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SwiftFuel Alternative To Alternative Fuels
TheDawgLives writes "PBS has an article by Bob Cringely about the best route to end our dependence on oil and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of replacing all our expensive cars with even more expensive hybrids or electric cars, his suggestion is to use a cheap drop-in replacement for gasoline called Swift Fuel. It is derived from Ethanol, but doesn't require any modification to older cars to prevent corrosion. It can be mixed with gasoline in any amount and can even be distributed using the same network as gasoline, including being pumped in the same pipes and shipped in the same trucks. It is truly a drop-in replacement for gas, and it is real. It is being tested by the FAA for certification in propeller aircraft. It also happens to be about $2 a gallon cheaper than gasoline."
Switchgrass
Even if they use ethanol from algae, hemp, switchgrass, or sugar cane, this might reduce our need for oil, but it can't replace oil used for other things like plastic.
If this is made using ethanol from corn, then diesel is used in the production of this, and it causes food prices to increase.
What is wrong with using a vegetable oil in a diesel engine? That is a bio-fuel with low processing requirements.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
According to TFA, while they can make it from almost any plant, they're starting with sorghum:
"...sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn, turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. China, the third largest producer of ethanol after Brazil and the U.S., is switching entirely to sorghum for its ethanol production."Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
It's not the same land or farming resources, though. Switchgrass grows on a wider variety of soil and climate, meaning it can be grown in places where you couldn't grow food crops, and doesn't require much seeding or fertilizer.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You might not have a "shortage" in the USA (and I don't, in Europe), but try asking some people in a developing country. Their prices have increased more than ours and there's less international food aid. Some countries have banned wheat exports. Government stocks are low.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5539
Hmmm, does Brazil have these same problems?
Don't know, but 144,000 people are about to lose their jobs in Brazil thanks to biofuel:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article4083137.ece
A commodity is anything for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. In other words, copper is copper. Rice is rice. Stereos, on the other hand, come in many varieties of quality. And, the better a stereo is, the more it will cost. Whereas, the price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand.
One of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole. Well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, these are basic resources and agricultural products such as iron ore, crude oil, coal, ethanol, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminum, rice, wheat, gold and silver.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Brazil grows sugar cane and started back in the 70's. It is only in the past 5 or 10 years that they became energy independent so it took them decades. I am sure they had all sorts of growing pains but they should be commended for doing it. We should be doing it for the same reasons. Better to use a renewable fuel where we can and save the oil for what we really need it for. Moms SUV is not really a need to me. She can have ethanol or swift fuel.
All points of time and space are connected.
Factor of six sounds high. I admit these figures are old, but...
Yield of 99.5% ethanol per acre from:
Sorghum cane: 500 gallons
Corn: 214 gallons
Grain sorghum: 125 gallons
Only David Pimental believes that, and he's in the pay of the oil companies.
You realize that SwiftFuel is an attempt to replace 100LL avgas?
That is 100 Octane, Low Lead.
Avgas already has tetraethyl lead in it, right now. And it is definitely a hazard, as you point out.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Per the article (Cringely, so not exactly trustworthy, but I don't feel like verifying the numbers) wholesale ethanol costs $1.42 a gallon and SwitftFuel production costs are ~40 cents/gallon. 1 Barrel of oil (42 gallons) currently goes for $130. That's converted to 20 gallons of gasoline (plus 20 gallons of other useful stuff), so the raw cost of gasoline is ~3.09/gallon. That's reasonably consistent with these numbers from the California gov't. Refinery costs for gasoline are slightly less, but not too far out of line.
Therefore, IF the ethanol price and ethanol conversion costs are accurate, the end user cost could easily be $1.50-1.60/gallon less than gasoline.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Lead is currently added to avgas to retard premature detonation in the cylinders, and to increase the octane rating. One of the problems with unleaded fuels is that they produce higher compression than avgas. Today's unleaded gas would increase compression to the point where it would literally blow the seals out of the engines. They also have different chemical effects on materials that may cause deterioration in such parts as fuel lines and gaskets. Another difference is that the lead additives help protect the engine valve seats from eroding.
