "just because they need a reason to live" (don't more of these people turn to religion?), is not the same as wanting to destroy oil companies.

I don't think your problem is that you're not communicating effectively. I believe you made yourself clear on your first post. It's just that you're beliefs are indicative of a delusional mind. That might sound rude to you, but I'm just being honest. Also, regarding your previous comments on my rude response, I don't see how it's any ruder than slandering environmentalists. In your defense, however, I also think you were just honestly conveying your own personal beliefs.

Re:What's the reason for your anger?

[gregorio]

Is it because you know you're wrong, and you're mad at me for pointing it out?

Oh god, so low, so low.

EOD.

The Great lakes aren't the largest freshwater

[blueZ3]

system in the world. Baikal, in Russia is a _single_ lake with a freshwater volume greater than that of _all_ the "Great Lakes" combined. Lake Tanganyika, in Africa, is also larger.

Re:The Great lakes aren't the largest freshwater

[wolfgang_spangler]

Baikal: Water volume 23,600 km (5,521 mi)
Tanganyika: Water volume 18,900 km

Great Lakes: 22,812 km

So, Tanganyika is not larger, and the Baikal is really too close to call as these numbers are just estimaes.

Nice try though.

Question: Dual Plant

[Nom du Keyboard]

Question: Can you produce ethanol from both the sugar and cellulose in corn, giving much higher value from each plant?

one tonne of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil

[cdn-programmer]

One tonne of dry biomass on an energy basis is about the same as two barrels of oil. Another pithy fact is that one needs to be able to brew beer at $2.50 per keg in order to compete on an energy basis with gasoline. The last factoid is easy to see. A keg is about 60 liters and at 5% this is three (3) liters of ethanol. Ethanol has about 2/3 the energy of gasoline.

We seldom see these issues described in a compact form. I keep seeing terms like "Ethanol is an oxygenated fuel". In fact it is a partially oxidized fuel which is why it carries considerably less energy than say gasoline or diesel. Liquid motor fuels are for the most part Alkanes and have a chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Ethanol is an alcohol which has an OH tacked on to an alkane. Ethanol is C2H5OH which is a partially oxidized propane. The oxygen makes it liquid hence relatively safe and easy to transport. Methanol is partially oxidized methane: CH3OH.

Hence it is immediately clear that if we had a large supply of propane then the shortest chemical route to produce ethanol would be from the gas - not from sugar or starch and certainly not from cellulose or other plant matter... except for one thing. The biologic source is renewable. The geological source as best we know is not renewable.

Now the thing that is not emphasized in these discussions is that every gallon of ethanol produced from starch will come out of someone's mouth. It might not be your mouth or mine - it might be a pig's mouth or a chicken's mouth but it will be someone or something currently in the food chain who will have to give up their source of food in order for us to feed our cars.

This is obvious. We do not have a HUGE amount of excess agricultural capacity and we also do not have huge piles of unused grain hanging around. Hence it is clear that we eat what we produce and there is little long term surplus.

The world consumes about 82-84 million barrels of oil per day. This can be found in the BP statistical oil review - there are other sources but this is a very good one. North America consumes about 24-25 million barrels per day if you include Canada.

I share the opinions of those who say we are probably at the world peak of oil production. We will probably stay near this peak for a couple years more. On the news two days ago was an EIA forecast that world consumption is forecast to grow by another 2 million barrels per day next year and that OPEC is expected to step up to the plate. I laughed. I expect that OPEC production will be flat and that the forecast demand will simply drive the price up until the demand is destroyed. Mathew Simmons says it could take over $300 per barrel to destroy the demand. I don't know if I believe what Simmons says will happen before 2015 but I do have a great deal of respect for him. He could very well be right.

Now the issue of cellulostic ethanol. Probably this makes some sense. But you still need to collect and transport a tonne of organic matter to the ethanol plant in order to create the equivalent on an energy bassis of two (2) barrels of oil. Then this material has to be converted at 100% efficiency into ethanol and at zero (0%) cost.... and it has to be 100% convertable into ethanol.

Other alternatives are coal liquifaction and coal gasification to create a hydrogen source for the development of synthetic crude.

As I see it - the ONLY way that make sense is synthetic crude.

We are doing this in Alberta at the tar sands. We are expecting to ramp up production into the 3.3 million barrel per day level by 2015. The problem is that by 2015 if world oil peaks between now and 2010 for instance then we can lose conventional production at a rate of 10% per year on a production base of say 84 million barrels at peak - and this compounds annually... it is an exponential function.

Without nuclear power to create a source of hydrogen we either have to discard literally 1/2 of the carbon we mine or we have to use a chemical process such as Fis

Re:one tonne of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil

[RGRistroph]

I like your analysis.

I think the plant described in the article doesn't have to produce ethanol. It makes synthesis gas which can be "upgraded" all the way to gasoline or diesel as long as you put in the energy. why stop at ethanol which has a lower value ? They are probably just trying to ride the ethanol hype wave, which is focused on yeast made ethanol (for now) and the "cellulostic ethanol" which is really supposed to mean a low-energy enzyme based process, not a high energy gasification process.

I like your point about the cheapest way to get alcohol being from oil or natural gas. I noted several years ago that news stories appeared indicating that much of the cheap vodka on the market in Russia comes from oil refineries, not wheat or potato fields. Even longer ago, there was once a scandal in France relating to whether cognac was being produced from agricultural output or whether there was "cheating" going on; the agricultural lobby carbon-dated cognac on the market, and showed by the isotope ratios that if it was all from agricultural output it would have to be thousands of years old. Of course manufactures were violating France's farm-protectionist "food purity" laws and using oil-derived alcohol.

You say you support hemp as a source. If it were really economically viable, wouldn't the big plants in Russia (where any law can be broken) Europe (where hemp is legal) be "cheating" in their alcohol and energy production by buying cheap hemp ?

