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Looking Beyond Corn and Sugarcane For Cost-Effective Biofuels
carmendrahl writes "The abundance of shale gas in the U.S. is expected to lower the cost of petrochemicals for fuel and other applications, making it harder for plant-based, renewable feedstocks to compete in terms of price. In the search for cost-competitive crops, companies are testing plants other than traditional biofuel sources such as corn and sugarcane. In this video, you can see how a company is test-growing a relative of sugarcane, which is expected to yield 5 times the ethanol per acre compared to corn."
So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Ethanol-fueled, motherfuckers!
-- Ethanol-fueled
Corn and sugarcane got nothing on the sugar beet.
If we switch to grasses for our biofuel how are we going to artificially prop up the price of corn? ADM has not lobbied congress for years to suddenly have us switch to some other crop.
I read the internet for the articles.
But corn ethanol is already the perfect way to enrich campaign donors in Iowa and the other farm states. Why should the guys getting rich off corn ethanol agree to share the government loot with other biofuel producers?
I hate video. Too real-time. Like TV news, I can read the majority of nyt.com in the space of the evening news. I assume the video is about switchgrass, can anybody confirm?
People blah blah about the economics of this vs that and then write off the more expensive techology. But what interests me are the actual costs. Often the economics can be very interesting on a local scale. For instance, if you were a small organic farmer could you plant some of this stuff in the scrubby back 20 and then with a little bio-fuel setup in the barn make your own fuel? Often people like farmers have cash flow problems and taking fuel out of the equation could be a big help. This might be a case where the farmer would work at this in the winter producing a summer's worth of fuel and it is grown on worthless land. For the farmer it takes his winter time and makes it valuable and takes worthless land and makes it valuable. It is doubtful that the farmer cares that crude oil is cheaper in that he doesn't have that under the back 40.
Then you go third world where access to cash is an even bigger problem so again removing fuel from the expenses would be a huge help.
A good variation of this would be that many Texas farmers have abandoned oil wells on their land. The farmer stakes a claim to the wells and then using wind or solar pumps a few barrels a day. These wells are dead as far as the big companies are concerned but for the farmers can add up to a pretty good living. So according to macro economics as viewed by the oil company accountants these wells are worthless; when the farmers show that they clearly aren't.
So I often read about technology X not being better than oil when you add up all the costs but often those costs don't apply.
My question: Is ground for growing food crops affected by this? If farmers all grow switchgrass/hemp/$whatever and make more money selling that for fuel, then it will spike food prices, which can cause major problems down the line (people can put up with a lot of injustice, but if they are starving, all bets are off.)
Ethically, I can't support a fuel that takes food out of people's mouths, even though ethanol has a number of decent advantages.
A lot of people don't understand that carbohydrates are one of the densest forms of energy on the face of the earth, losing only to fossil fuels, pure hydrogen and nuclear power.
The best plants are convert 1.5% of incoming sunlight when factoring length of growing cycle and planting density. Cheap solar panels are five times more efficient. More expensive solar technologies and/or concentrators gets into double digits.
However when you include the costs of the entire system- the startup capital, intermediate fuel type and distribution- the current cost-efficiency of both become more comparable.
And make the fuel grade ethanol / whatever using GM algae. That would just as "green" and "renewable" without sacrificing land where one could produce vegetables and fruits already so bloody expensive.
Can we measure two benefits?
1) Create Biofuel
2) Clean the environment
Example 1: Cattails remove toxins & pollution from wetlands, stormwater. http://www.scer.rpi.edu/bwe/?p=369
Example 2: Sunflowers decontaminate radioactive soil. http://www.ecaa.ntu.edu.tw/weifang/cea/sunflowers.htm
Example 3: Algae blooms http://www.npr.org/2013/08/11/211130501/the-algae-is-coming-but-its-impact-is-felt-far-from-water
... so 5x better than corn.... that means it's still 20x worse than oil, meaning that it's still an environmentally *hostile* source of fuel compared to oil. when will people understand and accept that the way to use less fuel is to build vehicles that use... less fuel??
RuBisCO as a carbon capture catalyst is less efficient than current inorganic catalysts and fundamentally prevents the complete scale up of biofuels. There are economic reasons to start with biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels (anyone can make the raw materials for biofuel), but at some point we're either going to have to be ok with drastically altering the genetics of plants or we'll have to move to a more traditional chemical manufacturing model.
Unless something has changed, palm oil still has the best net energy return compared to any other organic fuel source. If we're not going to eat the stuff, GM palm oil trees may be the way to go here.