Airplane engines were designed to run on a very specific fuel, that had very specific properties. Avgas produces a precise amount of compression when it's burnt. The old engines were designed to be run at 100% of their potential power, so there is no tolerance for out-of-spec components, such as unleaded fuel.
In order for SwiftFuel to be an acceptable replacement, it will have to have very similar characteristics to today's avgas. Either that or it will have to be "close enough" so that older engines can at least be modified to burn it, and that would promise to be an unpopular, expensive decision (airplane repairs are never cheap.)
John
Don't they have to continually clear rainforest to grow that sugar cane though?
And FYI, switchgrass and other cellulose feedstocks are being developed in order to address the land use and runoff problems.
I'll stop 'preaching' to you now and let you get back to your "facts".
Demand for gasoline means the entire supply of ethanol would last that long.
Forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that compression was caused by the reduction in volume within the cylinders between the bottom and top ends of the piston stroke, and had nothing to do with the particular gas that was being compressed. Am I wrong, or did you mean to say that unleaded gas detonates at lower compression ratios than leaded gas does?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
solar power -> through existing electric infrastructure -> to the battery of your electric car/mower/series of tubes
So I worked out the math on this one time. The limiting factor is the amount of light that falls on the earth.
If you assume 40% efficiency (the best we're hoping for) and start building with a year 2050 goal, you'll need enough solar panels to cover 1/4 of New Mexico with nothing but panels. And that's with no room for maintenance or cabling infrastructure - if you include that you're covering 1/3 of New Mexico. If you factor in clouds, it's about half of New Mexico, and I didn't even deal with breakage from all those damn cacti growing up through the panels.
And that just accounts for our electricity needs, it doesn't account for our automotive needs.
Kurzweil is expecting a 2^5 increase in efficiency over the next 5 years, but for the life of me I can't figure out how he's going to get more sunshine in.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Wanna bet? ; )
(FYI: the point of this is not efficiency, but rather that an electric motor is quieter than a diesel engine so they can sneak up on enemies more easily.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Unleaded fuels without other octane boosters are prone to predetonation. That might be what the guy was talking about - that "pinging" noise of a so-called knock condition is the sound of the piston vibrating in the cylinder as it tries to compress an expanding mixture. Hard to say.
As for eroding lines and such, this is true, especially of Ethanol. A lot of that aeronautic stuff is pretty damned antiquated. I wouldn't be surprised to find that replacement parts are still sold with leather seals and whatnot. It wasn't an airplane, but my 1960 Dodge Dart (2dr, "Phoenix", 318ci big block hemi) had a 650 CFM Carter carburetor which had a leather acceleration pump flap. When the switch from leaded occurred, a lot of these cars sort of fell apart. Not mine though. Must have gotten lucky. Also I used the expensive lead substitute, maybe it was good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Peak Oil is _not_ "that stuff running out". It is the production of oil reaching a plateau and then going into decline. The peak of a mountain doesn't happen when you reach the valley, it happens when you've got to the top and can't go higher.
Consider this - since 2005 oil production has been on a bumpy plateau with a slight downward trend. There's tons of publicly available data you can research to confirm this. In the meantime worldwide demand continues to go up - where's your magical creation of new oil via supply and demand? Oh yes, Bakken. I'll believe that one when its up & running and producing a few million barrels a day.
You should also realise that the USA's oil production peaked in 1973 - its been all downhill ever since. Even opening up Alaska didn't reverse the decline for long. North Sea peaked in 2000 and its plummeting now. Mexico's Cantarell field is doing the same. Perhaps you should clear your head of the economic "demand will create supply" nonsense and wake up to the geological realities of living on a finite planet with finite resources. Have you checked out the EIA's reports on US inventory levels lately?
Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
Nuclear is pretty much infinite resource if reprocessing takes place. The price of fuel is so small percentage in nuclear powerplant costs that you can increase the uranium extraction costs by 10x and still be profitable. Really, we do have enough uranium for producing entire worlds CURRENT electricity consumption for tens of thousands of years. Yes there is 10^5 times the current "estimate of economical mining" reserves, if we use
a) fuel reprocessing.
b) breeder reactors
And the fuel cycle improvements give another 10^3 increase over current model. So its 10^8 increase over what figure people talk about the current economic reserves just by one cent electricity price increase since last study. Or that much reductions in operating costs by making all parts of nuclear economy higher volume production.
©God
These guys are promising a biofuel that is exactly like fossil crude oil. It could be mixed in with the petro crude and refined into any currently available fuel.
Maybe
Ideally, you wouldn't want to store hydrogen. You would want to find a way to make it on the fly. We have problems with long term Hydrogen storage because it is so thin of a molecule, it tends to evaporate or seep through the storage containers as well as the evaporation causes the pressure to builf to a point it needs to be vented if it isn't kept cool. With long term storage, you will reach a point where energy use in keeping it cool will outplay any benefits or savings in using it.
Here are a couple of links talking about the issues.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/dlnl-lph060408.php
http://www.fuelfromthewater.com/storage.htm
Yea, I didn't mess with a proper link so you might have to copy and paste them. I don't know why I didn't link them properly, it seems that this little explanation uses more key strokes then I could possibly save by not including a href= and a couple of anchors. But that's where I'm at tonight.
This discussion needs more numbers. If you don't want to read all of the below, then at least read this: sorghum-based ethanol cars use 200 times as much land as solar panel-powered battery-electric (not hybrid) cars.
In 2006 the USA consumed 5.1x10^11 L of gasoline. Gasoline's energy of combustion is 34.8 MJ/L; ethanol's is 23.5 MJ/L, or 68% that of gasoline, so replacing the USA's gasoline consumption would require 7.5x10^11 L of ethanol. Sorghum can produce 3100-7600 L ethanol per hectare, or 3.1-7.6x10^5 L/km^2. Let's assume 5.0x10^5 L/km^2. The total area of the USA is 9.83x10^6--that includes agricultural powerhouses like Alaska and Los Angeles. To replace our gasoline consumption with ethanol, we would need to use 1.50x10^6 km^2 of land, or 15.2% of that. In 2002, 20% of US land use was agricultural, and 26% was pasture land. Harvesting sorghum is more akin to harvesting corn than to letting cows roam free, so the agricultural portion is likely to see a larger hit, so in order to fulfill all our gasoline needs with ethanol the USA would probably have to halve it's agricultural production. That's impractical. Diverting smaller amounts of land to ethanol production is still not worth it; the land is simply better used for producing food for the world's burgeoning population. (Alternatively, the USA could shrink its national parks, forests, and wilderness preserves.) Gasoline only accounted for 23% of all energy used in the USA in 2004, and 61% of fossil fuels used for transportation. Diverting agricultural land to biofuel production is a bad idea.
(On the other hand, the USA produces a lot of waste biomass. Reclaiming this as biofuel is a good idea, since it reduces landfill use while also providing energy. However, this can be at most a supplemental energy source, since it can't be scaled past the amount of biomass waste we produce. McDonald's only makes so many french fries.)
The internal combustion engine is grossly inefficient. A typical gasoline car engine and drivetrain in typical usage is able to convert about 20% of the chemical energy in gasoline into kinetic energy; the rest is lost as heat. Diesel engines are better, largely due to their higher compression ratios, and average roughly 25%. Modern gas turbine power plants extract about 60%. For comparison, fuel cells can convert roughly 36% of the energy stored in H_2 to kinetic energy in typical automotive conditions; including energy expenditures in generating H_2 from electricity and storing it, that figure drops to 17% or 22% if stored as liquid or high-pressure gas, respectively. Electric motors convert 85-95% of the electrical energy input into kinetic energy. Battery charge-discharge efficiencies vary by chemistry from 66% (NiMH) to 99.8% (Li-based chemistries). Electrical transmission losses in the USA in 1995 were 7.2%. (I'm too lazy to look up transportation and processing losses for fossil fuels, so I'm assuming (inaccurately) that they're zero.) Thin-film solar cells convert about 15% of incident light energy into electricity, or 200 W/m^2 (perpendicular to the sun's rays, NOT parallel to the ground). At 38 degrees latitude, that figure drops to 126 W/m^2 (parallel to the ground). Annual average insolation is roughly 18 MJ/m^2/day in most of the USA, so a 15%-efficient solar panel would produce roughly 990 MJ/m^2/year of electricity.