One factor in favor of biomass over coal as a source of feed for a gasification / synthetic fuel production is that the removal of polluting sulphur from the coal, usually post-gasification, consumes energy and is complecated. I have been doing a bit of reading on the subject.

You mention the Fischer-Tropsch. If surphur is present in the coal feed, you will have hydrogen sulphide in the resulting hydrocarbons from Fischer-Tropsch.

I think it would be interesting to build a small plant that heated the carbon feed with microwaves, and fed in H2 separated electrolytically instead of by burning some of the carbon. You might be able to make a small stationary plant, that could be feed from intermittent power from a windmill. It would operate robotically as long as it's feed hopper was full and it could get water. If something like that were placed actually in the fields, then the ash or clinkers could easily be re-spread on the ground. I suspect it would only be viable in agricultural areas so remote that it is expensive to transport fuel to them and product to the market.

And that leads to some observations about your objection to starch and yeast derived alcohol. Farmers have traditional produced such alcohol as a way of "concentrating" their agricultural output for easy transportation, which is one reason why that production is traditional in the mountain areas of the south. But the current tax-break-subsidized boom in ethanol is not from small tubs and stills on the farms themselves, it is directed towards larger corporate stills that operate in town, still requiring some transportation of the bulky feed. I believe it is unlikely the economies of scale of a whiskey still pay for the transportation. The United States maintains its old laws that tax a distilled alcohol product from the minute it is produced, unless you pay a tax bond that is available only to the big producers, thus keeping small independents out of the business. One more reason not to put that tank-rusting ethanol crap in your vehicle.

Re:one tonne of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil

[micromuncher]

You do not have to limit yourself to cellulase producing organisms like fungi because you can also get lignase and amylase from bacteria. The problem with any enzymatic process is that the enzymes are expensive to produce and just as awkward to reclaim. ( www.iogen.ca has received tons of federal money for this )

You do not need to put gas into a fisher-tropsch process; anything organic can be "burned but not") and recombined. The problem with fisher-tropsch process is its high temperature and pressure. Not so cheap. And you don't need to add water, as H can come from your cracking. The basic FT process is break the hydrocarbon into its CO and H form, then recombine it into any other hydrocarbon.

* wave from Calgary

Re:one tonne of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil

[cdn-programmer]

You are correct of course the H can come from within the F-T reaction itself. The problem here in Alberta is that our only real surplus H comes from Methane and we are past the peak of North American production as of 2001. So we need to look elsewhere. Hence I still stand behind my comments that unless we are willing to create the H from nuclear energy disassociating water (steam electrolysis perhaps) then we will be creating a stream of liquid CO2 measured in the millions of barrels as we produce a stream of synthetic crude measured in the range of 5 million barrels per day.

This is when we get there.

Our other alternative is to leave up to 1/2 of the carbon we mine in a coke pile. The H is simply not in the feedstocks.

Essential ingredient to the process is ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Pork

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Dogtanian]

Interesting diagram, thanks. Yep, looks like Europe and most of "Asia" are one mass; the interesting bit is that Saudi Arabia and surrounding parts of the Middle East *do* have their own plate, and the same applies to the Indian Subcontinent (The latter collision of two plates forming- of course- the Himalayas). So, if we use plates as the basis, most of Eurasia can't be considered separate, but those two can.

This is not the first...

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a celulosic ethahol plant operating in the early 20th century near Port Townsend, WA, using chips and scrap from a nearby sawmill. It used a process developed by the French that left little waste--the mash remaining at the end of the process was used for cattle feed.

The structure still exists and now houses a very nice hotel called the Inn at Port Hadlock.

Re:This is not the first...

[mikehoskins]

Not only that, but when I read the articles, they refer to a competitor doing this in California (not Baja California).

kudzu

[falconwolf]

Well, this plant runs on cellulose and not sugar. So I'm assuming its going to be using Kudzu instead of Sugar Cane.

There's certainly enough kudzu in the south to feed the plant. Instead of trying to erradicate it maybe it could be grown to produce ethanol.

Falcon

...not only that

[Xodmoe]

...but the paper rendered from hemp has a lower acid content than the stuff we print our TPS reports on.

World corn production = 475 million tonnes

[cdn-programmer]

World corn production is about 475 million tonnes of which the USA produces about 200 million.

You can get about 10 liters max of ethanol from the starch in a bushel of corn which weighs 56 lbs. 2000/56 = 35 bushes * 10 = 350 liters per tonne.

Ethanol has about 17,000 btu per gallon verses gasoline at 27,000. This is about 2/3.

There are about 158 liters in a petroleum barrel. So the ethanol barrel equivalent of the starch in the the world's corn crop is:

475*350/158*17/27 = 662 million barrels.

For the USA... they burn about 22 million barrels of oil per day.

200*350/158*17/27 = 279 million barrels.

279 / 22 = 12.7 days. If the USA gives up 100% of its corn crop they can feed their cars for 2 weeks.

Offsetting this we get the brewers grains which are high in protein but lack the starches since we converted them.

Since this is only 4% approximately and I have not even considered the energy required to run these plants and haul the stuff around - I think it is rather foolish to give up potentially 100% of the corn crop for 4% of the fuel required. This simply not even within the ballpark of making sense.

some thoughts about your writing

[Nick Number]

The word is "you're". It's a contraction of "you are". "Your" is a possessive pronoun.

Also, it's customary to capitalize the first word in a sentence. This makes it easier for a reader to identify where a new thought is beginning.

Consider using a spellchecker. You could install Firefox 2.0+ for inline checking or just refer to dictionary.com when in doubt. The latter only takes a couple of seconds.

All of these things would greatly contribute to your posts' readability.

Pot and the Kettle

[benhocking]

And next time be more polite.

