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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.
"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.
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