Multiplying these efficiencies out, a battery-electric car powered off of a gas turbine gets 31-53% of the natur
"Global warming cultists are *not* environmentalist. They're easily led rubes that have bought into a self flagellating religion born out of politics."
Thakyou for opening my eyes. I now see how the science I have been following for at least 25yrs is really a massive political conspiracy that has managed to infiltrate and control every national science body on the planet.
Thanks also for sharing your thoughts on 'self-flagellation', it was enough to convince this 'easily led rube' that a massive muti-decadal plot has been hiding right before his very eyes, matter of fact it's now so fucking obvious that I have been led by poitics that I will promptly find and burn my BSc.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
No till usually doesn't produce the same yields when current crops of going with 40 and 50,000 populations. On some fields it will but in practice, you will find that it doesn't. Now sometimes the savings in the tilling make up the difference in loss of yield but that won't be a guarantee. You still have to consider the herbicide spaying to give you a good burn off before planting and fertilizer that needs to be applied in multiple doses of smaller strengths.
Where no till really shines is when you have a low amounts of topsoil and need to control erosion and run off verses spending a fortune in chemicals to renew the lands. Generally, you can only no till a corn crop for 4 or 5 years before the ground it too compacted and effects root growth. But that again is effected by the types of soil, a sandy loamy soil will last longer then a clay soil.
But I think this is all mute because I'm not sure I was clear with the comment about tilling ans switch grass. With no till corn, you still need to seed the field. With the switch grass you don't. Once it is set, it is set.
I did some quick calculations on another post and have determined that planting switch grass isn't really worth replacing another crop over. Generally though, the corn that is in use that would be replaces would be a dent corn which is an industrial field corn. It isn't the food corn. Most of the corn you see growing when driving through the country isn't meant for human consumption. But even at that, it is far more economical to plant the switch grass in marginal lands that would already have grasses on them to control run off and so on. The only difference would be that it would act more like a Hay field then a Fescue plot. Most watershed areas could probably be converted without any detrimental effects on the watershed. These are areas feeding some river system that flood in the spring and isn't really good for crops in the first place. They are sort of buffers to attempt to catch the chemicals being used before they hit the waterways. Most of them can be marked out of production and the government will pay a sum for not farming them. Most of them also have chemical restrictions which makes farming them about useless too.
Corn is a pretty bad crop selection for making ethanol. The water, fertilizer, direct and indirect energy requirements for growing corn are quite high. Pessimistic estimates put corn ethanol as a net negative production, but even optimistic estimates put the costs at a large fraction of the gross output. For ever gallon of corn ethanol you make you need to burn away most of that gallon to make the next gallon of corn ethanol.
According to this source(*) on sweet sorghum:
yields between 500 to 800 gallons of ethanol per acre
requires one-half of the water required to grow corn and one third of the water required to grow sugarcane
can grow in marginal soils, ranging from heavy clay to light sand... marked resistance to drought and saline-alkaline soils, and tolerance to high temperature and waterlogging
requires the use of only 40 to 60 pounds of nitrogen per acre whereas corn growers use more than 150 pounds per acre
The energy requirement for converting sweet sorghum juice into ethanol is less than half of that required to convert corn into ethanol
(*)Note: The website appears to be an outlet for information from commercial sources. I have no particular reason to doubt this info on sweet sorghum, but it might be a good idea for someone to dig up a more authoritative source.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Actually, anyone who takes global climate change seriously is well aware that so-called 'biofuel' does far more harm than good.