I find that funny coming from the same person who wrote:

No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others (*). They don't give a crap about the environment and they would gladly defend taking out a lot of the amazon forest just to grow sugar cane and replace those big corporations.

and:

Except that some enviro-nuts are actually motivated to destroy oil companies.

I do not believe I was any less polite than that. By the way, I also do not believe you've been rude, either. I believe you've honestly expressed your belief, which is exactly what I was doing. If you really believe the motivations of more than 10% of the activist environmentalists (as you've said elsewhere) is to destroy oil companies with no regard to the environment, then, well, I believe that's delusional.

why synthetic oil needs hydrogen

[cdn-programmer]

The issue of why we have a severe hydrogen shortage when we look at synthetic fuel production is quite easy to see. Liquid motor fuels for the most part are alkanes which have the chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Bitumin from the tar sands is close to 1:1. With coal it varies and can be down at CH0.6.

Octane for instance is C8H18 (n=8).

Clearly if we mine (CH)n and need CnH(2n+2) then for large values of n we need about a hydrogen for each carbon or we need to discard 1/2 the carbon we mine. This is more true with coal than with bitumin which perhaps explains why tar sands operations make more sense than coal mining even now and even though we have massive amounts of coal and the coal is not 2/3 sand.

Your comments of sulphur in the coal feedstock are correct. However my analysis is just a rough ball park - I did not even consider the economics and details of anything. I simply wanted to illustrate that the ethanol hype we are hearing now is based on a poor understanding of the problem. Its expensive, it takes food out of mouths, and even if we push the technology of starch to ethanol as far as we can we won't make much of a difference other than to drive up the price of corn and grain. Food will become more expensive. However there is so much middle man costs in a loaf of bread for instance that fuel demands cannot possibly compete. Expect the pork industry to go broke though. Cattle will be better but not much because grain is used to finish cattle. Poulty uses a lot of grain.

I do think cellulose to ethanol from non-grain sources might have a great deal of potential. I also think that biological processes will make a great deal of sense.

I am left with the pyrolic methods... they are robust and simpler. We should be able to use these methods on our garbage which presently is not handled IMHO even close to the way it should be handled. For instance in my mind all organic waste should be converted to fertilizer and returned to the land. We have to stop mining our land. God's not making all that much more land for us to destroy.

When I look at coal as a chemical feedstock for liquid fuel and consider Nuclear as the source of hydrogen then to me it looks like a winner.

Biosources yield chemical feedstock with the general chemistry of (CH2O)n (Set n=6 and you get C6H12O6) which means one is carting around 50% of the load as oxygen. You can't cart it all that far before your economics go to pot.

Ethanol is C2H5OH which is 24+5+16+1 = 46. 16/46 = 35%. There is still a huge amount of the load which is not productive. In fact its about 40% of the load which is non-productive. Not only are you carting about the heavy oxygen, you also lost 2 carbon:hydrogen bonds and the energy from them. This is one reason the oil industry wants to transport methane as LPG instead of turning it into an alcohol. Best route is probably gas to liquids.

Comments like NOx is reduced may not necessarily make sense if one computes the NOx per mile. Also, NOx is reduced when the combustion temperature goes down and when one looks at the thermodynamics one sees the efficiency of the engine goes down with the combustion temperature. We saw this before with the EPA regulations where the emissions went down ... but the motors were de-tuned and this really hurt the gas milage. I remember calculating that the total emissions per mile driven went up.... the issue is the equation used by the EPA resulted in the denominator becoming larger due to the poor milage and the bigger denominator masked things.

I'll give an example.

Car #1 gets 20 miles to the gallon and produces x grams of emissions per liter of exhaust.

Car #2 gets 10 miles to the gallon and produces 75% of x grams per liter of exhaust.

Car #2 has an emission level that is 3/4 of car #1. One can say that Car #1 produces 1/3 more emissions.

But car #2 produces 1.5 grams of emissions per 20 miles driven while car #1 only produces x grams. This means that Car #

trading with Cuba

[falconwolf]

I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with not funding a repressive totalitarian regime or anything... I'm as suspicious for corporate conspiracies as the next guy, but we should not send our capital to Fidel and his minions for any reason.

We traded with China and the Soviet Union, we certainly can trade with Cuba as well. One reason given for trade with China is that it would open up China, the same thing applies to Cuba.

As for totalitarian regimes the US has supported quite a few. Bush Jr took us to war against one, Saddam. However his dad Bush Sr as president and as VP with Reagan as president both supported Saddam. The Reagan and Bush Sr admins supported Saddam while he was using WMDs against not just Iran but also against Kurds and others in Iraq. Before Reagan and Bush Sr, Pres Ford and Henry Kissinger supported the dictator Gen Pinochet when he overthrew a democratically elected government. Both also supported the president of Indonesia General Suharto's invasion of the sovereign country of East Timor. After the invasion 200,000 East Timorese, one third of the population of East Timor, were massacred.

The US has supported dictators and atrocious human rights violaters and has no legs to stand on to support it's stance on Cuba. Hell the US supported the Cuban dictator Batista before Castro was able to overthrow him, if it hadn't been for the corrupt Batista Castro may of never gained power. This is not to excuse Castro but the US has plenty of blood on it's own hands.

Falcon

Re:trading with Cuba

[schweinhund]

I unfortunately must agree the that US has supported dictators in the past and currently, but that doesn't mean we should take on any more!

People can't be trusted with nuclear.

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I can tell you from simple observation of the people and corporations around me: we should stay totally away from building any more nuke plants, and we should shut down the ones we've got as soon as we can develop a carbon-neutral replacement (no time soon, I know).

Kids today can't even keep their pants up, and you want to let a company that spends 90% of its executive brainpower figuring out ways to reduce payroll costs (that'd be nearly all US companies) run a nuclear plant? C'mon, that's like entrusting your car to a liquored-up teenager and his anorexic girlfriend. It's not that nuclear isn't better, it's that our corporate overlords are far too greedy and incompetent to be trusted with anything that requires intelligence and vigilance.

