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Switchgrass Makes Better Ethanol Than Corn
statemachine writes to mention that the USDA and farmers took part in a 5-year study of switchgrass, a grass native to North America. The study found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver around 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can only yield around 24 percent. "But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. 'To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization,' he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. 'Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber.'"
Switchgrass gets you more ethanol than corn sure, but that's all you get. Growing corn gets you fuel and food. Growing hemp gets you fuel, food, and fiber.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Almost anything is better than corn. Corn is only popular in the US because corn farming has a powerful lobby. Sugarcane and practically anything else commonly used to produce ethanol is better than corn.
"The polling firm found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver only 0.54% of the voter cast in the states capable of producing it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can yield around 24% of the votes cast in the states that produce it."
It's not about EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Investment), it's about PEOPI (Politicians Elected On Pork Invested).
Switchfoot makes better music than Korn, too, but such opinion is no more revolutionary than the one in the article. Ethanol IS NOT the cure for our energy disease.
...how switching one hydrocarbon for another (ethanol being two carbons, five hydrogens, and a hydroxyl group) will solve man-made global warming? The production of fuel from dead dinosaurs pulls carbon from the ground. The production of fuel from plants pulls carbon from the air.It's true that corn is a pretty poor feedstock for ethanol generation. But I think most people (farmer subsidy lovers) think that ethanol has come into focus because of its potential as a fuel *replacement* for gasoline.
Let me remind you why we have a demand for ethanol in the first place: a replacement for MTBE, a gasoline anti-knock additive (letting the engine run at higher compression ratios, and thus more efficiently) which was found to be leeching into groundwater and concentrating. MTBE is being phased out, and ethanol is a replacement chemical. Whether or not ethanol will be used as an energy source is irrelevant. It's critical today as a fuel additive for gasoline. Beyond that, it's a pretty inefficient energy carrier. Switchgrass may do better, but we're not there yet.
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When you replace oil with ethanol, you stop using carbon that was fixed a long time in the past (and thus did not contribute to present levels of co2), and instead use carbon that was fixed in the last growing cycle. The net co2 added to the atmosphere in a year is zero, because the corn/switchgrass has to fix the co2 before you can later release it in the burn cycle.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
So let me get this straight... when President Bush championed swithgrass in his State of the Union speech a couple of years ago, and the news folks sorta laughed at him, he was actually right?
like this?
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
Because you are no using hydrocarbon that are in carbon sinks [oil] that would almost never see the light of day had we not dug it up. By using something like cellulose or grains, you have a carbon cycle. You grow the plant, which takes carbon from the air to grow, becoming the carbon holder, then you use it, releasing the carbon. But when the next crop is grown, the plant uses the carbon you emitted using the fuel from the last crop.
Now, I am sure it is not a net-zero result, probably a net-gain in carbon, but you are at least using something that can take much of the carbon that is emitted for use back to make a new plant.
And IMHO, anything is better than using resource heavy and subsidy heavy corn for ethanol and bio-diesel.
. . . the giant glowing thing in the sky.
Unfortunately, I don't see any candidates supporting the "Big Switchgrass" lobby (lol) with federal grants and subsidies.
;)
The government is *ALWAYS* ten years late on supporting technology, and usually picks the wrong one. Same situation with PV, hybrid cars, and nuclear power... about the time some lobbyist gets enough "representatives" to sign on to some legislation that makes their life easy, a new start-up or breakthrough makes them obsolete.
One more reason to vote for someone who believes that open markets will drive innovation a lot faster than corporate/agricultural welfare, and that states can be more responsive when government needs to have a role.
I know, I'm yet another rabid Ron Paul supporter. But at least if we elect him, hemp will have a chance to compete with switchgrass. Which will be great, except your car will have the munchies and will insist on calling you "dude" and "bro" when your door is ajar.
When your application doesn't work, refactor the code.
When the government doesn't work, refactor the system.
This has been circulating around the intarwebs for a few days now, so it spurred me to do some background reading already.
Corn has higher amounts of the simpler sugars that bacteria need to work on to produce the ethanol. Switchgrass and other cellulosic feedstocks, which are largely equivalent in feasbility in general terms, have those sugars bound up in...you guessed it...cellulose. Because of this it requires much more processing prior to fermentation. There are several ways to do this with varying costs and efficiencies, but at the very least is technically viable.
