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'Energy Beet' Power Is Coming To America
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Gosia Wonzniacka reports that farmers in Fresno County, California, supported by university experts and a $5 million state grant, are set to start construction of the nation's first commercial-scale bio-refinery to turn beets into biofuel with farmers saying the so-called 'energy beets' can deliver ethanol yields more than twice those of corn per acre because beets have a higher sugar content per ton than corn. 'We're trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to shift our transportation fuels to a lower carbon content,' says Robert Weisenmiller. 'The beets have the potential to provide that.' Europe already has more than a dozen such plants, so the bio-refinery would resurrect a crop that has nearly vanished. The birthplace of the sugar beet industry, California once grew over 330,000 acres of the gnarly root vegetable (PDF), with 11 sugar mills processing the beets but as sugar prices collapsed, the mills shut down. So what's the difference between sugar beets and energy beets? To produce table sugar, producers are looking for sucrose, sucrose and more sucrose. Energy beets, on the other hand, contain multiple sugars, meaning sucrose as well as glucose, fructose and other minor sugars, called invert sugars. To create energy beet hybrids, plant breeders select for traits such as high sugar yield, not just sucrose production. America's first commercial energy beet bio-refinery will be capable of producing 40 million gallons of ethanol annually but the bio-refinery will also bring jobs and investment, putting about 80 beet growers and 35,000 acres back into production."
There's nothing good about energy beets. We already know we can use algae, and that it is superior in a variety of ways.
Do not cheer this. There is nothing good about this. It is merely less evil than using corn as a fuel feedstock.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...to grow energy instead of food. Which means the price of food rises and the poor riot as they cannot afford to buy food,
So immoral that even Al Gore rejected it, which is saying somethng.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
You will probably get modded into a smoking hole in the ground, but you are right.
Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is of course a good thing, and if we don't start developing alternative technologies now, then we'll be in trouble when it does run out. Although that date does seem to keep slipping, as discovery and extraction keeps improving.
However, mindlessly subsidising things which are patently never going to be competitive makes no sense, except to the politicians and 'green' shills who do not seem to count, or reason, the same as most logical and well-educated folk.
I still think celluloistic ethanol production is most promising as you can grow for the most biomass/m2.
Ethanol is a dream, and a dumb one. We should be making biodiesel and butanol, but we are not due to corporate malfeasance and greed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The summary (and probably the article as well) does not make this clear. Invert sugars are mixtures of glucose and fructose, generated by applying acids, heat or enzymes to sucrose.
So the sentence should be read "...meaning sucrose as well as (glucose, fructose and other minor sugars,) called invert sugars.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Hemp does not contain much free sugar. Almost all of it is converted into cellulose, which is still proving difficult to break down into sugars for conversion to fuels.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
"Can use it" and "are ready to use it on a massive scale" are two entirely different things. There's a ton of traditional farmers out there who could transition from corn to beets in a single season. Algae farmers... not so many.
Well, it's not great, but it is a crack in the monoculture-for-fuel mindset.
That being said, I don't know enough about beets to say whether it's much improvement over corn. They tout a doubled energy output, but without knowing the comparable energy, pesticide and water inputs it's a bit tough to determine whether there's any economic advantage, particularly after factoring in corn production subsidies.
Log in or piss off.
It's all a simple matter of area: With an electric vehicle my entire transportation energy usage can pretty much be covered with a small rooftop solar system. To do it with biofuels would require acres of space.
The problem is simple: Photosynthesis is just vastly less efficient than photo voltaic solar
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Note that it's a government grant, not private industry. This is basically political patronage; whatever people running it will be contributing heavily to whatever political party was responsible for the grant. If sugar beets were a viable fuel source someone would be doing it already.
This just shifts the problem from one of directly increasing world corn (and therefore food) prices by diverting corn production to fuel to one of indirectly increasing world food priced by diverting farmland from food production to fuel production.
The worst part is that large scale farming has a significant environmental impact in terms of pesticide and fertilizer use as well as runoff into waterways. We don't gain much benefit from carbon reductions and a lot of costs from the farming itself.
It's a dead end and everyone knows it. Political hypocrisy at it's finest.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Water.
Sugar beet is less land demanding than corn, but has higher water needs.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The problem with corn ethanol isn't the diversion of farmland, it's that it's a completely artificial diversion. Corn is so subsidized no one knows how much it costs anywhere, and world food prices are creating local scarcity because no one can outcompete US government subsidized corn - so local farming never has any incentive to grow it or other staples, as opposed to cash crops (many of which are incredibly harmful to local soil ecology to do so).