Regardless, plants are still just inefficient solar panels whose only advantage is that their energy output is chemical, not electrical, thereby minimizing transmission and storage energy loss.
From a net energy/price standpoint, biofuels still can't compete with petroleum, though that will change as petroleum gets more expensive and yields less net energy over time, however, the ecological effects of trying to replace the 160 exajoules of energy provided by oil each year would be an unmitigated disaster.
Nice idea, but we're still going to have to reduce our energy consumption worldwide, long before the end of this century.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So basically, there are some companies that are looking for gaurantees of higher profit margins. How is this news?
We could use nuclear reactors in our cars.
Of course, this would really only make sense if there wasn't much of a risk of people creating accidents. Maybe if computers drove our cars?
We have so much food, we burn it in our cars!
Years ago, people were talking about switchgrass. Or how about kudzu? What's wrong with WEEDS that will grow anywhere... oh, that's right, those nice folks in the petrochemical industry can't sell you fertilizers for that....
mark "or maybe hemp?"
The energy density of ethanol is just not high enough and the alcohol isn't particularly friendly to plastic material often used in auto parts.
They are just trying too hard to push their endless uses for government (tax payer) subsidized corn. I'm surprised they haven't found a ridiculous and wasteful way to make paper out of corn yet.
There are a whole lot better things they can do to improve matters. Among them are to focus as much on efficiency as they do on sources. I want DC wiring for my light fixtures. LED bulbs can be pretty good but they all have their own AC to DC converters and that's not so great. Just put light fixture circuis on their own breakers and replace those breakers with AC to DC power converters and now you have good light with very little waste.
And how do we fertilize all these bio-fuel crops?
Why, that would be with nitrogen phosphate fertilizers.
And where do we get the industrial quantities of this chemical needed to fertilize acres of these plants?
Why, that would come from oil.
The percentages, if everything goes right, no storms or weather hiccups destroy the crops, and if the subsidies are in place to keep the plan moving forward, if all that works, then bio fuels appear to work out a little better than burning straight oil. The sun is inputting a portion of the energy, after all.
And hey! That's great! Offsetting the cost of oil by combining it with some sunlight.
Though, in doing so, arable land is being destroyed. (Though, the PR video suggests that they're only using acres "unsuitable" for producing food, a claim which is nothing more than spin amounting to a bald faced lie. Those farmers electing to switch from growing food to the more profitable bio fuel crops aren't picking up and moving to other patches of land.)
It might also be mentioned here that agriculture itself kills land. Soil, plant and animal life are sustainable only if they function in close circuit. Tilling and force-fertilizing soil kills it. Irrigation from rivers increases the saline levels of the soil to toxic levels in a matter of decades; the salts have nowhere to go and so accumulate. Root systems removed creates the problem of soil erosion, which occurs much faster than the earth can replenish it through natural means. Already food based agriculture is unsustainable, a one way ticket to overpopulation through excess production, poor health through carb based diets and inevitable famine.
Soil is a finite natural resource, and our agricultural practices are quickly spending through the supply which took millennia to save up. When it's gone, it's gone and you're left with desert. Look at the Middle East; once a lush garden, burned through by agriculture by a much smaller population base. It happened within recorded memory.
Adding cars to the number of biomass consumers can only speed along this process.
Bio Fuels are the result of short term thinking at best.
But leaving aside the question of food and the fact that the world is in short supply, that food prices are going up and people are going hungry in America today.., what do we do about energy needs?
What about solar technologies which don't rely on living systems. What about solar panels?
There are plenty of arguments against them, many seen around Slashdot. Yet several European countries have embraced the technology with a great deal of success.
How successful? Well, successful enough to threaten the established energy industry. Spain is currently drafting new legislation aimed at creating tax laws designed to limit the growth of solar power. The more solar you collect, the more you pay, all in an effort to keep the fossil fuel players happy. (Along with a list of flawed rationalizations for their actions to keep people from open revolt.)
Unfortunately, the idea that solar is bad persists. Private engineer types seem to be easily corralled by the energy giants via simple PR spin. Not really a surprise there. Smart people are among some of the most easily manipulated. They've been trained to trust men in lab coats and educational authority figures up through childhood. All it takes is a slick presentation by Exxon or Shell or any one of the others to satisfy their hunger for rational thinking on a subject, (or as is so often the case, the ersatz stand in for rational thinking). Toss in a dash of technology-hating hippie dogma, (much like the patently irrational but nonetheless effective "welfare moms bleeding the system!" ploy), to trigger an easily directed series of emotional response. Anger at the alternative and a nice, calming flood of reward center feedback in their brains which bypasses the higher thinking centers.