The term "biofuel" covers a lot of fuel sources. Some of which make sense, some of which make less sense than "petro-fuel". Note that "making sense" does not imply anything about "global warming", "climate change", etc...
Sugar cane is grown mainly in the continental area of São Paulo state, where rain forests don't exist since the 1800s (or even earlier). The Amazon's climate is too hot for sugar cane to grow, and the soil isn't adequate. Growing it there would be as productive as growing coconuts in Alaska.
Brazil also has a large amount of oil production and a large proven reserve
http://www.indexmundi.com/brazil/oil_production.html
So all substitutes and methods of reducing emissions are futile, eh? Or had it occurred to you that they are not being developed in a vacuum; that they just might be effective with a global cap-and-trade system?
Not what parent said; if we don't burn a barrel of oil because we have Magic Fairy Dust (tm), that barrel will just get burned by someone else. At least for the foreseeable future.
And "global cap-and-trade"? Are you kidding? Good luck getting every nation in the world to agree to that system. Good luck getting just China to agree to that system. Good luck getting everyone bound by that system to stop bickering over what their caps should be. And good luck having such a system function as it's actually intended to.
Getting the entire world to agree on a complicated system simultaneously is not a good way to solve world problems. Even if that problem would actually be solved by them doing so. The US has made greater progress on its would-be Kyoto goals than any Kyoto nation - and we didn't even sign the thing.
Now, biofuel is great and whatnot - biofuel and politics have killed a large chunk of the world economy. We subsidize corn ethanol to make the corn belt farmers happy. In the meantime, we have a huge tariff on imported ethanol - we can't buy alternative fuels from Brazil, for example, but we can buy crude oil from the Middle East. The result is a lot of corn diverted for ethanol production.
All this legislated corn-ethanol nonsense raises the price of corn - that's a side effect of doubling demand for it overnight. So, of course, some food prices go up too, but that's just for starters. The prices of other grains rise as well - they're "substitute goods", things people will use instead of the now-prices corn if they can. With the costs of every grain rising, livestock feed becomes more expensive, meaning practically everything you buy in a grocery store is more expensive. Meats, soda (corn syrup, remember) - all of it rising in price.
But it doesn't stop at just food, either. Soap is made in part from waste fats from slaughtered animals. As it becomes more expensive to feed livestock, even something as simple as soap becomes more expensive. We in America can generally deal with the rising food costs, but our Big Ag special-interest political games in the name of the "environment" come at the expense of the rest of the world.
Biofuel is great... If it happens on its own, and not when huge tracts of our economy are forcibly shifted so politicians can win the farm vote.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Where did you get this information from?
I've heard from plenty of other people that the U.S. has vasts amount of open land and after traveling to quite a few places in the U.S., it sure seems like it.
Some relevant statistics here.
As of 2002, farmland takes up just about 43% of the U.S. That sounds like quite a bit, but it also shows that about half of of our pastureland and woodland are not in use (read: still available). If that's the case, there is some legroom for bio fuels. You made it sound as if the U.S. would certainly have to cut sustenance production to do anything with bio fuels. I think this notion is false.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I'm not trying to argue, because I really can't take exception with much of your post, but...
Generally, you can only no till a corn crop for 4 or 5 years before the ground it too compacted and effects root growth.Just so nobody reading gets the wrong idea.... Compaction is generally a result of tillage, not so much the lack of it. Earthworms and root systems tend to leave the ground pretty well aerated if you leave them alone. Especially in soils with heavy clays, you're generally better off with minimal or no tillage. With tillage, you can get a hard, impenetrable plate just below the plow line. That's particularly detrimental to corn because the root system goes so deep.
At least, that's what I've observed and was taught. But I can see how you could be getting different results with different soils, especially those deep heavily organic loamy soil profiles out there in corn country.
I don't necessarily oppose your thesis, but thought I should comment on the part of your post meant to "head off" opposition.
