Slashdot Mirror
Plastic and Fuel That Grow On Trees
Tim Hanlon writes "Biofuels continue to lead the field in the search for a renewable, environmentally friendly replacement for crude oil. Besides its use in the transport industry, crude oil is also used to produce conventional plastics and chemical products such as fertilizers and solvents. Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can be used to produce not only fuel, but also plastics, polyester, and industrial chemicals, cheaply and efficiently."
and has shown its portents to be but one word off. *real* Plastic Trees.
Trillions of dollars in previous investment and commercial interests will see that doesn't happen for a long time, if ever. I, for one, continue to pay due obeisance and tribute to our vile oil-powered overlords.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
"Although it is a fairly simple process to convert HMF into plastics or biofuel, it is seldom used because HMF is costly to make"
they go on to say they made it less expensive, but no where does it state they have broken into a price range that makes it useful aka "cheap".
seriously if this is the level of reporting the bio faction are going to stick to, be prepared to laughed at a LOT.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Tell the world what you've discovered, and if it's real, you'll have 10,000 copycats. Keep it secret and be first to market, and you'll be a billionaire.
Based on that thesis, I declare this article a load of crap.
If all the arable land in all the world were used to grow the highest yield plant for biofuel, it wouldn't come CLOSE to what we need for fuel, or our plastic demand. Hell, it might not even be a need to support the polyester demand...should the 70's happen again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Alright! Let's chop down those trees and start saving the environment!
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live." - M.J. A
I know that here in Florida we have a few plants that we in Forestry researched called Titi and saw palmetto.
These plants grow fast in mass groves and were viable candidates for biofuel. Alas the biofuel plant was nixed.
Though it provided green jobs, an alternate fuel source, environmental karma and would aid us in the fight against overgrown ground fuel for wildfires the community voted against the smell the plant would cause.
The oil won't last forever so people need to wake up. Even though I burn trees down with Forestry I also hug them. :)
"Don't Panic"
Copaiba is a tree from the Amazon region that gives diesel oil. Drill a hole in the tree and pour the oil that comes out in your tank, that is all you need to do. Typical yield is 40 liter per tree every year.
How is this different than the "corn plastic" that's been around for years? Like the stuff mentioned here... http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/plastic.html
The process described is about two years old and was published last month.
Untold millions of dollars have been spent in search of a cost effective process to produce ethanol from cellulose for use as a fuel, leading me to wonder exactly what the catch is.
Of course, converting much of the world's cropland to pulpwood production isn't exactly an environmental panacea.
You've described trade secrets, but there are also patents.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Could you please describe the micromechanics of exactly how commercial interests will prevent this from happening? Who will speak to who? What will they say? Will they enlist assassins? Will they demand to have it outlawed? On what grounds? If this method can reliably convert a tree into cheap raw material, how will any individual be prevented from starting a company doing this at a small scale?
Oil companies don't sell oil - they sell energy. Oil is just how they get the energy to you. It's a transport medium and nothing more.
If you give them something that does the job better (which is to say, with a higher profit margin) they'll be all over it.
That's why discoveries like this are great, even if financially unfeasible right now. It sets a ceiling. If gas jumps to 3 or 4 or 5 dollars a gallon, eventually other technologies will be competitive.
It's like telling the oil bearing countries, "We've drawn a line - right here. See it? Cross it and we'll switch technologies."
It's always nice to have alternatives. And it's even better to let the people you buy from know that you have alternatives, so they better watch it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...and there will be enough to supply all our plastics needs for 100Ks of years.
being that cellulose itself is basically nothing but a plastic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Y'see. Most of our fertilizers and pesticides are produced using fossil fuels. The Haber-Bosch process for example.
Which means that when the fossil fuels run out, so will the food.
What is the EROEI on making bio fuels to produce fertilizers to produce bio fuels? Is it even above 1? And how will the cost of food compare against the cost of a tank of gas in that environment? Should we encourage people to starve to feed the Hummer?