And so what do we end up with?
Corn oil. Or in this case, sugar can petrol.
Here in Maricopa, AZ we host the only ethanol plant in the state of Arizona, and one of the local crops used (grown by Ak-Chin Farms, one of the Indian Reservations that surrounds Maricopa) is sorghum, the same plant you can get molasses from. Much more bang for the buck than corn or sawgrass.
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
A local dealer sells ethanol-free gasoline, while others sell gas stated to have as much as 10% ethanol. When I run my truck on ethanol free gas, the milage jumps by 10%, when compared to gas with 10% ethanol. It doesn't sound to be as though the ethanol does much, other than generate more polution, because I'm burning more gas.
P.S.. Because I'm burning more gas, it costs more.
We should really explore using non-food sources (e.g., algae) as biofuel bases. We need food to stay inexpensive and gas not to increase in price, because we're using more expensive food sources. Here's a good Q&A about algae as a source of bio fuel (http://algae.ucsd.edu/potential/algae-qanda.html).
way better than ethonal. If has an air:fuel ratio close enough to petrol that you can mix it in any ratio and not need to mod the engine.
Butanol fuel
When I see beets I say "beat it, beet."
They told us don't you ever try to make new fuel
Don't want a lower price, you better like your gruel
The law is on their side, and their policies are cruel
So beet it, just beet it!
I am officially gone from
Electricity storage.
All these new energy technology sounds great but won't change a thing until we have break throughs in storing them for any meaningful period of time.
You can bet everyone will be using mini solar panels/mini wind turbines in their backyards and roof tops if they know they can charge and store electricity all day long, without relying on garage sized capacitors that can burn your house down, or relying on the power company to use clever tricks to shift electricity around the grid.
Electricity storage is where we should focus on first, until the day we can have microwave oven sized batteries that can power the entire house for a week, these 1% 3% 5% 10% figure 'improvements' doesn't change a thing.
I can personally convert beans to methane with very little effort or trouble, and while I'm doing other useful things. A side benefit is that during the process people tend to leave me alone and I get even more done.
I don't understand the need to grow food to be converted to ethanol. It seems stupid and a waste. ST1 is a Finnish energy producer that converts bio waste to ethanol. IMHO they get the bulk of their material from factories like bread makers. They also gather bio waste from city residents. I'm not completely sure what they do with the waste from ethanol production. http://www.st1.fi/puhtaampaa-siksi-halvempaa
In the 80s, I met a PhD biochemist who had worked on making synthetic rubber from petroleum products. He said going the other way -- from the latex in rubber tree sap to something that could substitute for gasoline -- looked feasible. All the science was known and in principle the process would be straightforward, but neither the engineering nor the economic/political problems involved had been solved. Is anyone looking at this sort of thing today? What about oil-producing plants, such as oil palms?
Is that with or without government subsidies cost effective?
Nice. This company found what Brazil is doing since the 70s. Just google for the Proalcool program. There's now a full grown market for the production, distribution and multi-fuel vehicles in place.
Consider this.
It took hundreds of millions of years to decaying plant and animal life to produce the fuel humans have used up in a little over a century. All the CO2 that was trapped over hundreds of millions of years has been released in just one century.
Biofuel is not the remedy. There is no NATURAL way to replace the reserve of fuels created after hundreds of millions of years. Our fuel consumption and CO2 emissions are UNNATURAL. To believe there is some cheap way to naturally produce fuel from some miracle crop or organism is fundamentally retarded.
I mean really think hard about this! Fossil Fuel came from nature but it took millions of years to accumulate and a little over a century to burn through. It took hundreds of millions of years of planet wide "crops" to make enough fuel for 100 years. How can anyone think that a yearly or semi-yearly crop harvest is going to make enough fuel to power a planet?
We should be looking at some kind of artificial photosynthesis as the solution. We need a solution that can remove waste CO2 from the air and turn it back into fuel. It would be awesome to create an equilibrium where the CO2 we emitted is then trapped and turned back into fuel, using solar and wind energy. PLanting "natural" crops is not even a sane solution because planting, harvesting and processing crops only produces more CO2 so we still put more into the air then what the crops can take out.
