Slashdot Mirror
'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.
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
"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
Test your net with Netalyzr
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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.
Hopefully something directly from the USDA will suffice:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/policy.aspx#.UU9Txb-9LTo
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.