World food prices need to be allowed to rise gradually so the local economies which are importing can transition to growing locally or, people with an actual competitive advantage can move in to drive them down in a non-artificial way. But playing games with how much corn there is predictably creates price shocks because technically there's enough product in the market place, it's just mysteriously not getting to the locals, yet simultaneously can't be expected to reliably stay high either.
"Can use it" and "are ready to use it on a massive scale" are two entirely different things.
That's true. Unfortunately for your argument, we've had this technology for over twenty years. We've had more than enough time to spin up. And the process should have been profitable at least since 2010, and how long does it take to dig some round trenches and line them with plastic, anyway?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We should implement an open-fuel standard, requiring all new cars to be flex-fuel capable. That would break the monopoly of oil as a transportation fuel, bringing real competition for the first time in a century. More importantly, fully flex-fuel vehicles can run on methanol just as well as ethanol (or any mix of these and/or gasoline). Thus, fuel crops would not have to compete with food crops for agricultural resources, since methanol can be made from any type of biomass. This would also have the added benefit of boosting ag markets in developing countries and making them -- the whole world really -- less dependent on petroleum.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
We should implement an open-fuel standard, requiring all new cars to be flex-fuel capable
Most new cars are flex-fuel capable already. Most diesels will run on B100 and all gassers will run on Butanol, which we are not permitted to buy because BP and DuPont's shell company Butamax has not yet figured out how to legislate all competition out of the market. There is nothing good about mass-market ethanol fuel. I'm told that if you can figure out the magical document number, our own government will sell you a booklet explaining how to produce ethanol from waste with a solar still, and that this used to be a fairly common thing to do on the farm in order to power the family tractor. That's almost the only good example of ethanol as a fuel, because the energy going into the process (which is substantial!) is mostly solar, and because the fuel is being produced from a waste product, and finally because the fuel is used on-site.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
ALL biofuels are inefficient solar energy collectors whose only advantage is that their output is directly chemical. Even if it took no petroleum based, petroleum transported fertilizer to grow sugar beets in quantity, it still takes land, water and sunlight away from other food crops and the natural ecology, on which we will be dependent for the foreseeable future.
Want to keep running a large scale industrial civilization? Forget biofuels. The unpleasant reality is that in the long run, it's thorium nuclear, space based solar, or nothing much, and civilization as we know it now, contracts contracts significantly, along with the world's population.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Ethanol is to gasoline as sawdust is to hot dogs.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Quite a few Europeans use vegetable oil in their diesel-engined cars. There's a thriving market for small back-of-the-garage "refineries" processing waste cooking oil from fast-food shops etc. to remove some of the more harmful byproducts like glycerine and water as well as filtering out particulates. You can usually tell if someone's doing this as their car exhaust tends to smell of french fries.
Unused cooking oil (usually sunflower or rapeseed) can be poured into the tank without requiring treatment, especially in older diesel cars and vans with mechanical fuel pumps. In the UK the price of cooking oil is now kept artificially high to match the price of garage forecourt diesel (about UKP 1.40 a litre at the moment) since most of that is tax and too many folks were going to Costco and the like and buying vegetable oil in 5-litre containers for a lot less. Theory says that folks using alternative fuels like biodiesel should pay the same duty as petroleum-derived fuels garner but this doesn't happen much as you might expect.
AFAIK, currently some cars are flex-fuel, but not all, and on many it's optional (plus, not all can handle methanol). If I were buying a car today, I'd certainly go with a fully flex-capable one (since I can't afford a Tesla). Last time I checked, the bulk price of methanol was about $1.50/gal, and as you note, it can be made "at home" from a wide variety of feedstocks... yard waste, for example.
The jump from ethanol to methanol is important because it takes fuel out of competition with food. Ethanol (at the moment) is hard to make from anything that doesn't contain starch or sugar, whereas methanol can be made from sawdust, or just about anything almost.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
From the summary: "Europe already has more than a dozen such plants". So maybe it is viable.
In any case your argument suggests that anything that isn't currently being done isn't viable. So any sort of progress is never possible.
...that store solar energy. There is inefficiency and energy loss at every step of harnessing their energy. TIme to cut out the middle men?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
With apologies to the aptly named Go-Gos
See the people driving down the street
Fall in line just waiting for their beet
They don't know where they wanna go
But they're in the fill-up line
They got the beet
They got the beet
Yeah
They got the beet
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
From the summary: "Europe already has more than a dozen such plants". So maybe it is viable.
