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Carbohydrate-Based Synthesis To Replace Petroleum Derived Hydrocarbons?
someWebGeek writes "From PhysOrg's 'Taking biofuel from forest to highway,' University of British Columbia biofuel expert Jack Saddler says, 'we will become less dependent on fossil fuels and will become more dependent on fuels made from the sugars and chemicals found in plants.' Nothing too new there; the idea of biofuels eventually taking over from petroleum distillates has been around for ages. However, Saddler contends further that 'Similar to an oil refinery that processes crude oil to make thousands of supplementary products like plastics, dyes, paints, etc., the biorefinery would use leftover agricultural and forest material to make many of the same products, but from a sustainable and renewable resource.' I remember my organic chem instructor back in '81 telling us that eventually the textbooks would have to be rewritten. There would be no presumption of fractional distillation of thousands of basic compounds from petroleum, and the teaching emphasis would shift to synthesis from simple hydrocarbons. He noted that we'd all miss 'the good, ole days' when synthetic fibers, plastics, etc. were cheap... or even an economically viable option. I can live without rayon, but, dang, I'm gonna miss polyvinyl chloride!"
While this is great and makes sense - I can't see this happening until much later in the peak oil scenario.
Fabricating all (most) of the stuff we make from oil now from plant matter will be a much less efficient operation and require much much more energy inserted during the production/refining process - which will of course make it much more expensive and inefficient to do. With that, I can't see it happening on any sort of serious scale until we have started running out of oil sands - let alone oil wells.
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One has to wonder just how hard the petroleum industry will fight these developments, though.
It's not going anywhere. If bio-fuels do become economical the billions or trillions of barrels of petroleum that's left will be used for synthesis instead of for running cars and the like.
Oil isn't going away any time soon. The fact is that for a very long time after it no longer makes sense to burn oil for fuel that oil will be available and will still make economic sense to use as a precursor product for all of those complex compounds that currently can only be made from oil. Perhaps in the far, far future it will become necessary to reinvent processes to build these things out of other precursors, but not for a long time. There's still going to be plenty of that black gunk in the ground long after people stop being able to burn it to get from A to B.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
to make one barrel of biofuel?
Who are you kidding? Wood for heating and charcoal for iron smelters was responsible for deforestation of large parts of Europe long before the industrial revolution. People turned to burning coal and lignite for lack of trees in the comparably sparsely populated countries of the 17/18th century. What exactly do you expect this around, with 8 times the size of population and much larger energy needs?
... argues against it. This is why I am perpetually skeptical of all solar, wind, and tidal energy schemes: they inevitably and always elide crucial details about the economic availability of storage, or of the energy/dollar cost (the latter reflecting the former) of buildout, frequently demanding subsidy to bring them to parity with fossil fuel systems. Biofuels have even worse things to contend with, including biologic sequestration from competing species (expensive containment), and corresponding reduction in productivity that strains capable of living in open ponds.
I have stopped reading his blog because it is too depressing, but Robert Rapier is a very good source for this kind of material, and a good counterweight to the all-too-rosy scenarios coming out of academia and elsewhere. While he does not agree with me on everything (he has been a proponent of solar where I think it makes no sense at all), his comments on biofuels come from an area of expertise and go a long way to skewer much of the unsubstantiated talk in this area.
Dog is my co-pilot.
What's lacking, is not tech or economics. Alternatives such as Biobutanol can be used as a direct substitute for gasoline with minimal to no alteration on current vehicles, and they pack about 90% ~ 95% of the energy density as gasoline. If we took the $30-50billion we spend EVERY YEAR on subsidizing outlandishly profitable Oil companies like Exxon, and put even a fraction of that money towards developing Industrial scale economically viable biobutanol, biodiesel distilleries/refineries which could run off of agricultural waste, and other non food renewable resources. We could cut our fossil fuel use, cut pollution (biobutanol burns cleaner), and have a readily available bridge source of energy to power our transportation network until other, cleaner tech come on line. We can do this now, hell we could have done it a decade ago. But as long as politicians of both parties are bought off by the Energy Oligarchs, public funds will continue to subsidize fossil fuels instead of cheaper less destructive technologies.