Deleted
Googling for more data on this, I found at least one article that claims otherwise: "... copaiba (Copaifera Langsdorfii) has raised the possibility of eliminating even the processing step. The copaiba produces at least 20-30 liters of oil every six months -- and this oil is a mixture of 15-carbon hydrocarbons which can be used directly to power a diesel engine"
Salt?!? WTF?
Yes, salt. We not only have a serious petroleum problem, but also a big fresh, potable water problem. There's not enough to support the massively growing populations and the industries that consume hundreds of millions of gallons of it. Industries like integrated circuit manufacturing.
But the world is two-thirds water. However it is mixed with 23% salt: sodium chloride. We can separate the salt from the sea water, but it currently uses a lot of petroleum to do so. Today the areas that have the greatest need for fresh water derived from the sea tend to have a lot of petroleum nearby. That will change as the easy-to-reach oil is consumed and population grows in oil-poor lands.
We have also lots of sand. Sand can be melted into glass, which can be shaped into lenses that can focus the sunlight to evaporate the water from the salt. It's a big and complicated project, but we can do it.
But we end up with a lot of salt. Mountains of the stuff.
We have another great need. We've cut down many of the forests that has provided our basic housing building material. The alternatives such as brick and steel is expensive.
We need some way to transform the mountains of salt into cheap, workable, flexible, strong, and bio-degradable building materials to build housing, pipelines, aqueducts, and all the other things needed now for the massively growing population. We need chemists who can transform NaCl into new and presently-unknown materials. And to produce a new class of materials in a environmentally-friendly manner. And to do new material manufacturing in ways that will scale both up and down in order to supply millions of new jobs for all types of economies.
Any chemists need a serious challenge? Or, looking for a doctoral thesis topic?
Great instead of a lack of oil and large polution problem, we're just going to have a lack of trees problem? Awesome, I see nothing wrong with that! Who needs the rain forests anyways? ...errr remind me again how oxygen is made?
So what happens if there's a forest fire with these plastic trees? Wouldn't that be a pretty hazardous situation to the Environment?
if energy companies can put it in a pump and sell it alongside cigarettes,beer, and condoms they will sell it. if someone discovered how to make ethanol from cellulose in unlimited quantities for 50 cents a gallon and the oil companies could sell it for $1.25 a gallon, oil companies would happily sell it. "drill,drill,drill" is about having control of supply. If supply is cheap and guarunteed, then drilling no longer matters
The article reports the ground-breaking/unprecedented/whatever direct conversion of cellulose to HMF. Here's an earlier article from a different research group that the editors of "Gizmag" seem to be unaware of. It was published earlier and actually describes the same process from either cellulose or untreated biomass:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja808537j
I'm ready for the home inventor plastic making machines. Stuff your grass, shrub, and tree cuttings in one end and pull your invention out of the other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Here in Germany it was very common for people to use unprocessed oil from plats (just pressure and a filter against non-oil components) with normal diesel plants (before oil industry recently lobbied for law change to have mineral oil tax on those non-mineral oils, too).
There are only three problems: Your car supplier will say it is not supported (because they fear liability if they say otherwise), you need slightly better filters for the exhausts in the long run, and it behaves differently on different temperatures, so if you want to be sure it also works and you have no problems in winter (and do not want the trouble to mix with normal diesel), you need a little extension to heat the oil.
There were garages changing your car this way for about the money you had saved in three months by cheaper oil instead of diesel, but then the law was changed. (The law also made some percent of eco-fuel in all normal fuel mandatory, but I read that also only helps the big firms, as they usually always add some artifical fuel for better properties in there, and do not care much if they produce that from gas or biologial sources, but only care that people have to buy it from them and not from the farmer at the next village).
This isn't exactly new technology, it's already proven that oil and plastic (as well as paper, high-durability concrete, etc) can be made from hemp. The only problem with hemp is that it's illegal to grow it in the US because it looks too much like Marijuana, and is therefore controlled by the DEA, despite the fact that you can smoke all the hemp you can handle and still not even get a buzz.
