Slashdot Mirror
Doubled Yield For Bio-Fuel From Waste
hankwang writes "Dutch chemical company DSM announced a new process for production of ethanol from agricultural waste. Most bio-fuel ethanol now is produced from food crops such as corn and sugar cane. Ethanol produced from cellulose would use waste products such as wood chips, citrus peel, and straw. The new process is claimed to increase the yield by a factor of two compared to existing processes, thanks to new enzymes and special yeast strains."
You're too late. They have been overthrown by the wood-chip-based overlords.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
of not actually decreasing the food supply and driving up the cost of staples such as grain and sugar.
Nothing like solving the energy issues for the wealthy while letting the poor starve just a little faster.
You're also too late. They have been overthrown by the Monsanto corn-based overlords.
Until the process becomes cost competitive with corn, this is just a story about some enzymes and yeast that only a zymurgy nerd could love.
We'll see whether they commercialize this before cold fusion becomes a practical source of commercial electrical power.
But think of the straw!
"If you see a man on a horse, he is likely an enemy. Kill the man and eat the horse."
This means we can make booze more efficiently!
There's a potential problem with the whole 'special yeast' part - yeast is airborne, and its main feature is that it rapidly reproduces as it eats. Historically, yeast strains were developed by leaving starched/sugared water out, then selectively culling the foam that grew on top until you had something that made bread rise and taste good.
Basically, yeast is everywhere - and the problem with using a special yeast is the same problem that many biofuels using microflora have: Contamination of your carefully bred cell lines, and spread of your proprietary licensed lines into nature leading to lawsuits.
I hope the Netherlands has better laws about owning and licensing life than Monsanto follows. Yeast would be FAR harder to legally control than even food crops, as enough use would mean you could accidentally gather their 'product' almost anywhere on earth just by leaving out some floured water, then rapidly selecting for best performance across quick generations.
Ryan Fenton
Enzymes for conversion of cellulose into something more useful as a fuel have been around for years. The problem is that the enzymes tend to cost too much. This outfit at least has a plan to grow the enzymes at the refinery, rather than shipping them in. The costs of these processes have dropped substantially in recent years.
Fuels are very cheap per unit volume. Any input to the process has to be even cheaper.
You just might want to do a little more in depth research to see where the huge price rises in corn, etc come from. Hint: not from farmers, nor from ethanol production. It comes from wall street speculators, people who produce *nothing*, parasites, who take and take and take as much as they can get through controlling the government.
Assholes who live in NYC and Chicago make more money off of food products than the farmers make.
Even then, we have had mountains of surplus corn sitting around, you can go buy all you want. The "poor" suffer because those speculators drive the prices up.
If the anti ethanol people are so concerned over corn ethanol, they can put their wallets where their mouths are and actually buy shiploads of corn and distribute it..but they don't, they just run their mouths and never even do the most minimal research about that subject, or any number of other subjects where there is this far left urban centric legend about commodities.
Farmers want to grow food, they don't want subsidy to not grow food, that was forced on them when the government-at the direction of wall street-forced the ending of buying surplus crops in bumper years to maintain prices and switched to credit card based financial "food" for welfare and aid.
You want someone to blame for high food prices, blame those jerks, the sames ones and same mindset like with the oil spill, cut corners, skim off all you can, never think of the future or your global neighbors, just be a bloated tick and live off the labors of others.
...until we're throwing our banana peels directly into our Flux Capacitor for fuel.
Clones are people two!
I will not fall for your Straw Man argument!
what waste? everything list would be better being mulched and returned.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, but I will convert your straw man into a burning man.
See ya in NV.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
In that it also eats flesh, controls your mind, and makes you smell funny. Oh yea, and make you crave braaaaaiiiinsss!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
If this were true, farmers would have a very simple way to get rid of those parasites: sell directly to the consumers. AFAIK there are no militias that force farmers to deliver corn to the speculators at gun point.
Here's a farmer that grows corn, there's an industry that consumes corn. Both meet, agree on a price, the corn is delivered. Simple, isn't it?
However, both farmers and industries much prefer the system where intermediates guarantee prices and delivery. With a commodities market farmers know they will always have someone to sell their products to, industries know they will have someone to buy from. The futures market tell them what price they will get so they can plan ahead.
If markets were as bad as you say, then North Korea and Cuba would be the richest nations in the world. Albania would still be Stalinist, China would have continued with Maoism and the Soviet Union would still be a union.
You're both too late - oil's back.
Now, in the U.S., we can subsidize major food conglomerates to throw away the crops they don't grow!
I may be overreaching, But clearly the only answer is to Stop, Drop, and Roll!
Yeah, here in the gulf, we're swimming in it!!!
You just might want to do a little more in depth research to see where the huge price rises in corn, etc come from. Hint: not from farmers, nor from ethanol production. It comes from wall street speculators
ok, so i'm a speculator. I've bought 1000 tonnes of corn in the hope it goes up. Then what do I do?
Do I burn it?
Do I dump it in the ocean?
What?
At some point, that corn has to be sold to the end user, and in the process I increase the supply, just as I increased the demand when buying. i.e. when it's consumed, someone paid the market rate for it.
Deleted
This may not be true of every farmer out there, but I'm not obliged to sell anything to anyone I don't want to. We're not all just hapless pawns of some faceless organisations resident in a Manhattan skyscraper.
If a nice man comes to me at the beginning of the season and promises to buy however much (beet/potato/turnip/broccoli/whatever) I produce at a given price, and it's a price I like, we do business. It takes a lot of the uncertainty out of the whole business. I have insurance for crop failures (owing to various natural disasters) which takes more uncertainty out. Does it all cost me money? Sure it does. If I have a surplus over and above what a speculator will pay for, I can then sell it on the spot market, or compost it, or whatever makes the most sense.