However, this pre-processing and the fact that large-scale cellulosic ethanol production is a new technology means the initial costs are higher. According to Wikipedia (with original sources referenced), corn ethanol plants cost about $1-3 per gallon of annual capacity to construct. The first round of large scale cellulosic ethanol plants now under construction are billed about $7 per gallon of annual capacity. Production costs are expected to run about $2.25 per gallon initially, or about $125 per barrel of oil energy equivalent.
However, as the method is proven, that cost is expected to come down. About $350 million of cost is also being funded by the federal government under the new energy plan. Also, the cost of the feedstock for cellulosic ethanol production is much lower, as it can use switchgrass as mentioned in the summary, corn stover, wood chips, or just about anything else containing plant matter, where as the corn method requires corn (duh), and thus competes with food production.
Of course, the article makes the energy-return benefit over corn ethanol obvious. Elsewhere it has been estimated that cellulosic ethanol production could account for 30% of our transportation energy needs in a couple decades. Obviously far short of weaning us off foreign oil, but a start nonetheless. However, an added benefit of using grasses like switchgrass is the fields don't have to be replanted every year, reducing soil depletion and erosion.
Hemp seed is actually really healthy and contains good amounts of all essential amino acids (and so is high in protein). It provides some iron, good amounts of manganese and magnesium, and is also a good source of omega-3 and -6 fatty acids. Hemp seeds are good for salad toppings, baking, etc (think multi-grain bread). Hemp oil is also highly nutritious and can be used as other vegetable oils are.
It's a shame that prohibition drives the seed prices through the roof.
Ethanol is for drinking, not for driving.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
At most alternative grocery stores (Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, etc) you can buy roasted hemp nuts, which are a similar food to shelled sunflower seeds. Hemp seeds have high protein and fat content, so you can use hemp oil in places you would use, say, olive oil; and with all the protein in them, they can be used to make many of the things that we currently use soybeans for.
Don't hold your breath waiting for the Democrat congress to cut back on farm subsidies.
I got into a conversation about alternative energies over the holidays with a friend of mine who has her PhD in something Agricultural Science related from Purdue, and when the conversation went to ethanol she informed me that apparently there's a much better alternative in butanol. According to the first link I've provided, Butanol is both a "cleaner" fuel source than ethanol and has a higher energy content (110,000 Btu per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol, for reference gasoline is 115,000 Btu per gallon). It requires little to no modification of existing engines and can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines. Historically it's been considered less viable than ethanol because of relatively higher production cost.
About Butanol Energy
However a researcher from the midwest (Ohio I think) has patented a process by which it can be produced more cheaply than ethanol *without having to change existing gasoline infrastructure.*
Here's the researcher's company.
More Butanol Information
From what my friend told me, the only thing preventing this right now is a lack of funding and public awareness. So please read it for yourself and spread the word.
ANWR is not the be all end all that drillers tout. There are between 6-16 billion recoverable barrels (from pro-drilling site). Right now, refineries use about 15 million barrels of oil per day (from the EIA -- scroll to bottom).
That means the US uses around 5.4 billion barrels of oil per year. If you buy the pro-driller propaganda, ANWR is AT BEST, 3 years worth of supply. If you took the highest estimate of oil in the ground and assumed the magically ability to extract all 30 billion barrels -- that's 6 years of supply.
ANWR is just another method to enrich Cheney -- like the logic of paying contractor truck drivers 120k per year to drive truck in Iraq when a regular soldier makes about 1/6th of that. But that's another tale.
In my view, the better plan is to consider ANWR to be "money in the bank". Oil price increases are just starting. We'd be better off sitting on it for 50 years because by then, we'll be lamenting the days oil only cost $90-100 per barrel.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
(I know, I know... but I couldn't pass up the chance to say that).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Interesting. I hadn't heard of this before.
It seems that BP is thinking along the same lines too.
BP's Bet on Butanol
BioButanol: a better biofuel (fact sheet)
The total proven reserves in ANWR are about 10 billion barrels. Our daily consumption of petroleum is about 20,687,000 barrels/day. Doing the math, that means the entire ANWR reserve discovered so far would give us about 10.4 billion / 20 687 000 = 502.731184 days of petroleum.
<sarcasm>Yeah, real massive. </sarcasm>
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
This anecdote pertains specifically to biodiesel, but among friends surely we can discuss all kinds of biofuels?