European beet farmers are heavily subsidized. So Europe is an example of beet-energy not being viable.
In any case your argument suggests that anything that isn't currently being done isn't viable. So any sort of progress is never possible.
We need to try new things. But we also need to not squander resources on dead ends. Beet ethanol is not as stupid as corn ethanol, but it is still stupid. If we were serious about ethanol as a fuel (rather than as a source of subsidies for special interests) we would eliminate the prohibitive tariffs on Brazilian cane ethanol.
You are right. One can make methanol from anything, including coal and gas. So we will never run out of liquid fuel. For example, South Africa has been synthesizing fuel from coal on a massive scale since the 1950s.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
All moving to biofuels does is destroy the large underground lake called the ogalala that the midwest sits on. Once gone it is hello dustbowl 2.
Well, what I read that I like is over 1000 gallons of ethanol produced per acre-year. Since my family ethanol/gasoline needs are approximately 1000 gallons per year, that means that even evil energy beet fuel production only needs one acre of farm land to produce our energy needs, half that if we update our vehicles to higher efficiency ones. This is, of course, ignoring the cost of production issues.
Now, with nearly 100 million families of four (equivalent, also consider that we might be below average in our fuel consumption) in the U.S. - 100 million acres is a lot of farmland - a bit over 10%, but it wouldn't be a bad transition from oil.
Maybe algae energy is better, certainly is if it can be done on marginal lands, but either way, I'm liking the biofuel implications here.
we've had this technology for over twenty years.
Algae based fuel has been "just around the corner" for a lot longer than twenty years. I first read about in the 1970s, and even then it wasn't a new idea. Algae energy is like fusion energy: it has huge potential, but also huge obstacles, and those obstacles have not been surmounted even after decades of effort.
Much rather I'd try, oh, taking PV or some other collection mechanism to a desert, and somehow use it to provide shade and moisture retention for crops that couldn't otherwise grow there, as well as for its energy collection properties.
That is precisely what I propose, after others. Read the report linked at the top of this thread! You pump dirty water into the desert, you grow algae on it thus capturing solar energy and carbon as well as nitrates and then you make biofuel, probably using PV for pumps and centrifuges and a combination of solar water heat and direct solar thermal for heating. Waste water is dumped into the desert, eventually replenishing aquifers. Waste material can be shipped out as fertilizer, or used on-site as fertilizer for land reclamation. You can also site the algae production facilities near coal and oil plants and use them as part of a CO2 capture strategy which can reclaim up to 80% of such emissions, increasing algae production in the process. We The People have already paid for the development of many technologies which can benefit us in this fashion if we only demonstrate the wisdom to accept them and the will to make them happen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since my family ethanol/gasoline needs are approximately 1000 gallons per year, that means that even evil energy beet fuel production only needs one acre of farm land to produce our energy needs,
It doesn't work that way. Even it it's more energy-positive than corn into ethanol, it's still going to require a bunch of energy input in the form of oil that is completely unnecessary while using algae.
Maybe algae energy is better, certainly is if it can be done on marginal lands,
Not only can it be done anywhere you can scrape a flat spot (with decent insolation, anyway) but it can be done with water unsuitable for growing beets even as a feedstock, e.g. brackish or outright sea-salty water. Indeed, it will be one of the few things we can grow once, they're done using the topsoil up by growing fuel feedstocks with petrochemicals.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The real problem with ethanol was never the fact that it was a bad fuel, but that the agriculture lobby got subsides enabled for it AND got mandates in at least ag states that retail fuel be blended with a certain percentage of it.
This both made it artificially cheap for producers, who could pay closer to market costs for corn, thus encouraging farmers to grown more corn (and widen the political support for subsidies) AND create an artificial demand for it, thus creating an artificial floor for pricing.
Nothing distorts an economy like subsidizing production and mandating consumption.
I think biofuels probably have a place in the upcoming 100 years, but the only thing that should be subsidized is research and small-scale trials. The technologies and systems that get commercialized should happen because they're independently viable from a cost/use perspective, not because ADM, the Farm Bureau and ag state Senators benefit from it.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of synergy between wind power, hydrogen and biofuels. Wind is common in ag areas (where the bio-inputs are, including ag waste which is marginal for yield if a lot of shipping is involved), wind produces a surplus the grid can't always use, biofuel energy balance could be more positive if some of the energy inputs were "free" (surplus wind's electricity or hydrogen produced from its electricity).