A paper by a professor named Jeff Dukes back in 1997 calculated that in that year we burned 400 years worth of biomass using fossil fuels.
http://plus.maths.org/content/burning-buried-sunshine
The idea we can consume the same amount of energy by growing biomass is a pipe dream. Many of the processes that produce liquid fuels via biological processes end requiring more input energy that can be extracted, usually because water has to be removed from the final product which requires heat. That is why so many companies have been able to succeed building pilot projects but can never scale up to anything sustainable.
Biofuel is made from whate4ver is cheapest, unfortunately waist material is not cheap, corn is. So what do we get, people in third world countries who can make more money by selling to oil companies (as they will invest in biofuel as the money is there)than at the local market.
The result of this is starvation and an increase in food cost for those who can least afford it. I don’t like the reliance on oil but at this point it’s what we need to use while we work out the details of moving to another option.
Make the change to other options but don’t do it at the expense of people, spend the time to do it properly and ban bio fule made in a way that it hurts others (The ban on ‘Blood dimonds’ springs to mind)
Right now, I've read we're burning about 400 years worth of laid-down plant carbohydrate per year, in the form of fossil fuels.
That's right. To obtain the equivalent amount of energy from non-fossil biofuels as we're currently getting from fossil fuels, we'd have to increase the amount of plant material being grown on Earth by a factor of 400 times current production, and use all of that for biofuels. (Assuming various conversion factors work out roughly equivalently for the two processes.)
Second, people need food more than cars, and forests need trees (and the Earth ecosystem needs robust biodiversity as opposed to massive tracts of mono-culture biofuel tree-farms).
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Out of all the examples you could pick you picked rayon? Rayon is produced using cellulose (wood), sodium hydroxide, carbon disulfide and sulfuric acid. It isn't a synthetic fiber, and there isn't any petroleum involved in the process. Rayon is just cellulose that has been dissolved and regenerated as a fiber.
The OP said, "I can live without rayon, but, dang, I'm gonna miss polyvinyl chloride!" Rayon is made from wood. We make vinyl chloride from petrochemicals, but the original source was plant material and the majority of world production uses plant material. Acetate, is another one typically from plants. As is nitrocellulose. Casein, is a protein from milk. It is also the plastic that the buttons on your shirt are probably made of. So plastic without petroleum is not that hard to find.
Both fossil fuel and biofuel are essentially vehicles for transfering the sun's energy to a tangible, packageable format. Biofuels are great, and we should continue to develop them, and deploy where economically viable. But biofuels cannot solve the basic problem of what fossil fuels provide: in addition to being incredibly convenient (dense portable energy from a hole in the ground), fossil fuels provide stored sun energy from accumulated years past. Millions of years.
Biofuel can deliver only one year's worth of sun energy per year, whereas mining fossil fuels gives you access to past millions of years' worth of sun energy. So yes, go for more biofuel, but don't expect biofuel to sustain energy consumption habits that depend on every year transfering a thousand past years' worth of ancient biofuel (oil/coal/NG) to this year.
Remain calm! All is well!
"but from a sustainable and renewable resource"
Whale oil was also sustainable and renewable, but not at the rates of consumption that existed in the 19th century. They ran out of whales. Likewise if you tried to replace the quantity of oil used world-wide today with biofuels, you'd either have to starve the world of food or strip-mine the forests, or both. Yes, it's all renewable, but not in the quantities that you would need. You can't grow trees fast enough to replace them at those rates. We would consume them at a net loss, and eventually be stuck in a "biofuel crisis" in the same way that whale oil ran out in the 1800s. Something more fundamental has to change in order for biofuels to ever be anything more than a small fraction of energy supply.
I'm not saying biofuels are worthless, but this is kind of like saying that because you can grow a tomato patch in your back yard you can become entirely self-sufficient in food. It's irrational to think of it as a complete replacement. I suppose he does acknowledge this with the statement that we will become "less dependent on fossil fuels", implying that we are still dependent on them to an extent. But most people have a poor idea of what it will actually take for a significant replacement. Knocking a few percent off the problem of dwindling fossil fuel supply isn't going to solve it.
Because that term is far too anthropocentric (it's all about me me me and MY environment, which surrounds and exists for me me me.)
But my sense of ethics (and my theory of wise action) does extend to eco-systems, and runs along the lines of:
It is almost certainly wise, and probably ethically sound and morally advanced, to allow a good number of the complex eco-systems on Earth of all scales to evolve in a context which is not dominated by human intervention.