As I already posted above, copaiba oil is remarkable exactly because, unlike other vegetable oils, it needs no further processing to be used as fuel.
Copaiba's main limitation is that it requires Amazon region climate, warm temperatures and abundant rainfall all year long. However, a researcher in Colorado is trying to insert the oil producing gene from copaiba into grasses. This could have a very interesting use, if it could be used with plants such as wild grasses that grow in regions unsuitable for growing food plants.
There is an interesting thing about salt...it dissolves in water!
If you start ussing NaCl for building you will desalinate the oceans causing massive damage to the environment.
How about instead we put it on a ship and slowly dissolve it with ocean water...tereby maintaining the balance.
Fuck you.
I don't want my food, or potential food, turned in to fuel.
I don't use the term lightly ... Biofuel is EVIL.
Manure was used as fertilizer before they invented the Haber-Bosch process. There's one tropical plant, the Brazilian water hyacinth, that's considered one of the world's worst weeds. It doubles its mass in six to eighteen days, probably the fastest growing plant in the world. One hectare produces up to 750 kg of dry organic matter per day.
The ideal biomass production scheme? Grow water hyacinth in ponds of untreated sewage. Make cellulosic ethanol from that, or else just burn the biomass to power steam turbines.
we call it.......wood.
I am an industrial chemist in an immediately related project. I do think the discovery is important, but I don't see the point of converting prime cellulose to fuel, because that's sort of missing the point. Currently cellulose has plenty of uses; it is being used widely as is in things like paper, paper tissues, cardboard, viscose fibres and cellophan. The fact is that only 20% of the Earth's land area outside the polar regions is in a natural state. The rest is in human use somehow. We'd need to cut down energy consumption severely and improve the efficiency of current technology to live with 100% renewables only.
Most of plant matter is not prime-quality cellulose, and there is a major research effort underway to evaluate the uses of the rest of the plant. For example, the second-largest constituent of wood, lignin, has been up to this point only burned to regenerate pulping chemicals and produce energy for the pulp mill.
The discovery is important in the sense that first, it provides information of the catalysis on cellulose, and second, annual plants or other more difficult sources than wood could be used for producing plastics and liquid fuels. Then again, we have to consider the alternative of using oil for plastic: it's not really that bad environmentally to take oil and then convert it into solid plastic, because the carbon it contains is sequestered into the landfill. Liquid fuels from this source would compete with other land plant sources or e.g. algae that produce oils (either triglyceride or terpenes that can be converted with hydrocracking).
I read the article in Applied Catalysis A itself, and found it fairly impressive. The system is truly catalytic, there are no impossible stoichiometric (in this case about 100 g chromium or 220 g chromium chloride per 100 g cellulose) non-regenerable reactants so common in the "alternative fuel" literature. They needed only 0.5%. I see only one major problem in it: chromium. It is being increasingly avoided because it can form carcinogenic compounds. You can distil off the furfural, but you can't distil sugars, so you'll have to deal with the residual chromium somehow. Probably a simple ion exchange could be used.
Its derived of biomass idiots, why reinvent the wheel. It delivers more punch per cc and using todays state of the art is cleaner than ever.
Biofuels is trading good fuel for bad as water will be used to now produce the mass needed to produce this new "biofuel". So instead of the great war of oil, it will be over water.
Day by day, its becoming obvious the state of cluelessness that is the new scientist spurned by that fucking hypocrite blowhard al gore
sorry the recent credit card law revamp you hear about in the news?? it went through the senate and passed 4 to 2.. yes 6 people out of 100 there to vote on it..
I think you misspelled "90 to 5".
Why do "they" "always" mock conspiracy theorists? Because so many of said theorists spew so much garbage. Post a screed with a few dozen "facts", and most people won't be bothered to check every one of them. Some will discount the whole mass, others will accept the whole mass.