I once heard an aerospace executive say (while explaining to another exec why the front office was overruling engineers recommendations) "if those boys in the lab were as smart as we are they'd be making more money than us". That's all you need to know about the hereditary masters of American business.

Re:People can't be trusted with nuclear.

[rtechie]

It's not that nuclear isn't better, it's that our corporate overlords are far too greedy and incompetent to be trusted with anything that requires intelligence and vigilance. Yet somehow our corporate overlords have been able to operate the ones we have now for decades without a major accident. If you don't think the corporate overlords can handle it, how about the government? I don't have any problem conceptually with a state-run nuclear power system as it would definitely be better than fossil fuels, any way you look at it. Or maybe a hybrid system, with the government providing security and monitoring.

I once heard an aerospace executive say (while explaining to another exec why the front office was overruling engineers recommendations) "if those boys in the lab were as smart as we are they'd be making more money than us". Except that in many of these industries the executives ARE former engineers, so this rings a little hollow.

nuclear power

[falconwolf]

Forgetting about mining uranium, where are you going to store spent fuel, Yucca Mountain?
(skipping)
And the salt just stays there, rather than washing away, why?

What salt?

Also, there is always Hawaiia Volcano Nat'l Park. Just dump it into the molten lava and let it emerge as rock in a few years.

You mean let it emerge as radioactive gases?

There are large subduction zones around the world, as well.

A few months ago I read an article on this that pointed out some problems with putting nuclear waste in a subduction zone, unfortunately I don't recall where I read it. One problem I recall though was that it could be expelled and spread around contaminating the ocean floor.

Falcon

Re:nuclear power

[dwye]

> > > Forgetting about mining uranium, where are you going to store spent fuel, Yucca Mountain?
> > > (skipping)
> > And the salt just stays there, rather than washing away, why?
>
> What salt?

Yucca Mountain is (or has) an underground salt dome, hence believed to be fairly stable, geologically (no Canadian Shield, but good for a few 10,000 years). If they were just going to use a cavern, they could as easily used Carlsbad Caverns (not the tourist area, of course), or even Cheyenne Mountain (hey, it's already hardened again any non-nuclear attack).

> A few months ago I read an article on this that pointed out some problems
> with putting nuclear waste in a subduction zone, unfortunately I don't
> recall where I read it. One problem I recall though was that it could be
> expelled and spread around contaminating the ocean floor.

A subduction zone is where the planet is eating its crust. Any contamination will be sucked down into the mantle, along with the rest of the seafloor. Obviously, you vitrify the stuff first, rather just than drop 55 gallon drums of the waste, or something equally strawmanish, but once there it will be sucked up in time.

Elasticity

[Mateorabi]

The Econ 101 word you are looking for here is "elasticity." Gas is an extremely inelastic good. Demand does not fluctuate (much) with price compared to other goods. Of course if you get to Econ 202 there may be a time domain component. I still have to get to work tomorrow and so will pay the price, but next year when I buy a new car, I may look more favorably on that Mini where I'll be buying less every tank from then on.

Dedicated Crops?

[WastedMeat]

Why is it necessary to grow crops just for the purpose of producing cellulose? You cannot metabolize cellulose (AKA fiber). Human wastes have the same quantity of cellulose as the plant matter originally ingested. If you are not going to use the simpler sugars in something like corn anyway, you might as well let it run through something that can before destroying it.

The tone with which much of the world says that the U.S. is full of shit may someday change from disdain to envy.

Using CO2 as a source for fuel

[zoftie]

From what I have read burning ethanol produces nearly as much CO2 as of regular gas. Given we do take carbon source from the plant, which reabsorb it, picture often is quite a bit more complex then a loop of carbon described in our grade school geography class (at there where we were taught that). Anyhow, I thought the idea would be to go completely electric and have control over CO2 emissions at places of control, and degrade necessity on cabon fuels over time in favour of non-carbon energy sources, wind, solar and nearterm nuclear.(however it is hard to build quality nuclear stations fast, though I might be wrong).

I am not against going to ethanol, at least it will alleviate some pollution in the downtown core of my home city. We are still suffering from soot pollution of many coal powered stations that still give much of electricity to our region.

So to round it up, isn't there a deception going on war against greenhouse gasses vs pollution. Mass media as usual seems to be confusing the public, rolling with what the white house has preached.

Commies

[Mark_MF-WN]

Well, I was using it sarcastically. Republicans toss out the word communist to refer to absolutely anyone that they disagree with.

But fifties retro isn't that rare... especially since neoconservatives are still using the word communist without even the slightest understanding of what the word means. My associates and I frequently use the term "commie-pinko-with-aids" to refer to anything over which people show an irrational dislike or an irrational level of polarization. I mean, it sums up the whole mindset of the ultra-liberal or neo-conservative whackos (like the guy I was responding to).

An example, from one of the most inspiring Americans I've ever run across on the net, on his list of Things that need to BE DESTROYED.

American Assholes who think that it's perfectly fine to disregard or weaken the Constitutional Amendments about Freedom of Speech, Freedoms of Petition and Assembly, Seperation of Church and State, Unfair Search and Seizure, Due Process, Cruel and Unusual Punishment, and the amendments regarding elections, states' rights, minorities' rights, women's rights, etc. but if anyone DARES to suggest that maybe not everyone should be allowed to own a fully automatic assault rifle, or that maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to check their criminal backgrounds first, then they're "GODDAMN COMMIE UNAMERICAN PINKO SCUM! HANG 'EM! YOU MEAN I GOTTA WAIT SEVEN WHOLE DAYS BEFORE I CAN UNLOAD A 32 ROUND CLIP OF HOT DEATH INTO MY BOSS IN A LITTLE OVER A SECOND AND A HALF? WHAT IS THIS? COMMUNIST CHINA?"