And no, that view cannot be equated to the world being in a static state. It should however be in a complex nested homeostatic state, one which reaches many sustainable equilibria at many levels, due to the action of complex eco-systems.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Is someone invent a process to convert air, water and sunlight into light sweet crude with decent efficiency.(Man, that'd be a game changer.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Oil production peaked in 2004 if I'm reading wikipedia correctly. Oil production per capita peaked in 1979. Peak Oil is a mathematical certainty if there are not an infinite amount of hydrocarbons on Earth. We can easily talk about Peak Oil in the past tense if we focus on the major oilfields; we've pretty much used up all of the oil that's easy to get to. Hubbert actually predicted the timing of the US's peak oil production pretty accurately. Additionally, demand for oil is far outpacing production; there's a lot of people on this planet. Thus, even if production continues apace, oil will continue to become more expensive.
But go ahead and keep thinking you're smarter than everyone else. Clearly all future predictions are worthless.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
BTW, we are, in a sense, made from gas. The process eventually generates half of our protein and feeds at least 1/3 of humanity. But without it there probably would be no WWI, Revolution, WWII... It was developed by the same guy who created Cyclon-B. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclon_B
I don't get why they keep fermenting it into alcohol when there exists many species that produce lots of oil and there are micros that will turn cellulose into oil. I don't get it.
Here's a wild and possibly half baked idea... I warned you... do we know of any insects that will eat just about anything and produce an oil? I don't know if that's a commercially viable process but if you gave big colonies of insects all our agro waste... maybe they could turn it into a fuel source?
I'm thinking something like termites or ants. Something that will gobble up any garbage we give them and output something useful. The chemical factories inside a colony are pretty impressive. I don't know how efficient the process is but you could use really low quality fuel to sustain it so it might not matter.
Possibly down the road with some genetic engineering.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not obvious - just one scenario amongst many.
1. There's enough biomass, but we'll have to have one hell of a population receed to make it work.
2. Probably. Unless they go nuts about growing algae in the desert someplace. The energy costs will make this decentralised, of course. Economically, they won't have much choice.
3. Or, we can get into hydroponic greenhouse gardening in a big way. It'd be the only viable way to farm unfarmable land.
4. Most fertilizers today are made from petroleum. Without petroleum, no fertilizers, no massive production. See my Point 1.
We having fun yet? On the upside, populations tend to fall in developed countries as the birthrate declines. There's not as much pressure to pump out a dozen kids when 11 of them will survive to adulthood. The downside to it is, it takes a lot of technology and energy to efficiently feed all those people.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It's called thermal depolymerization and you can do it to just about anything organic. So unlike what some other posters are saying, you don't have to devote huge agricultural areas to producing stock just for this process, you can use preexisting waste for the job. There was a company running prototype plant in Carthage, Missouri. They situated themselves right next to a turkey processing plant with the hope they could "process about 200 tons of turkey waste into 500 barrels (79 m3) of oil per day". The plant ran for a number of years, and was supposedly able to produce oil for about 10% less than the price of crude ("supposedly" as in the oil was definitely produced, the question was exactly how much it cost them and how much of a profit they were making.) However they suffered from a number of lawsuits and eventually had to declare bankruptcy.
It seems like they jumped into the game a little too early, or just weren't able to find enough venture capital to perfect the system. Certainly as the price of oil continues to rise and the technology improves this is a process that could certainly be brought back. And note that since they're using organic waste the process is carbon neutral.
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As an agricultural scientist, I always feel slightly uncomfortable when biofuel producers start talking about using 'agricultural waste'. Increasingly, this 'waste' is now used by farmers as an integral part in boosting soil carbon and increasing biological activity as it breaks down, improving soils and improving subsequent crop yields.
The value of this, though often difficult to measure is significant and very real. But I worry shortsighted farmers looking for a quick buck may lose these less tangible benefits, leading to further soil degradation and lower yields in the future.
Take a look at his research interests and recent publications. It appears he might know a thing or two about it.
These days, the traditional role played by a discipline (more accurately, the role that people who probably have no actual knowledge of a discipline assume that it has played) means very little. I don't know anything about Forestry, but I know enough about academia to say that if people or departments think they can carve out a new niche for themselves even in a seemingly unrelated area of research, they will. It means more money and even the survival of the discipline as a whole.