... and knowledge of how to turn hemp seed oil into plastic has been around since the 1930's
http://books.google.com/books?id=PKDrpeRRY94C&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=convert+hemp+oil+to+plastic&source=bl&ots=8CrIve8q4F&sig=pAYC_wFiWLAo1yVg-5qXFUTmCqU&hl=en&ei=zugWSqvMLqDKtgf7i8n-DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1
You can also make gasoline and diesel fuel out of it a lot more efficiently than you can with corn, using no petroleum based fertilizer.
The government of this country has it's collective head up it's ass when it comes to energy independence and being green, despite the propaganda and party line. If they really wanted to solve the problem it'd be easy. You can't fight wars over your own resources so it will never happen.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Plants don't come from nowhere. They suck up chemical energy from the environment and electromagnetic radiation from the sun, both of which could be put to far better use than making more Buzz Lightyear dolls.
Biomass technologies are just a process, and cannot be used as a source of mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy (which is essentially what complex plastic represent; the ones we have at the moment are the result of energy applied by the Earth itself for millions of years). Just like the touted 'hydrogen economy' - it just shifts the problem to someone else.
These biomass technologies will, unless they are only used in energy-intensive artificial environments, displace food production and starve people. So yeah, we can have plastics without crude oil - but they will be like soylent green; made of people!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Biomass does not generate energy. It consumes energy. The Sun produces the chemical energy in plants and the products you get from planets.
Oil is also, ultimately, a form of solar energy - but accumulated over millions of years. When it runs out, biomass will not be able to replace it at all.
Insightful my arse. Moderators fail physics too.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Restrictive laws and regulations. Use your imagination and past examples to see how this works. Here's an example from 30 years ago. When solar PV first really became popular, it was a bear to even get a local "permit" to install it, it "didn't pass code". I had friends that personally went through that. Then the electric companies fought it constantly because they didn't want grid tied systems. Their goal is to sell you a product that can never be completely paid off, home generation is a direct threat to that business model. Small scale personal hydroelectric is possible, but it is near impossible to get it permitted, from environmental impact statements to possiblly the endangered three eyed flying newt was spotted ten miles downstream of your proposed little turbine, and so on,etc.. Now we have an alternative liquid biofuels industry with ethanol and biodiesel from traditional sources, as a first transitional step towards unbiquitous renewable liquid fuels, but a lot of interests still don't want it because "it takes food away from poor people" and "drives up costs", "hurts the environment" etc, even though it is the only viable alternative we have at the present for the existing millions and millions of ICE vehicles out there right now, leaving us always walking on eggshells wondering when the next huge price jump will come out of the blue (like it has several times over the past few years) or when the supplies might be disrupted due to some new enlarged wars in the middle east or whatever.
Look at computer software and the introduction of FOSS for another example, we are all aware of how it has been fought against at some lofty levels, and how they went about it, we've discussed that a lot here. Heck, back to vehicle, electric cars are buildable, they were just as common as any other vehicle a century ago, and we've had examples in the more recent past such as the EV1, and people *begged* to buy them, they loved them, yet they were recalled and crushed. They worked too good, they were a threat. There's a movie about it. That's why you have seen all these big car companies try to foist off those ludicrously expensive "hydrogen fuel cell cars" with small numbers of prototypes instead of just building at least some electric cars in mass quantities starting years ago. They can look like they are doing something while actually delaying tech that could be on the market. Guess who owns the patents on building large NiMH batteries, the ones we could have been using since the early 90s for electric cars and are still priced way too high to be really well adopted?
When you are talking about *disruptive technologies* and their economic impact, there is always an element of resistance from those older entrenched industries and concerns who could see their bottom line impacted negatively. They will spend what it takes (in both money and effort) overtly or covertly to at least delay and make adoption of the newer or better tech more complicated and expensive then it needs to be.
That's exactly it - thank you.