-- NegativePositive. http://negativepositive.org/

Re:Commies

[Dr. Cody]

But fifties retro isn't that rare...

I posted and immediately remembered the Swing craze I'd suppressed.

Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?

Not just sugar cane.

[tacokill]

It's sugar beets. too.

Everyone can get CEI

[benhocking]

Although I have no idea about the accuracy of the provide information, the source makes me suspicious. CEI has an extremely strong agenda. This is not peer-reviewed science we're talking about. Do a little research on CEI, and you might hesitate from using them as a source again. Again, they might actually be right about this one, I really don't know. However, I'd bet they've probably at the very least exaggerated the science, if indeed any was used.

I realize this might seem like an ad hominem attack, but reading this article is kind of like going over to the boy who cried "wolf" to see if this time, in fact, there is a wolf.

Yucca Mountain and nuclear power

[falconwolf]

Yucca Mountain is (or has) an underground salt dome, hence believed to be fairly stable, geologically (no Canadian Shield, but good for a few 10,000 years).

Yea, a few 10,000s of years. The tyme period had to be lower to 10,000 years from millions so they would be able to say Yucca is a good place. Many of the isotopes that will be stored there, if is used for storage, have a half-life of more than a million years, some over 100 million. Originally when a place was being decided on where to store radioactive waste back in the 1970s there were three places being considered, Yucca Mountain, Utah, someplace in Washington, and another in Texas though I don't recall exactly where in either state. Both Washington and Texas were able to get their names taken off the list because they had strong congressional representation, leaving only Yucca on the list.

A subduction zone is where the planet is eating its crust

Not quite. A subduction zone is where one tectonic plate is sliding under another. Putting anything there and it could go down OR up, ie "cling" to the plate sliding under or "cling" to the plate floating over the other. By drilling a cavity into the submerging plate deep enough then plugging the cavity to hold the waste this could be mitigated if not not stopped.

Another thing that might work that could be done is to mix the waste in a glassy substance and let it harden. The mixture can then be placed in those cavities.

Obviously, you vitrify the stuff first

Ok, I see you already cover what I last said, the glassy substance. I couldn't recall what the process was called.

Falcon

Re:Yucca Mountain and nuclear power

[dwye]

> Yucca Mountain, Utah, someplace in Washington, and another in Texas
> though I don't recall exactly where in either state.

Hanford, in Washington. They were already storing the liquid wastes, so it seemed reasonable to vitrify the stuff and store it there permanently. Then came the reports on the stored liquid leaking enough to get offsite, and they were off the list.

I do not remember where they were planning to put it in Texas, though. If Texas, for that matter.

I just googled it (site long term+ "nuclear waste storage"), to no great luck. Interestingly, it included a google directory in its top 100. Isn't that masturbation? :-)

> Many of the isotopes that will be stored there, if is used for storage,
> have a half-life of more than a million years, some over 100 million.

The goal is not to get all of the radioactives decayed, just to get the radioactivity down to around background. Otherwise, we would have to do the same for everything - can you imagine how difficult it would be to store all the Pepto-Bismal until the bismuth decays? :-)

"tyme"

[falconwolf]

It seems like just recently I'm seeing a lot of people here write "tyme" instead of "time". Or maybe it's just Falcon over and over again, I don't know (no offense Falcon). Is this the new "loose"?

That I know of I've the only one that uses the spelling of "time" as "tyme". And it's not new, it's an Old English spelling. The first tyme I saw it was in the latter 1970s in volume 20 of 20 something volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, OED . I've used that spelling since. I've also had to drag teachers and profs to the library or copy the page with that spelling to show them it was correct when they marked my spelling as wrong.

Falcon

Cellulose to Sugar

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought everyone knew Cellulose is converted to Sugars by TERMITES !!!

Re:Question: Dual Plant... ANS = yes

[cdn-programmer]

Yes you can do dual plant (stage) You can probably do triple stage.

The first issue is the starch. In ripe corn there isn't all that much sugar. You need to malt it which is the same as beer production from barley and the seed produces both alpha and beta amalayse which break down the starches into simple sugars like glucose and dextrose. Sugar cane produces sucrose which is a fructose and glucose molecule hitched up. The non-chemists can think of this as marriage.

Long chain starches eventually are called celulosic polymers. Alpha amalyase doesn't work very well on these long chain sugar polymers so they don't get broken down into something yeast can use. They cause horrible things if you are brewing like starch hazes and crap like that. From a fuel standpoint - its an unfinished job.

But.

You can parge the wort of all the good stuff you get and if you do your best from most grains including corn you get about 100 brewers pounds per quarter. I'm not going to tell anyone here what a brewer's quarter is or what brewer's pounds are.

The left overs.

The protein to a certain extent is concentrated. In some circles this is good because it means we can use the leftovers (brewers grains) as animal feed to make lean meat instead of fat. But hamburgers and sausages like fat.

The rest of the mix is still there.

For fuel, one might want to use an acid catalyst to break down the sugar polymers. Acids break down the sugars as well. If you use the biological pathway then you can extract the fermented sugars as a 1st phase and reprocess what is left behind which if you know your medieval conversion constants regarding brewers pounds and quarters and the like turns out to be about 1/3 of what you put in if you start with high quality grain.

I posted in a previous essay (diatribe) that using 100% of the USA corn production in 1990 creates by way of fermentation about 4% of the liquid fuel demand. IE. Its folly. There are far better ways.

-------

So "what of what" is left over from a fermentation process. These are called brewers grains. The best use is cattle feed. But your question is if we are dumb enough (my tilt) (your's is a good question) then what if we tried to convert our brewers grains as well.

