Slashdot Mirror
Watermelon Juice Makes Great Biofuel
Mike writes "Watermelons are more than just a tasty summer snack — researchers at the USDA have determined that the fruit constitutes a promising and economically viable source of biofuel. It turns out that the relatively high concentration of directly fermentable sugars in watermelon juice can be easily converted into ethanol. Rather than grow fields of the fruit for the purpose, the report suggests that farmers capitalize on the 20% of each annual watermelon crop that is left in the field because of surface blemishes or because they are misshapen."
As a homebrewer, does this actually taste decent?
Any glucose/sugar product can be distilled this way.
Next up: Candy Canes make Great Biofuel
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG76egCZXfo
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I worked for a couple of months on a farm run on manual labour. Dray horses were used when more than a strong back was needed. The owner of the farm made what he called his Kickapoo Juice from the watermelons he grew in a dirt patch near his house. It was a low alcohol content, mild sweet, hot summer's day drink. I high recommend watermelon as a base for biofuel. :)
ideopath @ play
Someone should design a decent bio reactor and distilling apparatus. Farmers would appreciate the free fuel , even if the industry does not adopt watermelon juice powdered cars , tractors have less sophisticated engines that could probably run on mostly alcohol without much damage. I some farmers down here ran their tractors on sunflower oil because that's what they were growing in the fields.
The real news is that 20% of the watermelon crop is currently thrown out due to cosmetic issues. I don't understand why shape and surface issues would disqualify the fruit from use in processed foods. Such as watermelon juice, fruit salads, sweeteners, etc. If true (and the article did not provide citations, this represents a stunning waste.
Near as I could tell, the only people who claimed that corn ethanol was actually a good idea were corn growers and any politicians who needed votes out in corn country.(and anybody involved with whiskey, of course; but they aren't wrong)
Another site...
From another article:
"Retailers rejects 360,000 tons of âoesubstandardâ fruit annually in America alone they could be used as an economical way to make fuel."
How much, in terms of fuel and resources, does it take to produce these reject, substandard fruits?
"The waste from US growers could produce nearly two million gallons (nine million litres) of biofuel per year."
We use, what, 70 billion gallons per year of motor gasoline?
"Dr Wayne Fish, who led the team, found that 50 per cent of the fruit was fermentable into ethanol which could provide valuable fuel."
What percentage of nuclear material can be used to provide valuable fuel? I'm sure the number is quite high. And it's just sitting there. That's what it's there for! It wants us to use it! We don't have to use energy to make another product, only to use more energy to make another product, only to convert the negligible amounts of waste into a fuel product!
"The study, published in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels, discovered that watermelons could produce around 20 gallons of fuel per acre from fruit that otherwise would go to waste."
How many gallons of fuel could be saved by upgrading the efficiency of farmland use?
Watermelons are fresh, delicious fruit. They're for eating, not for fueling your vehicles.
TFA sticks with the "economically viable" phrase and doesn't offer any numbers or details.
Plenty of things, including oil sands, arctic natural gas, and burning baby seal blubber can be "economically viable" in certain situations, but only when more traditional sources of crude oil reach a certain market price. This article doesn't even conjecture about when and where watermelon fuel could be "economically viable" compared to crude oil, and comparison with crude oil marks the only concrete method of making the comparison.
Naturally, using watermelons you've already grown for fuel might be viable at a pretty low return, compared with letting them rot, but the article doesn't prove that, either.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, ANY food source used as a bio-fuel is a terrible idea. Using food sources for bio-fuels has resulted in people STARVING to death in developing nations. Why can't these intelligent scientists see this? Even if it's only for spoils of watermelon crops, the fine line between selling the entire source for fuel vs food will become invisible - just as it happened for corn and wheat.
It took a global economic meltdown to correct food prices to help reset this stupidity. But it seems these morons (lets call a spade a spade) forgot this fact. All it takes is for watermelons to get expensive, and in poorer countries, you'll have the farmers selling their entire crops to bio-fuel companies.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
This is all wonderful, us rich people can continue to drive GMC Yukons or whatever, except it has the same problems as using other foodstuffs for fuel. Oh, sure, you can use the 20% bad watermelons for it, but once watermelon->fuel processing capacity exists, market prices will dictate whether the 80% of good melons go to the grocery store or to the melon refinery, and when the global economy bounces back and fuel prices go up, it'll be just one more thing putting pressure on the food supply. Before anyone says "oh, but watermelons can't be a large part of the global food supply," what happens with cash crops is they end up more valuable than food crops (hence the name) and displace them in the fields.
And so this whole thing is barking up the wrong tree - the fuel is alternative, but it sure isn't sustainable, just one more squeeze on substance farmers someplace we don't give a damn about.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
They aren't suggesting growing more watermelons, they are suggesting that the watermelons that are presently left in the field to rot could instead be harvested and sent to a distillery.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Good cropland is scarce enough as it is. Urban areas are constantly expanding and turning cropland into cityscape. It doesn't make much sense to hasten this trend by effectively converting space for growing food into space for fueling our vehicles.
I swear, the only reason we continue to see these ridiculous schemes is because the fuel companies don't want to see everything go electric. It won't be long before battery technology catches up and allows us to drive a reasonable distance on a charge. (Or we could just take advantage of the various swappable battery technologies that have already been developed for cars.)
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
The queues are long enough at the gas station already without having to wait for people to get EVERY LITTLE SEED out before pumping their cars full..
Have you ever held a fully grown watermelon?
How about picked and loaded a truckfull of it, taken it to the market and then be told that you should either return a part of it cause they are bellow the buy-off quality or that you will be paid less for those watermelons, again on account of lower quality?
It is WAY cheaper to do quality control before PICKING, and just grow more to cover for the statistics.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Exactly. Iowa's early primary ensures that any canidate trying to raise more money has to take the pledge to support ethanol as a biofuel. If they point out how wastefull and pointless it's been, they'll have a weak showing there, and their campaign contributions will take a hit. Plus no congressman with eyes on the presidency would be willing to vote against corn for the same reasons.
Ethanol subsidies have been a huge waste, the money is all going to ADM, which is the last company we should be giving it to.
That wiki page also has some interesting stats on the taxes. "every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30." And we're STILL dependant on oil. It's not even that they take corporate welfare, I'd be mad enough just based off how lousy an investment that is.
Although watermelons and corn can make biofuels: I offer you a much better alternative: Kudzu vine. It's already been synthesized into kudzuhol Kudzu grows up to a foot a day, it's the vine that ate the south. It just seems a waste to convert perfectly good food to biofuel.
It's like having your cylinder head smashed in by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
The United States is, by far, the largest producer of corn in the world. Corn is grown on over 400,000 U.S. farms. In 2000, the U.S. produced almost ten billion bushels of the world's total 23 billion bushel crop. Corn grown for grain accounts for almost one quarter of the harvested crop acres in this country. Corn grown for silage accounts for about two percent of the total harvested cropland or about 6 million acres. The amount of land dedicated to corn silage production varies based on growing conditions. In years that produce weather unfavorable to high corn grain yields, corn can be "salvaged" by harvesting the entire plant as silage. According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry, and fish production. The crop is fed as ground grain, silage, high-moisture, and high-oil corn. About 12% of the U.S. corn crop ends up in foods that are either consumed directly (e.g. corn chips) or indirectly (e.g. high fructose corn syrup). It also has a wide array of industrial uses including ethanol, a popular oxygenate in cleaner burning auto fuels.
http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/cropmajor.html
Growing food for producing fuel is just mad. mad. mad.