This is the kind of thing that could very likely happen to the oil industry. A couple of guys in a lab somewhere suddenly came up with a cheap and easy way to turn plant matter into gasoline and plastic. The process runs at 120C and is about 50% efficient. Those are damn good numbers, especially for a first pass. That's not a lot of input energy, and 60% and 70% efficiency aren't too far away I'd guess. Maybe more.
Maybe here in 100 years or so your grandkids will be saying the same thing, only instead of talking about the railroad barons they'll be talking about the oil barons.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
requiring oil in the manufacturing process in one form or another.
This research is still valuable though.
I can't see algae fuel being a threat to displace many food plant-sources.
Please take your defeatist attitude elsewhere. We're likely going to explore a few dead ends before we find the optimal solution.
You stereotypers are all the same...
If you can turn cellulose into a valuable, exportable commodity, say goodbye to every third world ecosystem with trees.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Photovoltaics in the past decade are just finally getting to mass production scales where the costs drop fast. When they were first introduced, they cost over 10 grand a small inefficient panel and were used primarily in space missions.
Economies of scale *work*, you don't have affordable PV yet because of resistance to it from the entrenched energy monopolies and because the solar makers had to make do with leftover bad/scrap silicon wafers from the chip industries. New fabs dedicated to just PV production are coming online this year and next year.
And BTW, your grid supplied is cheap *now*, but do you have a long range contract which guarantees a price, say 10 or 20 years? And is there any amount you can give them to make it a sale instead of a long term lease where you build no equity? Do you know what it will cost you exactly then in the future with such a contract? If so, could you identify your electric company? Just wondering, I have asked this question many times now here and elsewhere on the net and haven't had any takers yet.
You can get such contracts and price guarantees with some of the alternatives. That's the point.
I know PV doesn't work in all areas all the time, but it certainly can and does work in numerous areas just fine. There is no single magic energy solution. They all have upsides and downsides, so I won't argue that.
As to corn ethanol, I was *careful* to point out is a a transitional crop to get some sort of viable market going and to get enthusaism up, such as in the article. Even the people who push corn now admit that, it is to help get established the interest in biofuels and to also insure at least some form of limited liquid fuel availability insurance in case of force majeur disruptions to traditional supplies, which can happen overnight and ruin your whole day. so no, I disagree, it isn't a boondoggle when you add in the fact it is affrordable insurance plus, me being a farmer, I knoiw the US is setup to grow corn in vast quantities and we do so every year. so at least we could maintain some supplies if needs be for a modest extended period if something bad where to happen.
I know I *personally* had to pay 10 bucks a gallon for two gallons-the limit you could get- back during the OPEC embargo, just enough gas to get home and park, and therefore not enough to go to my job the next day, said job was then lost shortly. Stuff happens. We had no biofuels industry of note back then, the choice was eat it raw and only get two gallons if you were lucky, or ....screwed. I actually saw a guy purchase and pour two cases of ron rico 101 into his RV tank and drive away...you just couldn't get gas, not enough to matter anyway, and we had *no national backup*.
We have no guarantees on petroleum supply for the future, none, AND we are MUCH worse off now than back during the OPEC embargo days when it comes to that, we are forced to import a much higher percentage of our oil (and export all that cash, a lot of it going to some rather dubious regimes....) and any number of possible and credible scenarios could seriously disrupt supply to the point you would feel lucky to get gallons of anything that burned for ten bucks. Or a hundred bucks.
If the US had to go within a week from the prices we have now to ten bucks a gallon at very limited supply levels, we'd collapse if it went on more than a month or so. I don't mean just get inconvenienced, I mean collapse economically.
Domestic produced biofuels are our only credible backup fuel insurance we have now. Throw it away if you want....
Insurance is just that, and insuring alternative supplies have real but hard to quantify costs associated with them *until you need them*, then they seem quite cheap. Your other insurance for this or that costs you x-bucks a month, and you get nothing for itm, there is no ROI there, and you hope you never need it, but if you do, it pays off. Mumbling about unobtanium electric vehicles not on the market yet at all exc
In fact, in the end oil-laden algae will be where we get our biofuels--you can harvest algae many times times per year, and more importantly, you can even use seawater to grow the algae, too.