At a minimum we could be talking about cutting the energy inputs for food production and a more localized and sustainable energy cycle.
Algea to biodiesel isn't a complete answer, while algea provides copius amounts of lipids for conversion to FFA, Free Fatty Acids, you still an alcohol like methanol (preferable) or ethanol to complete the process. So where do you get the methanol? Evil techniques like Pyrolysis of bio-material, and Petro-chemical convertion. Next problem is your going to have trouble getting most cars to run well on more than 10% biodiesel because most cars run on gasoline! To get over that you have to convince all the "green-in-theory" soccer moms to become "green-in-reality" soccer moms and buy some "stinky" diesel SUV's; good luck with that.
"Topsoil-based fuels are wrongheaded in every way", not so, beets require soils that are unsuitable for less robust crops, FTA "the beets are an ideal crop: they grow in poor and salty soils, and can use lesser-quality water," furthermore
when beets are harvested, these long tap-roots often remain in the ground, opening deep channels through any hardpan to alow better drainage into subsoil aquafers, bringing plants nutrients and minerals from the deep subsoils and leaving necessary organic material which will produce a deepening of the top-soil. Additionally the top growth is left on the fields providing compost. Sure you can't monoculture beets for long (like anything else), but as part of a crop rotation with science based fertilization it has positive effects on the soil, processing the beets is pretty stinky tho.
Your going to get people to buy flex-fuel vehicles running sugar-beet based E85 a long time before your going to convert our fleet to diesel vehicles running on biodiesel.
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Please provide a link for that US government subsidized corn production, I know a lot of farmers around here who would like to get them some of that money.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
End sugar import quotas we could buy all the sugar cane we needed for ethanol from carribean nations and have better coca-cola to boot.
The technical hurdles are insignificant compared to the political ones.
Please enlighten me: What political hurdles are keeping you from growing algae, extracting the oil, and selling it as bio-diesel? I love a good conspiracy theory, so I can't wait to hear about the jack booted, goose stepping algae police kicking in your door and arresting you for unauthorized fuel production.
Available land and permitting.
Are you serious? You actually believe that a permit is required to grow algae? You should see my neighbor's swimming pool. The algae gestapo has never arrested him.
Ahh ... I see now. The government will stop you from growing algae on property that you do not own . Wow, that is a real show stopper. Hmmm ... if only there was a way around it somehow. Hey!!! What if you grow algae on your own property!!! Boy, I bet nobody ever thought of that! Now that this hurdle is overcome, we should see algae oil on the market in a few weeks, and all the big oil companies will be bankrupt shortly after that.
And how does the whole equation look compared to solar power?
The "whole equation" includes replacing all the gasoline- and diesel-burning vehicles with electric ones, and upgrading the electrical infrastructure to match. While this is a desirable goal in the long term, it is not something which can reasonably be accomplished as quickly as producing more biodiesel and transporting it with the existing transportation infrastructure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hopefully something directly from the USDA will suffice:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/policy.aspx#.UU9Txb-9LTo
The raw materials occur in particular places, i.e. it only makes sense to place a coal mine where there is coal.
And it only makes sense to place an algae farm where the required resources exist, e.g. unused flat land and sunshine. The BLM land belongs to The People, in theory, but in practice the rights to use it are granted to corporations (and some small ranchers, driving cattle) and people who actually live in it on isolated pieces of private property have regularly been turned away from the routes to their homes by US Forest Service employees citing ongoing "Exercises" and other specious bullshit. These uses are justified by claiming that the activity is in the public interest, as if clear-cutting and strip-mining fit that description. If those things are valid in BLM land, then there is no reasonable basis on which to claim that algae farming is not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
why is no one using their own land to produce it in quantity?
There are several reasons:
1. It is difficult and expensive to extract fuel from algae. The algae first has to be dried, then the cell walls crushed, and then the fuel is extracted with heat and expensive solvents.
2. Invasive species, that spend their energy reproducing rather than making fuel, tend crowd out fuel producing algae. They can be controlled with chemicals (expensive) or by growing algae in sealed enclosures (even more expensive).
3. Viral and bacterial diseases, as well as microscopic predators, tend to wipe out algae monocultures.
Research on fuel from algae has been ongoing since the 1960s, with little progress in any of these areas. Algae has so much potential, that (in my opinion) further research is justified. But to claim that it is ready to be deployed at scale is absurd.