Income and wealth are not the same thing. To borrow language from Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave, there is an economic continuum with people filling the role of producer and consumer at one end and people being "prosumers" (consumers of their own production) at the other end. The pendulum has swung from the latter to the former, with the industrial revolution and its after-effects being the primary driver.
To further illustrate, consider the skills of former generations compared to ours. They generally produced their own clothing, often build their own homes including production of building materials, raised and processed much of their own food, etc, and little of this work was converted into income. They were generalists. We, conversely, are specialists. We do one kind of job, and use the income produced to buy the things other generations produced for their own use.
That is why I cannot simply accept inflation-adjusted income as a measure of prosperity. Wealth needs to be a factor. Goods produced for personal consumption need to be considered.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
I think you're missing the point. The volumetric energy density of batteries isn't up to the task. It doesn't matter if it's a pickup truck or a motorcycle - they all seem to go about 35 miles on a charge. Why? Because energy density is Wh/l or Wh/kg, and smaller vehicles carry fewer liters or kilograms of battery. Banging that lower energy storage against a lower energy requirement of the smaller vehicle - hey! about the same effective range. Imagine that.
Have a look through the projects over at EV Album. Most of the folks are "hoping" to get 30-40 miles of range. All manner of budgets, motors and battery chemistries are represented. The results aren't stunning.
Biodiesel and butanol represent renewable energy storage methods that are compatible with the current distribution infrastructure. Both may be synthesized from renewable feedstocks (that aren't food, dammit.) Moving toward all-electric is desirable, but it's not the immediate next-step. Battery storage densities need to increase by 10x (though 5x would probably be good enough.) The power distribution grid needs to be upgraded too.
What? Why can't we just "plug in?" Let's compare the electrical power requirements of a current-day EV. Running a 6+6 flooded lead acid cell pack (six in front, six in back,) you've got 144V at about 50Ah. A full charge is 7.2kWh (we'll ignore the charging losses for now.) To charge in one hour, which the batteries will object to, requires 7.2kW. With a 120VAC source, which rectifies to a bit over 165VDC, you'll need about a 50A source. Don't have one of those at the office, do you? How about spreading that charge out over several hours? Okay, let's use an entire 15A branch circuit - you'll need 3.5-ish hours to charge the battery.
I'll add some reference numbers. My electric power bill (looking at it now) has a one-year historical use chart on the back. My 4-person 3-bed residential usage is about 1000kWh for 30 days, or about 33kWh per day. My anemic EV needed 7.2kWh twice a day - outbound trip and return trip, recharging at the office. I'm going to need to increase my electrical usage by almost 50% to convert to EV transportation. The current electrical grid is barely adequate for the existing load. Oh, and don't forget that my wif has a vehicle too, so converting our family to EVs will double our existing electrical load.
>Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
My coworker did some research on this over the last week, using data from the Department of Energy website. The stuff he printed out says, pretty clearly, that if we continue using oil at the same rate we are currently using it -- that is, not increasing usage -- the United States would use up its entire domestic supply in three years, and the world would use up its entire available supply in 38 years. Note this is not the amount of proven crude oil: this is the amount of oil extractable from crude oil, oil shale, and currently-existing technology for oil extraction from coal. That's *everything*, all the oil there is, and it'll be gone in under 40 years.
I'm trying to find a mistake in the Department of Energy's numbers, but haven't yet.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I don't think that assumption works.
What is important is "PTO energy", but you appear to be using "PTO hours" as your definition instead. This error doesn't totally wreck your point, but it tips the scales a little further over towards switchgrass.
Plowing, particularly the subsoiling type often done in drier climates, requires considerably more energy input than baling, mowing and seeding put together. Consider the quantity of diesel fuel required to plow and otherwise prepare a plot for seeding vs. mowing and bailing. There's a large difference, you notice it right away if your diesel storage tank features only a hand pump.
It's true that corn silage provides tons of energy, all of which is wasted in our current approach to ethanol production. But once you've extracted that, you have to plow and plant again to restart the process. Large output, but a large input required to get it.