Mutant 59 would've already taken place: one of the TWO key plot elements was a sunlight biodegradable plastic that served as the feedstock for the non-dangerous microbe to mutate and become dangerous. (IIRC)
The corn starch laden plastics, and UV-degradable polyethylene have been around for a long time.
Problem for a mutant 59 style bug is that even these are pretty stable, so not much energy for them to live off of. They'd be slow movers, in other words, not the visually dramatic thing needed to sell the plot/books.
But I've thought about that book/plot ever since I read it way back when. Points to you for bringing it up.
PS: Add the final variant of the Andromeda Strain was a plastic-eater.
Sugar cane is not able to be grown in most of the US. In fact, the very largest sugar cane operations that we had are now being closed down around the Everglades in order to bring back the "sponge" wetlands for insuring better water management. Whereas corn is grown in huge geographical areas and our farmers are set up for it. I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 50 or 100 to 1, corn to cane growers.
Large monoculture requires expensive custom equipment, it is hard to go from one crop to a radically different crop in other words, and your farm itself might not be suitable, as in, you aren't going to be growing sugar cane in nebraska. You could sugar beets, but again, specialized equipment.. A regular midwest corn/soybean farm will have millions in land and equipment and rather high operating costs, just so they can net what is in essence a normal middle class wage when the season is good and the market doesn't rape them. They can't just switch to something else very easily. Ethanol production has helped to bring about at least somewhat better stability in the markets for them, guaranteed sales because the demand to use it in gasoline blends is there.
The other thing with corn is, it is not all "used up" to make ethanol, what is left over is still suitable for animal feed, and millions of tons of year get used exactly for that purpose. I don't know if that aspect of the economics is usually understood in these conversations about corn ethanol, nor do people seem to take the "backup liquid fuel insurance" adequately as "worth something", but I personally think it is. I know if we ever went through another big embargo or one of those political loons decides to *really* light up the mideast and the straits of hormuz are closed for an extended time, I would rather we had the infrastructure in place and up and running and be able to still turn out a billion gallons of ethanol, than *not*. Insurance. Put a price on that, I can't, other than it is a lot more than zero. Add that to the economic cost and it looks like a better deal then.
Because I know that is all we have for a backup. The national crude storage is the only other thing we have to rely on in an emergency, and that has to be refined, and the lag time is huge. Ethanol is loads faster, plus it can be accomplished in an emergency with some rather crude equipment, most anyplace, again, another form of insurance, diversification, especially away from vulnerable coastal areas like texas and louisianna.
Brazil can do ethanol cheaper because they have a ton of cheap human labor-I mean back breaking really cheap as in hardly anyone in the US who pushes that as an option would like to be out there doing that work with a machete in the hot sun 16 hours a day themselves (as in talk is cheap, back breaking labor is acceptable as long as someone else does it ;)) for serf wages, and it is also tropical there, meaning sugar cane can be grown over large areas.
Just depends on the geography, climate and what the local labor situation is. Some areas it might be better to do palm oil or coconut oil, others perhaps canola/rapeseed, some cane, some corn, some....a big potential list. potato vodka fuel.
They are working on better biofuels all the time with breeding and so on. Who knows, maybe the algae stuff will win eventually. Switchgrass, jatropha, don't know, We need "all of the above" right now though. All the ethanol and plant based biodiesel we get now is still considered to be first generation efforts, from wherever it is sourced, it is just distilling the cheapest locally available bulk sugar stuff or pressing out oils and refining them a little. The tech will get better as long as we don't kill the biofuels industry off right now because it isn't "perfect" yet.
And that thing about corn ethanol driving up prices so poor people couldn't eat? Total crap, you can blame commodities speculators and assorted other wall street human predators for the bulk of the cost runups there and where that money gets skimmed off, just like they are doing with everything else. Another subject, for another time perhaps...