The other day I saw a diesel Passat with this bumper sticker, and I just wanted to rant to a crowd that would understand:
BIODIESEL
The 100% solution
Kyoto compliant, carbon neutral, OPEC free
I wanted to run him off the road and give him a math lesson as he lay torn and bleeding in a ditch. If we covered every square centimeter of arable land in the US with the most magical crop available, it could not make enough fuel for us to be OPEC free. Not by a LONG shot. And we need to grow food, too!
Biofuels can be a great part of a solution. They are not a solution by themselves. But some people are driving around believing that "they" are stopping us from deploying perfect solution. I'm sorry, Passat man... It isn't that simple. I beg of you, do the math and reduce the scope of your conspiracy theories. The truth is bad enough.
Jatropha will not grow in the bulk of the US landmass, it is a subtropical plant and can only tolerate a few light frosts. I looked into it for a fuel crop here and even this being Georgia, we are too far north.
I agree with the other poster, either switchgrass or industrial hemp are better targets for exploitation for biofuels using marginal land in most areas of the US.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It is also considered inedible for the most part unless, assuming you're a man, you like having high estrogen levels among other things. The Chinese didn't consider it worthy of eating until they learned to ferment it, and those guys back then would eat fucking ANYTHING so that says a lot!!
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
ftfa - "This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies."
corn-based ethanol therefore delivers roughly 125% of the energy used to produce it, not 24%
LOL. Good one. I was just thinking I should have mentioned it doesn't have any THC in it!
"So why the fuck is this racist shit not deleted? Clearly there are only WASPS running this increasingly shitty site."
Because a racist post complaing about a racist post is just too funny.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Sugar beets have a high sugar content(therefore can make more EtOH), and can grow in fairly cold, adverse environments. Grows quite well in North America. Corn is being used because of the lobbying effort of Archer-Daniel Midland, a world leader in processing corn, wheat, soybeans. Corn is a lousy product to make ethanol.
Ethanol yield/per acre for sugar beets is about 2x times that of corn, and about 25% higher than sugar cane.
Sugar cane is more efficiently made into ethanol yielding 8 times as much energy as required to make it, sugar beets only about twice. Corn is nearly an even output.
..........FULL STOP.
I would be in favor of more algae research and deployment, but not necessarily in the oceans but in controlled pools/tanks in the desert, in combination with some some solar and geo thermal and perhaps very large greenhouses. And mostly because they will most likely go for genetically modified algae and I wouldn't want to chance such a crop going wild with unintended consequences. I also think they could control it better in pools or tanks than in the wide open ocean. I've worked on the ocean before, it ain't always a flat millpond...
;)
I think the energy question will be answered with an "all of the above" solution, I am not seeing any single one solution fitting all circumstances everywhere. although back to the jatropha, mexico's oil fields are now in decline, it probably wouldn't hurt them a bit to see if they could start to squeeze a few million acres of the plant in there before it goes into fast decline....
Personally I am trying to eventually go full personal production for the fuels I need/use, to decentralize production (doing my bit to be part of the solution rather than just part of the problem), and also pure self interest-keep my wallet stuffed more than "theirs". I am not real far along yet, just wood as primary heating fuel, perpetual supply and carbon neutral, some solar PV,a greenhouse for year round food production (helps drop shipping demand/fuel use/pollution from imported foods, plus it is just better to make your own food onsite, IMO, tastier!), but am working towards liquid biodiesel next, that's why I happened to know about the jatropha, I had looked into it and had to abandon the idea. Most likely we will be looking at using waste chicken litter for a feedstock source, as we have that in rather large abundance
I agree with you on the sugar beets, but sort of disagree on the "why" of corn right now. The primary reason for the corn is because that is what we have the highest numbers of big farmers set up to grow with the equipment at hand, and that stuff just ain't cheap. Corn and soybeans, ethanol and biodiesel. We are in a transition stage now to all the various biofuels, so I wouldn't worry about it being corn forever, it just happens to be the handiest one we have right now. We are still at the 286 level with biofuels, it will get better, and in probably a roughly similar time frame.
There are two good positives here, energy demands are just always going to be going up,so this biofuels idea will be continued to be worked on, and farmers love to farm, because it is a hard job, and if they didn't love it, they wouldn't do it, there are any number of easier ways to make a buck. So it will work out.