Do do this we can use more microbiology. Fungal spoecies such as Tricoderma verdi are excellent cellulose digesters. There are others: Pleurotis spp, Lentunula spp. Stropharia spp. Amarillia spp and of course I can toss in one shroom (cellulose digester) that should strike fear into the heart of even the most brave - Galerina spp. Note that several Galerina spp look to the unaware almost identical to Psylocybin spp. Only one can kill you. It takes about a week - maybe a bit longer. But these are just the large macro fungus.

Tricoderma spp is one genus. The species Imogen is working on was isolated in about 1942 in Guam. Its used to make our stone washed blue genes. It is a good cotton = cellulose digester. Nevertheless I suspect its claim to fame with cellulose to ethanol is more related to government grants that to suitability. Other fungus have much broader digestive pathways and are far more robust and also can be grown in liquid culture.

So... We can run a 'shroom through the brewer's grains. I don't think it will make any economic sense to do it and I question if Starch _. Ethanol will ever make sense. Nevertheless - we can do it.

After the best digestion of whatever species of shrooms we chose takes place we can still run another species. But its marginal.

3rd stage would by pyrolic decomposition.

But. We can do this at stage one and has been pointed out in other post the F-T process does this with ANY carbon - hydrogen chemical feedstock.

The simple observation is that if we want a tonne of ethanol which by energy is about 40% loaded with oxidization byproducts. (this is borken chemical links and the O itself) then with an alcohol such as ethanol (C2H5OH)

CAMEL DUNG

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what the world really needs. Camel and cow dung are used extensivly in Africa and Aisa. To hell with foreign aid....we should help promote this ancient practice !! SG in Florida.

Check your facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Georgia Pacfic and Miller Brewing have been operating cellulosic fuel plants for years.

http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/governorlocke/pr ess/press-view.asp?pressRelease=491&newsType=1

GP especially in JV with DOE out of their washington state facilities.

Check your facts!

Coal and Nuclear

[Mark_MF-WN]

It got more bizzare with the bit about burning nuclear fuel - a bit of a hint there that coal is more radioactive than nuclear fuel perhaps or is it an even more bizzare fantasy?

Coal, unfortunately, is heavily laden with radioactive isotopes (as are many things that have to be mined). The effective dose of radiation from a 1000 MW coal plant is 30 times higher than that from a 1000 MW nuclear plant ... and they release 5 times more uranium in their ash (which goes into the air that we ... you know, breathe) than a comparable nuclear plant produces in convenient little barrels... as well as hundreds of times more thorium. Incidentally, both of those elements are highly toxic, and their toxicity is actually much more of a danger than their radioactivity when it's in our air.

If nuclear plants simply INCINERATED their waste, they would be WAY ahead of even the cleanest coal plants as far as radiation and toxic emissions are concerned. And of course, that's not even getting INTO the mercury that coal plants spew out. Naturally, no one intends to incinerate nuclear waste; the point is simply that nuclear waste is a concern only to stupid people with too much free time and too little common sense.

Here's a reference that you might find helpful (including a very good list of further sources).

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html

Commercial nuclear power is unfortuantely still stuck in the 1950s

All kinds of new power cycles are being researched all the time. Third generation reactors are online in a number of countries. France already gets over 75% of its power from nuclear plants, and reprocesses 30% of the waste (making them the most energy-independent of all western nations). Japan gets 30% of its electricity from nuclear power, and has advanced reactor designs in place and more under construction.

Of course, there have been setbacks, and there will inevitably be more of them. But I'd like to think that we're not so cowardly and meek as a species that a few setbacks will stop us from exploring such a promising set of technologies.

...perhaps accelerate thorium...

You're preaching to the choir on that one. World thorium reserves are vast -- even more so than uranium, which is quite abundant itself. Of course, with reprocessing and the technology to implement a variety of fuel cycles, we can happily use both, breed fuel from unenriched materials (like all that depleted uranium that the US has sitting around), reuse the waste until there's nothing left but harmless low-level stuff, etc.

Wind and solar are nice, but there needs to be a stable backbone -- and nuclear offers that in spades. We've got enough nuclear technology RIGHT NOW to keep the lights on, and with the research happening right now we can make sure that the next generation of plants are so clean and safe that our grandchildren will wonder why we ever screwed around with fossil fuel plants at all. It would be nice if we could save the oil and coal for things that don't have alternatives yet, like making plastics. The petrochemical industry still doesn't have a whole lot of alternative feedstocks yet.

Re:Coal and Nuclear

[dbIII]

That paper on ornl has surfaced again. Take note of the age and the lack of peer reviewed papers that have cited it in the decades since - that should tell you something. Read the content and have nothing more than a high school physics and chemistry background - you will notice a few flaws - have a little more background and you'll see a few more. The biggest one, which I mentioned above before the above poster helpfully linked to the thing, is in a paper about emissions the polution controls are modelled as a mysterious black box that spews a certain percentage of everything directly into the air - perhaps enough for high school but if you are being paid to write things a slightly more professional approach is required. The coal mentioned in the article isn't typical either but people that skim the thing assume it is. Coal has enough real problems that actually do kill people without making stuff up.

If the claims of nuclear proponents that just wish to nobble competing energy sources were true we could just mine ash dams at power plants for our nuclear fuel needs - however I forgot the fantasy that it all goes in the air so perhaps we simply need to mine the lungs of children and puppies for the stuff. The claims are extreme, heavily financially motivated and come directly from PR companies and not the underfunded physicists who should be trying to get something decent together instead of funding the production of bullshit for a scam to get taxpayers to put obsolete Westinghouse junk into service at vast expense. I wonder what color of paint they will slap on the old gear to call it Gen V? If the nuclear industry was serious there would be some R&D money instead of a vast amount of "lobby" and advertising money.

long term nuclear storage sites

[falconwolf]

Hanford, in Washington. They were already storing the liquid wastes, so it seemed reasonable to vitrify the stuff and store it there permanently. Then came the reports on the stored liquid leaking enough to get offsite, and they were off the list.

