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."

Comments

Salt needs new creative uses, also

[Simonetta]

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?

You fail physics

[damburger]

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.