With switchgrass, you don't get the huge yields all-at-once the way you would with corn silage, but what you would get would come with (I think--- I haven't run the numbers) a better return-on-investment. The heavy energy consumption happens only once to get the stand established, after that there's only maintenance input during the periodic harvesting.
I bet that corn silage wins easily in total net energy yield per unit of land planted, but switchgrass comes out ahead in cost per unit of energy yield. You don't get as much out of a plot of land with switchgrass, but you put even less in.
Let's go on. Switchgrass is a perennial, so the heavy equipment needed to establish a plot isn't needed long-term (e.g. rent it vs. buy it). The maintenance equipment (mower, cutter, baler) is much cheaper, perhaps placing it within the budget of farmers that couldn't farm otherwise. Some of those wanna-be farmers might also be in regions that corn silage just won't grow in, whether you have the equipment or not.
Finally, since you only plow for switchgrass once, you don't have an annual release of large quantities of CO2 that might undo some of the gains made by switching away from a fossil fuel in the first place. I know that's not a part of this discussion, but I think it's worth mentioning anyway.
Overall, I really like your analysis and its approach. Some of the foundation might not be quite right, but the critical thinking is what this whole debate needs much more of. Kudos.
b.g.
Another factor is that grain combines, especially corn machinery, needs level to rolling ground. Haying equipment is not as large, heavy, or topheavy, and can be used on steeper ground. Also as a rule the steeper the ground the thinner and poorer the soil, and grains need decent soil.
BTW I'm wondering what advantage switchgrass has over alfalfa, which in a hot climate with sufficient water can produce up to 10 cuttings a year. Even in a northern climate, you get 3 cuttings. And alfalfa sets its own nitrogen, plus the primo first cutting can be sold at horse hay prices instead of silage prices.
Another thing I'm wondering -- is switchgrass any good as winter graze?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I know you are just trying to defend your religion, but you are mistaken.
The publicity died, but the efforts were only scaled back a little. Some facts for you
Here, (Phoenix Arizona area) there have been small scale tests of Solar Power going on and slowly expanding for the last 20 years. 5 years ago, a utility was installing solar panels with inverters on some folks rooftops. APS, the local Electric Utility currently claims to have around 2% of it's generation solar. The limiting factor is the cost of the panels.
Solar panels cost have continued to go down in cost, year by year since the 1960's. They are still about 1.5 to 2 times the cost of coal/oil based electricity. That's down from more than 100 times. There has been progress.
I use solar here because you thought it was eliminated under Regan. Wrong. They just stopped making political hay with it. The same it true of syn fuels.
Synthetic fuels have been in limited production since before 1900. Ethanol, Methanol, and other more exotic liquids. Methane, ethane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and other exotic gasses have all been tried, boosted, and are all in limited production. Hitler largely ran Germany on synthetic fuels for WWII, because he didn't have access to any large oil reserves.
The research is ongoing. It's not just the Government either. Every large oil company has a research group looking for a workable alternative to oil. They need it for their continued corporate survival. The Government continues to fund research too. There are lots of programs in Colleges. It's out there, it's just not a current hot button issue. You don't often see it on the nightly 'news'.
The limiting factor really is cost. Compared to alternatives, Gas is cheap. Even at $5.00 per gallon for gasoline, Ethanol is more expensive to use. Gasoline has a higher energy capacity, so you need more ethanol to go the same distance. Methanol has an even lower energy density. That's why ethanol is presently preferred. It's the best alternative to oil we can do right now. Remember to factor that into your cost data. The energy needed to produce it factors in too. Energy costs are high for ethanol, somewhat lower for methanol. There is even work on producing wholly synthetic petroleum. That is still ridiculously expensive.
And actually, we are not even close to running out of oil. Just running out of easy to get (read 'CHEAP') oil.
To date, though, nothing we've found will replace oil completely. Too bad, we do need to get off the oil.
As the poster you were criticizing said, we need more research.
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