I do not remember where they were planning to put it in Texas, though. If Texas, for that matter.

Here, I found it:

1986 The DOE issues final Environmental Assessments and nominates five candidate repository sites from the original nine, and then selects three western sites -- in Nevada, Texas, and Washington -- for detailed investigation, from which one is to be selected for repository licensing.

Falcon

Hemp in the Netherlands

[GPS Pilot]

Question: As you know, in the Netherlands they have very few inhibitions about hemp (and related crops). So, are farmers in that country growing lots of hemp? Why not, if it has so many profitable uses?

Re:Hemp in the Netherlands

[falconwolf]

Question: As you know, in the Netherlands they have very few inhibitions about hemp (and related crops). So, are farmers in that country growing lots of hemp? Why not, if it has so many profitable uses?

I don't know how much hemp is grown in the Netherlands. However according to this over four hundred thousand acres of hemp were cultivated in the US between 1942 and 1945. The federal government made the movie "Hemp for Victory" to encourage farmers to grow it. It was important for the war effort.

Imagination

[Mark_MF-WN]

How about this then?

A normal 500 megawatt coal plant burns around 1.2 million tons of coal a year.

According to the US geological survey, most American coal contains between 1 and 4 PPM Uranium and between 1 and 4 PPM Thorium.

1.2 million tons * (1 PPM uranium + 1 PPM thorium) = 1.2 tons of uranium + 1.2 tons of thorium.

We're discussing nuclear reactors in the 1000 MW range, so double those figures to 2.4 tons of each.

The waste from a 1000 MW nuclear plant tops out at around 30 tons, of which only around 5% is waste; the other 95% of it can be reprocessed using technology and fuel-cycles from '50s. That leaves a staggering 1.5 tons of assorted radioactive waste. The US is one of the only nations where the government considers it a good idea to try and dispose of the entire 30 tons... most other nations either reprocess it already, or are storing their waste until they DO have reprocessing facilities available.

...

Now, no one here is actually suggesting that coal power is going to irradiate people, at least not any more than we already are on account of normal background radiation. The point is simply that fear of the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is beyond stupid -- it's nothing but the result of paranoia and fear-mongering. With coal power, that radioactive waste is so diffuse that no one gives a flying shit. If nuclear plants incinerated a little bit of their waste every day, they would be no more dangerous, and there would be no menacing-looking barrels for people to point at when they need something to demonize.

Re:Imagination

[dbIII]

The thing that others do not consider is where it all goes or percentage of total mass or volume. Fanatics do not consider comparing it with background radiation sources such as sand safe enough to be in a childs sandpit.

Now, no one here is actually suggesting that coal power is going to irradiate people

Unfortuantely that is exactly what a number of nuclear trolls are suggesting - mostly on other forums but some here have done it in the past, and they use that junk science article on ornl to justify it. Ranking things by citation is an old idea with scientific papers and is the way google sorts popularity of links now - so think of that paper as having a ranking of zero due to the lack of peer reviewed papers citing it - it only gets media hype and expensive PR.

To get closer to reality - that coal with a suprisingly high heavy metal content (I've never looked at US coal so I'll take it as real figures) contains much larger amounts of sulphur which can cause real pollution problems. Pollution controls are thus arranged to remove a gas mostly by using a lot of water - I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider the relative mass of NOx and SOx gasses and solid particles of HEAVY metals. Gravity should be considered in your calculations. A rough back of the envelope estimate considering only orders of magnitude will be superior to that ornl paper.

I suggest that all nuclear advocates should learn a bit about what they are advocating - they'll stop pushing that "quick fix" stupidity for a start once they learn that it takes years to build any thermal plant and then you have the problem that your new plant is going to have to be a prototype of a new technology if it is not going to be a dangerous and expensive 1950's white elephant.

The "coal is nuclear too so let's build nuclear" argument I see as a really silly PR stunt and I'll say something about it every time it crops up. Coal has real problems that people die from - but nuclear has to stand on it's own merits and has to actually put some effort into improvment instead of just bribing people (the civilain US nuclear R&D budget is nearly zero but the lobby budget is large), coal is not the only other alternative.

Re:Imagination

[Mark_MF-WN]

The thing that others do not consider is where it all goes or percentage of total mass or volume. Fanatics do not consider comparing it with background radiation sources such as sand safe enough to be in a childs sandpit.

That's precisely what people don't consider with nuclear though. People dismiss nuclear for reasons that are equally true of coal.

The point about radiation from coal is not and has never been about radiation being a reason to stop using coal power. It's about exposing the concerns about nuclear waste as being pointless fear-mongering. Nuclear waste ultimately just usn't the boogeyman under the bed that so many people make it out to be. If you're not one of those people, then the argument isn't directed at you -- you're already ahead of the curve, so what's the problem?

Unfortuantely that is exactly what a number of nuclear trolls are suggesting - mostly on other forums but some here have done it in the past, and they use that junk science article on ornl to justify it

I've yet to see anyone try to make the backwards inference that nuclear power is t3h evil, so therefore coal --- being more radioactive -- must therefore also be t3h evil. I've only ever seen it used to shut down the trolls who go around whining like spanked children about where nuclear waste will go. Besides, I think that the data which I located would seem to confirm ORNL's premise, if not their methodology.

To get closer to reality - that coal with a suprisingly high heavy metal content (I've never looked at US coal so I'll take it as real figures) contains much larger amounts of sulphur which can cause real pollution problems.

Preaching to the choir again. There are plenty enough problems with coal. And I'm rational enough to acknowledge that coal may still have a future as a part of our energy infrastructure if clean-coal technologies pan out. Given that massive quanitities of coal remaining and the value of exploiting it, I don't doubt that engineers will find a clean coal process that can be commercialized. The offer of higher efficiencies and vastly cleaner emissions is just too tempting.