If I'm feeling lucky and I've had a few good years I can try to second-guess the market and fight it out on the spot market unaided, but the fact is that that is not easy to get right. Farmers basically invented the futures market to guarantee some kind of return, and the commodity markets revolve around that whole issue.
So, here's a big, fat hint for you: if you don't like AmeriGloboLeechCorp crushing the hapless peasants under the heel of its italian leather pumps, find some other way to ease the wild uncertainties which dominate the farming industry. Oh, and until you find that other way? Get used to poor ignorant peasants like me doing business with people who will work with us. Call them speculators, call them what you will, they can wheel and deal the futures that they have bought (with real cash money) amongst each other until they get dizzy. I got the cash in my pocket, and I'm using it to plant whatever's on order this season.
PS: I maybe sound more combative than I feel, and people obviously realise some of this, but I get very tired of people painting farmers as illiterate hicks. A modern farmer in the west is an entrepreneur (or the US, anyway) and the stupid and lazy ones go broke by the dozen. As with any small business, it's the smart ones that survive. We have inputs, capital and running expenses, markets and regulations by the score. A modern farmer has to have a sound working knowledge of everything from livestock first aid through to economic principles, to do well. As far as the purchasers? I really don't care who or what they are as long as the currency is genuine. I will charge what the market will bear, and if someone else takes the delivery and sales stuff off my hands for a cut of the action, so be it. I have plenty of work to do out here on the land.
PPS: The single biggest cause, as far as I can tell, for the rise of agribusiness in farming concerns particulary is that this is about the best way of gathering the kind of big capital that really large scale farming demands. It's not my style, and I don't need it, but a lot of people who complain about factory farming (which is really a misnomer) would do well to, again, come up with some kind of alternative rather than just whining about where the economic realities of today have led.
POET (www.poet.com), the world's largest ethanol producer has had a pilot scale cellulosic ethanol plant running in Scotland, South Dakota for over a year now. I work for a company that was invited to test our equipment on their corn cob bales last November. Right now, POET has dropped their production cost to about $2.35/gal of ethanol and are in line to get the price down even more. They will be starting up a commercial scale cellulosic ethanol plant in November, 2011 in Emmetsburg, IA. They've cut energy usage by developing enzymes to ferment the cocktail instead of having to boil it. At some plants (they have 27) they pipe vented methanol from local county landfills to provide some of their energy needs.
My question about the whole benefits of yeast produced ethanol thing is whether, in the long term, it can actually produce enough energy to make the whole process carbon neutral. Can we power all the devices that produce the industrial byproducts with all of the energy from those by products?
The process is, or can be, carbon neutral. It can actually be carbon negative, taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than what's released when farmed then used. That's because the residue, what's left after the alcohol is produced, can be added to or buried in the soil keeping some carbon in the ground. A benefit is that that increases the fertility of the soil so more can be grown on poor land.
However is there enough land to grow crops to produce alcohol? Or Diesel fuel? I doubt it.
Does it even make sense, in the long term, to invest the time, money, and fossil fuels in the process of developing this type of technology (biofuels, in general) in favor of more direct methods of harnessing the Sun's energy (like solar panels (and thus necessarily batteries/fuel cells), and sort of by extension, fusion)?
This is my own opinion, which others also have, is that future energy needs will require a number of different energy sources to be developed. In warm arid areas algae can be farmed to produce hydrogen and or biofuels. Other biofuels such as this can be produced on land where food crops will not grow. In places where ground source heat is close to the surface geothermal energy can be used. Geothermal energy can even be used as a baseload. Where sunny solar, concentrated solar, PVs, and solar thermal energy can be used. Then where windy, wind turbines can be used.
SciAm has the article A Solar Grand Plan concluding solar energy "could supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050." As regards wind the NREL Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States details the wind potential of various regions of the US. The Rocky Mountains alone contain enough wind potential to provide the 48 contiguous states with electricity. So what's needed next is a national smart grid and baseloads. According to another SciAm article currently blackouts, brownouts, and other power losses cost US businesses $80 Billion a year so it makes sense to build a new grid and make it smart. Then for the baseload, as stated above geothermal can provide some with Natural Gas fired power plants supplying more until a cleaner baseload source is developed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
corn
Ethanol from corn is not cost competitive. The only reason corn is used to make ethanol is because of the massive subsidies corn ethanol gets. Brazil, the second largest producer and the world's largest exporter of ethanol uses sugarcane as it's feedstock. Sugarcane produces more ethanol than corn does. Even better as a feedstock is switchgrass.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
An overwhelming majority of the beer and wine and spirits we drink are made from specialized yeasts. Its not terribly difficult to keep a specialized yeast strain from being contaminated by other yeasts.
What do you do? I used to freeze starter in ice cube trays however I stopped because I preferred making different beers and wines. I don't make enough to justify keeping starter for each style. So I buy a strain of yeast for each one now. I'm hoping to grow kiwis in my garden next year or the year after then make wine with them. If so I may go ahead and start keeping frozen starter again, if I find a strain that works well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Man, you don't know what you're missing. Glass full of ice, a little Tanqueray, a squeeze of lime, top off with (diet, for me) tonic water == the most refreshing drink on the face of the earth. Vodka & tonic ain't bad either, but that "pine needle" (juniper) taste mixed with the tonic and lime... is it quitting time yet? I'm thirsty.
Although this stuff is made from wood, it's not "wood alcohol" (methanol). No doubt they'll denature it, though, to avoid drinking alcohol taxes.
>would use waste products such as wood chips
If this is true, it would be nice to be able to contact all wood working companies and have them send their wood chips left overs to a recycling plant to make some biodiesel fuel and maybe be able to set up more gas stations with bio diesel alternative