In my own area (chemical engineering), bio this and that has been hot for years. Now we're all going crazy for energy applications like fuel cells, solar cells, and photocatalysis. Only 10% or so of the faculty members in my department work on "traditional" chemical engineering topics.
it's scarier
http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/water2/page/3209.aspx
"It is estimated that two out of every three people will live in water-stressed areas by the year 2025. In Africa alone, it is estimated that 25 countries will be experiencing water stress (below 1,700 m3 per capita per year) by 2025. Today, 450 million people in 29 countries suffer from water shortages."
that's in 13 years... not 70... and it's freaking WATER! (pop quiz, what do you require, oil or water to live?)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
people who aren't mixing up average and peak efficiencies get wildly different results.
From the linked page: "Purchase this article from the publisher for $14.00 USD"
This is the company to watch. They are using cyanobacteria and spitting out ethanol and diesel fuel directly. i.e. no processing other than removing water (and diesel floats on water). What does it use for feed? Waste. Sewage. They built a small 100 acre system in Texas on less than 30 million. They just got 70 million and are building a 1000 acre system in hobbs NM. Once they have the scaling in place, they are going to erect these outside of cities all over. According to their numbers, they will have less than $30/bl equivelence as they scale up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's absolutely ridiculous that this question is still being debated. It was clear way back during the OPEC oil embargo, where the future was... Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House to make a point.
There is absolutely, positively NO QUESTION that the future of passenger cars is direct storage of electricity, very likely in plain old rechargeable batteries. Electricity which was mostly supplied by solar power. The math worked decades ago, and it works now. It's insane that, now that we're getting further along, with multiple fully electric cars on the market, and solar power installations going in all across California, that people are STILL trying to pretend the future might be anywhere else.
Hydrogen and ethanol were always just ploys by the oil and car companies to delay change, convince people that maybe we had a different path forward, and so laying off of increasing fuel efficiency standards. The math never worked... it was all politics.
Now, the future of cargo transport is still up in the air, but that seems fairly obvious, too. Natural gas is cheaper than oil, very widely available, and much cleaner. Traditional engines can be converted to burn natural gas without drastic changes. In the medium-term, higher-efficiency engines will probably replace conventional engines, burning less natural gas for the same power... This seems likely to be fuel cells (double the efficiency), but turbines and even high compression conventional engines still have a shot at this point. That's pretty obviously the future of trucks. Trains will likely just change to eliminating combustion, and using power lines strung over tracks in most of the country, perhaps with conventional fuel for the most remote areas.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
With all of these people on the planet consuming lots of plant matter, couldn't we put all of that human waste to better use by turning it into biogas? It surely wouldn't meet all of our needs, but perhaps it could significantly reduce the burden on our increasingly rare energy staples.
This has a few benefits: We could use the available farm land to feed people. The more people there are the more fuel we get. This energy source is local to every country in the world, in fact, each household could potentially have their own digester.
I haven't studied this much, but I have always been intrigued by the idea.
which is about what oil contributes energetically, each year, to the world's economy, and NOT create an ecological catastrophe or starve everyone in the 3rd world, please do get back to me on that. In the meantime, I suggest you review a summary of the numbers regarding the energy situation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
First, to clarify, peak oil is not when oil production peaks, it is when production outpaces the discovery of new reserves. There is reasonable evidence that this has already occurred, though we probably won't be able to tell for sure until well after the peak.
Increased prices have indeed increased the proven reserves by making it economical to spend lots of money developing hard-to-get pockets of oil. This can't really reduce oil prices, though, since the high prices are required to make that production feasible
Frakking is not really one of the things that will bring more oil, it is mainly for extraction of natural gas.
However, peak oil is one thing, but natural gas and coal are far from being used up. If oil prices rise enough, we will be able to use natural gas and coal as feedstocks instead.
Optimistic much?...
How hard is storage compared to how hard building the current grid was? 100s of times harder? I think not.
Secondly, efficient long-distance transmission (HVDC? Super-conducting?) and smart switching can be combined with storage to provide a comprehensive solution to intermittent power leveling. Intermittent sources and demand response negawatts can become a large part of the "new base load". We have computers and digital communications network nowadays. May as well use them.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?