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Using Winemaking Waste For Making Fuel
Tator Tot writes "Grape pomace, the mashed up skins and stems left over from making wine and grape juice, could serve as a good starting point for ethanol production, according to a new study (from the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry). Due to growing interest in biofuels, researchers have started looking for cheap and environmentally sustainable ways to produce such fuels, especially ethanol. Biological engineer Jean VanderGheynst at the University of California, Davis, turned to grape pomace, because winemakers in California alone produce over 100,000 tons of the fruit scraps each year, with much of it going to waste."
I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can, fermenting it and making alcohol. Nor am I against flushing all toilet and livestock waste into giant fermentation tanks to capture the methane energy.
However, I don't think this is a "solution" to the problem of energy in the future. It will produce some, but not all of our needs, and there will be significant energy inputs required to make it work.
I am more interested in throwing all of our spare money, time and energy into long-term solutions, like cleaner nuclear reactors, better fuel cells, solar sails and even personal methane harvesters.
Futurist Traditionalism
You can add in regular grape juice pulp to that mix. Just image all the over ripe fruit that your average super market throws out a week and add that in as well. The fundamental problem is we designed our society to run on casually wasting resources. Nature wastes nothing, in effect we waste everything. Traditionally we had one source for waste, the dump. Nature recycles all waste while recycling is blow off largely as a hyppie/tree hugger invention. The two best sources for methane are chicken and pig waste so what do we do? Most of it ends up in our rivers and streams while chicken and hog farmers are living just above minimum wage. Most chicken and hog farms could power dozens and in some cases hundreds of houses. The broken down waste could fertilize fields instead of petroleum. We worry about what gets us through the next 24 hours and ignore out kids and grandkids. If we worried more about the next generations most of our problems would vanish in a single generation. Our current society can't last more than a generation or two, the math simply doesn't work, so most of us will live to see it collapse unless we change. Change isn't a matter of if but when. Forget iPads in a generation or two you'll be worried about food and water. Look at it this way, in the past we kept a year's worth of grain in reserve. We now have three months and we just got hit with a drought. A large percentage of the ground water is polluted already and fracking will pollute a lot of what's left. Project this just ten years into the future and you'll be waiting on the corn harvest to buy a bag of corn chips and you'll be enjoying toilet to tap because hey it's all you can get other than bottled water that costs more than gasoline.
Since they don't provide any useful facts, allow me to insert pseudo facts to fill the gap.
First, the words 'especially ethanol' ring a bit hollow due to the low fuel efficiency and great cost in terms of equipment, raw materials, etc relative to petroleum. Reserve the word 'especially' for biodiesel- a much more promising but still long term project.
Now if we start with 100k tons of grape stuff and push our imaginations to the extreme, let's suppose that will support 100k vehicles. That would be 2% of the vehicles in California (pseudo facts, remember). The land, plant and equipment to process the grape stuff will cost $23M (partly offset by generous federal grants but encumbered with additional costs for environmental studies, protests and court hearings). Assuming that the equipment works and the private enterprise receiving the grant money hasn't absconded with the money or cut corners on costs, we now have one hundred thousand vehicles operating for, say, five years at an annual fuel cost of $__________ . What's the point of doing the math when the numbers are fake?
Ennywhey it looks like a boondoggle to me. Only the Governor's friend who gets the grant money will be happy with the results.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Even if you are only getting half the alcohol as corn this is a waste product so it's not taking anything away from the food supply. This would offset 50,000 tons of corn just for California alone. Remember grapes are commonly grown all along both the east and west coasts from California to Washington state and from Florida to coastal Maine. The total supply has to be several times that. We're talking several hundred thousand tons that would offset easily a 100,000 tons of corn. The scary thing is I just did the math and 14 million tons of corn are used for ethanol. Recycling waste is important but it won't offset 1% of the corn used now. This isn't because corn is superior, it's a poor source of ethanol, but the massive corn subsidies mean the only practical source for ethanol is corn. Sorghum is a better sugar crop, it grows on poor soil and uses little water. Replace all the corn being grown for ethanol with sorghum and you use less water and less fertilizer and probably get twice the ethanol. Sadly there's no massive sorghum lobby. Other waste sources are maple sugar production, honey production and apple pulp and peels as well as other fruit waste. We can probably replace 10% of the corn from other sources then if we switch to better sources like Sorghum we could double the ethanol output without reducing the food supply. When they say biofuels are no replacement they ignore the fact that the northern states can grow sugar beets as well as some types of sorghum. Increase flowering plants and raise more bees and the honey can be used for biofuels. With some creativity and effort we could replace half the petroleum with either ethanol or methane based bio-gas. Increase efficiency by a 100% which is possible and we no longer need fossil fuels. This ignores electric cars running off wind and solar. We can fix the mess we just need the will.
Who knew a process by which the ultimate goal is to produce ethanol would be a good starting point to produce ethanol?
True that. I'm far more impressed by the people who realized that you could make dresses from wine making waste.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.