In fact, a ton of the good innovations and tweaking with biofuels are going on right now in real world deployments directly on farms for fuel use on-site, because they are so tied to energy availability and costs. They are the serious beta tester devs right now for all of this...so I say support them in general terms, let them sort this out better, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Society is right now asking a minuscule percentage of the population to double their output, in two critical areas, food and now they are going to be tasked with being the liquid energy producers as well. This is an incredibly HUGE undertaking, and I think it is more than fair that the rest of society, who will be the primary beneficiaries of the food and now energy production, be prepared to cut loose a few dollars for this effort, to offer a bit of understanding and acceptance of the size of these projects in total and realize there will be failures as well as successes along this new energy path, and to give them a chance to tweak it out better without a lot of condemnation and outright dissin'.
No other segment of our society has been tasked with a doubling or tripling of their projected work load en masse like the farmers have now accepted to attempt. The closest historical parallel we have would the durable goods manufacturers-with a much higher workforce total and much higher governmental support structure- who had to gear up and run triple time, plus alter product lines drastically, for the world war 2 effort. The coming transition to mostly biofuels as conventional petroleum sources become more iffy and more dear, is at least of such a scale the way it is being projected now.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
That's total nonsense. Not all energy is oil!
Take a look at the studies on ethanol - Pimental's, for example. About 90% of the energy involved is for (a) fertilizer, or (b) distillation-process heat, neither of which involve oil!
Basically, you've been fed a lie.
It's better by about a factor of four; that's more than "a little".
Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is similar to switchgrass in that regard. Basically, anyone who's only looked at corn ethanol has a very, very biased view of what can be done. US-grown corn ethanol is a ridiculous product - it's agricultural subsidies in a bottle - and shouldn't be used as the basis of any sensible technological comparison.
Don't be absurd. Oil isn't going to vanish overnight, and agriculture uses such a small fraction of it (~5%) that even peak-is-nigh models like ASPO's predict the world will have plenty for agriculture for decades to come.
Moreover, demanding that alternative energy sources make no use of current energy sources is as useful as demanding they turn the moon to green cheese - there is absolutely no economic benefit to cutting an alt-energy business off from the world's infrastructure, so nobody who's running such a business will do it. Insisting they should is no more than a way to ignore their results as "not counting".
Yeah, good one, that's hilarious. Perpetuating utterly false misinformation that keeps a highly useful and sustainable crop from being legal is SO funny. If that is clever, I've got another one for you:
Hemp seed is imported into the US only by terrorists, it shreds puppies, and hates Jesus. It is also highly radioactive, makes people sterile, and originated on planet Xircon 6. Hah! So funny. OMG lol.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Yeah, in the States, triclosan and stuff would be a concern.
Here in Japan, there are two separate sewage paths in most of the country, for soft sewage (sinks, shower, etc., mixes with the storm sewer outside (deep gutters!), and for hard sewage, i. e., the flush toilet. Some places have non-flush toilets, or have light-flush toilets, that drop into septic tanks, generally under the house. One house my wife and I looked at once in Kakogawa had a partial treatment plant on the septic tank -- stirred the sewage regularly to speed up the conversion. With the tanks, you'd have to have the septic truck come around every so often, and put a big vacuum house down the outside access and take it away.
Anyway, most Japanese people are very sensitive to sewage issues and don't wash industrial waste down either path. (Part of the reason is that there are often rice fields that use the storm sewers for irrigation in many neighborhoods, even in the cities, so it's easy to remember that what you wash down the drain could come back to haunt you.) Lake Biwa (which I really want to go see sometime) turned red some thirty years ago because of stuff in detergents, and citizens groups formed to push the detergent companies to make and sell bio-friendly detergents at reasonable prices, and to encourage the avoidance of the bad stuff. By the time they made laws, conformance was mostly not an issue any more.
Not everywhere in Japan has had such success with the environment, but there is a difference between Japan and the US. People don't tend to use old engine oil to kill ants and weeds here, either.
But, yeah, these are the sorts of problems that might have to be worked out to make common effluent useable for fuel crops.
We should try and find something other than corn as a new fuel source and this is a good step towards that. If America were to have a crisis, like what happened in Ireland with the potato famine, we would be up shit creek without a paddle. We rely too much on corn based products as it is, becoming dependent on corn for fuel would be just as bad as how we rely on oil now.
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.---Scott Adams