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New Wonder Weed to Fuel Cars?
Hugh Pickens writes "Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation, may someday power your car. The plant, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content that when crushed can be burned in a diesel car while the residue can be processed into biomass for power plants. Although jatropha has been used for decades by farmers in Africa as a living fence because its smell and taste repel grazing animals, the New York Times reports that jatropha may replace biofuels like ethanol that require large amounts of water, fertilizer, and energy, making their environmental benefits limited. Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts. Poor farmers living close to the equator are planting jatropha on millions of acres spurred on by big oil companies like British Petroleum that are investing in jatropha cultivation."
It is a very good biomass source, it grows just about everywhere.
You don't get high from smoking industrial hemp.
See:
http://fuelandfiber.com/Hemp4NRG/Hemp4NRGRV3.htm
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
This is a noxious fast-growing weed, apparently kept in check in its native environment due to the fact that the soil and weather conditions there are terrible for growing anything. However, TFA mentions that various companies are looking at planting this thing all over the place, including areas that have good soil and growth-friendly climates.
So what happens when we start planting this thing everywhere? Could this turn into the next kudzu?
with BP every day. They are the only major oil company to seem to "get" that oil won't last forever. They have invested money into solar technologies (walk into Home Depot), lowered their own emissions requirements to meet standards that don't even exist yet, and now are shown to be investing heavily into alternative "bio" fuels. Exxon and the like seem content to just pulling oil from the ground and putting it into pumps.
Just a simple thought. They are still an "evil oil company" thus far as I can see... but at least they have vision for the future and aren't thinking oil will last forever as the Bush administration thinks it will.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Just wait 'till someone like the evil Monsanto figures out a way to genetically modify this weed to either boost the oil contents even further, or make it capable of growing in Antarctica, or both... Then we will get the showdown...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Too many billions in subsidies going into the maw of ethanol production.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
According to the article, the price of fuel derived from this will be in excess of $1/liter, or about $4/gallon. That's more that diesel is now. Something will have to change for this to be profitable.
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You're going to have nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and depending on the fuel & control devices used, varying levels of particulates, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). You're going to get this whether you burn the horribly-connoted "coal" or the relatively-benignly-connoted "wood". Plant matter, like that specified in TFA, isn't all that different from "wood", and actually used to be lumped together in the "biomass" definition until the US Supreme Court vacated the appropriate legislation set forth by the EPA.
Point being... all of this is the generation of additional waste stream for fuel, instead of utilizing an existing waste stream for fuel. I applaud the thought and intent, but why not use the garbage we already generate for fuel? RDF (refuse-derived fuel) boilers already exist for electrical generation...
If BP changes it's corporate directive, or the Jatropha plant isn't the great biomass solution it's touted to be, then we have millions of acres planted with "ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed" which is "resilient to pests and resistant to drought". Oh, great. While we're at it, let's introduce rabbits like they did into Australia, and kudzu like in the Southern US. Don't get me started on Zebra mussles or sea lampreys in the Great Lakes. Ok, so there's not much in the way of swampland in central Africa, but the point is that Really Bad Things happen wherever mankind does something that drastically alters the native environment. I wonder if global warming and increased CO2 will help the plant grow faster and more obnoxious?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Yes, but it's much better than anything we're doing right now in the realm of biofuel generation.
I think the point here is not that any one strategy will solve everything- as you note, it won't. That's no reason to shoot down something better than what we've got.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
Funny how the hemp promoters are uninterested in other coarse-fiber crops, like jute, sisal, kenaf, and manila. Or in other low-cost sources of cellulose, like straw, bagasse (sugar cane after sugar extraction), and similar agricultural waste. No, somehow they're attracted only to hemp.
And when you give them money, you pretty much destroy their ability to self-govern as well.
If we would just back off for 10 years*, leave africa alone, a lot of people would die but afterwards they would have their act together.
* including large multi-national quasi governmental corporations.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Electric cars with a practical range approaching 200 miles would suffice for most of the driving needs of most of the populace. If people could buy the cars, then subscribe to a battery service, this would enable fast battery module swaps. But most of the time, people would just charge overnight at home.
The other 20% would still need some form of internal combustion vehicle for dealing with heavier loads. But this would be much easier to provide with biodiesel than all of the vehicular needs of North America.
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Before everyone jumps on the bandwagon it would be good to look for the downsides of this wonderful, almost free, all-natural cure for our ailing internal combustion engines. A cursory look around at some sources (I'll let you do your own homework) will reveal several downsides to this plant.
Problem number 1: Not really good for anything but fuel. Plants currently grown provide food, clothing, or, in some cases, building supplies. Some plants grown now even provide for multiple outputs. Corn (food, feed, fuel, chemicals) is a great example. Soybeans are another good example.
Problem number 2: As I'm sure at least a couple of folks will figure out from the numbers, you'd need to grow this stuff on a truly massive scale to put a dent in the amount of hydrocarbon fuel now supplied by petroleum. That scale would be so massive as to make #1 a significant problem. Do you want to eat or drive your car?
Problem number 3: Some people will look at #2 at either a small or large scale and answer that they want to eat and to drive (or sell fuel to the people that drive). And that will likely mean cutting down and/or burning more forests to make more farmland which seems a bit counter-productive.
Problem number 4: A high enough demand for biofuel will tip the balance on what gets produced. As acres of land previously growing food are switched over to growing biofuels, the cost of food will rise. There are a couple of ways of looking at or explaining this the easiest being that as the supply of food drops against a constant (or, really, growing) demand the price people are willing to pay for that food rises. In any case, the poorest people, many of them in fact farmers, will then suffer a proportionally higher cost to feed themselves even though they may participate only indirectly in petroleum or biofuel consumption.
Problem number 5: YAIS (Yet Another Invasive Species). Read about this plant. It is a badass. It's a badass because it comes from a place where hardly anything else can live and all the animals and insects are looking for something, anything to eat. You don't want to plant this in Ohio. Or Brazil. Or China. Or anywhere else that you don't plan on having this as an invasive and problematic pest plant for the next 1000 years.
F'ed up, huh? I know things like biofuel are meant only to be a stopgap to bridge us over to more efficient and/or less immediately damaging fuel conversion technologies and fuel sources, so it's not 100% right to bash them and say 'This does nothing!' but I think it is useful to play the Devil's advocate given the amount of excitement often heard in the same breath and the corresponding lack of analysis that too often accompanies it.