I suggest that all nuclear advocates should learn a bit about what they are advocating - they'll stop pushing that "quick fix" stupidity for a start once they learn that it takes years to build any thermal plant and then you have the problem that your new plant is going to have to be a prototype of a new technology if it is not going to be a dangerous and expensive 1950's white elephant.

Of course it takes years -- that's why it's so important to invest now. Other than interference from certain varieties of insane ultrahippies and meddling by energy concerns that want to avoid competition, the world's nuclear programs have been highly successfull. The accidents have been few in number, and vastly less harmful than the cumulative effect of what emissions from fossil fuel plants are doing. One of the nice features of nuclear power is that it commands enough respect that people will take safety seriously.

The "coal is nuclear too so let's build nuclear" argument I see as a really silly PR stunt and I'll say something about it every time it crops up.

Haven't you been keeping up? Coal is as nuclear as nuclear. You're just looking at it backwards -- the point is not to say that coal is evil, but to say that nuclear ISN'T evil... or at least no MORE evil than coal in this regard. It's an extremely dramatic counterargument against nuclear-waste fearmongers; they're arguing from an emotional position anyway, so why not point out that there emotions are stupid and wrong? Sometimes they need that kind of cold-water to open them up to the genuinely relevant facts.

Besides, who ever tried to position the uranium-in-coal factoid as some kind of universal advocacy platform for nuclear power?

Re:Imagination

[dbIII]

There are scientists and engineers all around the world designing advanced new reactors

Unfortunately you could talk to all of them around a relatively small table and most of them will retire soon. Meanwhile millions are spent on lobbying to build plant that really does not work very well instead - they don't want scientists and engineers they want techs to assemble old plant and a government handout.

Re:Imagination

[Mark_MF-WN]

I think the confusion here may stem from nationality -- I understand that in the US, the situation is indeed almost exactly as you describe.

Speaking as a Canadian, I would point out that the next generation of CANDU reactors is being designed right now. They can still breed fuel from thorium and be run on the waste from LWRs, they use vastly less heavy water (one of the biggest costs in building traditional CANDU reactors), they're half the size for the same power output, they have more passive safety features, etc. I mean, that's pretty good -- and that's just one nation's nuclear program. Japan and Europe have new reactors that are significant evolutionary improvements on older pressured water reactors, like the ABWR and EPR. Indian researchers are working on concepts for thorium-cycle reactors right now, among many others (I doubt they're on the verge of retirement either). And pebble bed reactors are already at the prototype stage -- hardly a primitive reactor design.

Of course, if you're referring to the underlying technology -- then sure, they are all based on designs conceived of in the 50s. But that logic, you drive around in technology from the 19th century (I'm making the audacious assumption here that you drive an internal combustion engine vehicle...). Your home is most likely heated using a technology from the paleolithic age. And so on. But when you make enough evolutionary, incremental improvements to a technology, you eventually end up with something that is very advanced compared to the original.

Now, there's no doubt that a very interesting and animated discussion could be had about the politics of nuclear power in America -- but those issues don't detract from the fact that all around the world, new reactors and new reactor designs are being researched and developed.

dictators

[falconwolf]

I unfortunately must agree the that US has supported dictators in the past and currently, but that doesn't mean we should take on any more!

Definitely NOT!!! I was against the invasion of Iraq. Attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan was ok but not attacking Iraq. Saddam was pretty much already contained and I never did believe he still had WMDs, nor did he support al Quada. Like Scott Ritter said, he was pretty well disarmed. bin Laden and al Quada wanted Saddam overthrown and executed. Now we're stuck in a quagmire there and the Taliban are gaining strength again. The same Taliban Bush gave more than $43 million US taxpayer money to, yes Bush gave them money.

Falcon

Furthermore...

[MacDork]

My last comment was a bit flippant. Allow me to share the college grade material with you. There's lots of relevant information there, if you are willing to separate yourself from your global warming religion. In particular, I like:

The more a soil is disturbed by tillage practices, the greater the potential breakdown of organic matter by soil organisms. During the early years of agriculture in the United States, when colonists cleared the forests and planted crops in the East and farmers later moved to the Midwest to plow the grasslands, soil organic matter decreased rapidly. In fact, the soils were literally mined of a valuable resource organic matter. In the Northeast and Southeast, it was quickly recognized that fertilizers and soil amendments were needed to maintain soil productivity. In the Midwest, the deep, rich soils of the tall-grass prairies were able to maintain their productivity for a long time despite accelerated soil organic matter loss and significant amounts of erosion. The reason for this was their unusually high original levels of soil organic matter.

This is what I've been telling you the entire f'ing thread. What you are saying contradicts an article with 10 reputable sources referenced. To believe what you are saying is to disbelieve Ph.Ds on the subject. Have you ever even handled a soil auger? Have you ever been graded on accuracy in identifying soil profiles? Do you know what a soil survey is? Do you know the characteristics of a Mollisol or an Oxisol? Do you know where they are usually found? Do you know what constitutes a 2 to 1 clay? Right off the top of your head, do you even know the difference between a clay and a loam?

No, you don't. You're probably googling it right now. You are clearly not very educated on the subject of soils. You have shown a complete disregard for any evidence I have provided you, and replied with nothing but statements of belief. I call that preaching... in lieu of scientific fact, you stick steadfast to your belief system. You are a member of a religion. That religion has clouded your judgement and your willingness to accept facts established using the scientific method. Rather than refute/verify them with experiments, you dismiss them. You only accept what fits nicely in your own world view. I can't say I'm surprised. It's the same with all global warmers. I can provide evidence until I'm blue in the face and it doesn't even make a dent.