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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
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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
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.
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.
Not to mention the energy costs. I wonder how much oil energy it takes to create a pound of plastic or biofuel. Would it cost less oil energy to just make the plastic or fuel from oil? That's the problem with ethanol, it takes a crazy amount of oil to grow corn (in worst case scenarios: 2 calories of oil energy for 1 of corn energy in fertilizer and pesticides and other stuff), then the wet milling takes another crazy amount (ignoring the energy costs to GROW corn, it takes like 6 gallons of oil energy to create 8 gallons of ethanol energy).
Simply coming up with a product that doesn't take oil in as a raw product doesn't mean that the process doesn't use any oil.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
If you subsidize it enough and penalize the oil-based products enough, it could be competitive. Just like ethanol.
Of course, then we'll all be worse off because we'll be forced to buy an inferior product for a much higher price. Just like ethanol.
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.
From TFA:
It says so right in TFA that's "where the fuck it says" it.
My Babylon
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"
Well you have to grow the crops to create the biomass, no? That requires things like herbicides (potentially not required if the weeds are just as useful as the crop) and pesticides. It also requires harvesting in some fashion. All that is currently accomplished (except on not-so-useful small scales) via tractors. Tractors use gasoline or diesel. Currently (citation likely needed, but I can't remember where I read it) biofuels are being slammed because of the fact that it takes more fuel to grow and process the biomass than is actually recovered from the biomass as biofuel to begin with.
I would put forth that the absolute dollar cost is not really the issue, it's the ratio of energy in vs. energy out that is.
Of course, that's also ignoring the amount of arable land required to grow that biomass - use too much land and suddenly the cost of crops that could otherwise be grown there increases.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
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
Ethanol is only inferior if you are only judging it based on mpg. Ethanol is a high octane fuel (usually between 110 & 130 octane). So if you have an engine designed to use ethanol (and take advantage of the extra octane) you are going to get more power. If you need that extra power it makes ethanol well worth it.
If/When they start offering ethanol from plant sources that don't "waste" farmland I think even losing the few mpg will only be a minor drawback to using it.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
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.
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.
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.
Those are far from the "only" problems... they are the easiest problems to detect. There are countless forums on the Internet that discuss all the finer points of running veg oil in diesel engines... use google if you want to find them to read all the nitty gritty details. General consensus is that running unprocessed veg oil most diesel engines will lead to coking over time, unless you heat the veg oil first. If you aren't extremely careful to remove all water from the oil, you can wear out the cylinder walls very quickly, too... and won't necessarily even notice a degradation in performance until it's too late. There are other problems that apply to specific models of diesel engines, too--you can't even run biodiesel in an '09 model year Volkswagen TDI engine without serious problems; I wouldn't even dream of trying straight VO.
Furthermore, because of the high octane and increased power, you can use a smaller displacement engine, which will off set the increase in MPG while increasing the overall efficiency.
The higher the compression ratio in a combustion engine, the more efficient it is. The problem is with these so called flex fuel cars, which are low compression and high displacement originally designed for gasoline, now being fueled by ethanol. Sure it works, but its completely inefficient.
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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.
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.
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