I think we need to find a way of creating a "reverse" factory which can scrub waste CO2 out of the air and turn it back into fuel. A few acres of factory producing fuel like this would prevent millions of acres of land wasted producing crops and also be the first human invention that has a "negative" carbon footprint.
But, two things against artificial photosynthesis, its not cheap to develop AND cannot be monopolized. Greedy corporations will not invest money into a solution that could ultimately be used in your own backyard to power your own car and home. Crops can be monopolized, air can't.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Why are we not pushing hard towards bacteria based production of biofuels instead of these huge complex pants? Seems to be that bacteria given the right conditions could convert a lot more CO2 into O2, eat a lot more waste, and produce a lot more complex fuels then corn, sugarcane, or other big plants...
Heck I think a few are going this direction, but to me it is the only way it makes sense at all..
Engineered Bacteria Make Fuel from Sunlight
Electrofuels: Charged Microbes May "Poop Out" a Gasoline Alternative
I like the idea of going all solar, and for individual houses, I can understand it, but for oil (you know, grease), plastics(you know, for our 3D printers), and even yes energy storage for some vehicles we are going to keep needing large quantities of hydrocarbons for a long time to come. Add to that the need to scrub our air of CO2 and other pollutants, and we have a great symbiosis.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Have gnu, will travel.
Fossil Fuels have some key advantages. 1. Portability. You can take it, put it in container and ship it anywhere, or store it when you need it. 2. High Energy. You can get a good bang for 1 kilo of Fuel. Vs. batteries, or other forms of portable energy 3. Low tech maintenance. Fixing a problem in a fossil fuel engine is much easier then fixing a power turbine or a solar sell, we can use alternate parts if needed to. 4. Out of Sight or of Mind. Large Windmills covering the landscape, acres of solar panels, large dams... A lot of big infrastructure projects
It isn't that we couldn't go, however you need to know the tradeoffs and find ways of dealing with them.
Just a wee rebuttal to your comments:
1. Since when are solar cells non-portable? Small wind turbines you would use for your individual home are not that non-portable either. You just need to take the tower down after removing the turbine and unhooking everything. Can be moved.
2. Energy density is higher in fossil fuels when compared to current alternative technology, yes, but if we don't research new ones we will never make that better.
3. Huh? If internal combustion engines are so easy to fix why do we need specialized mechanics? And power turbines aren't internal combustion engines, hmmm? And it's solar CELL, not "sell".
4. Yeah and those oil wells, refineries and gas stations are sooooo attractive and environmentally friendly, puh-lease.
We know what the trade-offs are and they are no longer acceptable as the cost to continuous fossil fuel use may be the death of our biosphere at our own hands. That is unacceptable, even criminal.
I am all for alternative fuels, but using a food source to ALSO be a fuel source is stooooooo-pid. Have you seen what happened to the price of corn since using it for ethanol took off? Great for Monsanto and ADM, but not for people that eat corn. Sugarcane is a horrible crop for the environment, let alone the impact using it for ethanol has on sugar prices for human consumption.
marijuana plants can make thousands of seeds each harvest.
hemp seed makes great amounts of oil for fuel.
marijuana grows like a weed. it thrives in poor soil and does not require the water that corn does.
hemp for food, fuel and fiber! hemp can save us alllllllllllllllllllllllll
Back before the discovery of fracking and the tar sands there was this fear that we would run out of stuff to burn to power our civilization (?). And even before that there was this idea that we needed to burn corn (corn liquor actually) to provide more business for farmers. Then someone noticed that the world was heating up and there was a possibility that all this stuff that we burn was a contributor. It is fairly clear at this point that we don't really need more stuff to burn. We need to find ways to live that do not require burning stuff to keep the lights on. And no, wind turbines are not the answer, whatever the question. I would vote for nuclear but everyone got fixated on early designs and seem quite reluctant to step away and rethink the whole idea. Somewhere between the Comet and early iron structural members I think (or Titanic -- largest steel order in history and no one had invented quality control...). Biofuels are entertaining (do I want my car to smell like french fries?) but clearly a solution to a problem that we don't have. Although, if we end up with Waterworld as a result of all this burning I won't really be surprised. Meanwhile... why does this kind of development work persist?
Well, probably never, or they already are, depending on how the question's framed.
Can solar panels independently reproduce themselves using only the same media in which they store energy? No, and they probably never will. So if you do responsible harvesting of cellulosic fuelstock from a large forest, it could conceivably last forever - which solar panels cannot do.
Can a solar panel produce more useable electricity than an equal volume of growing things over the lifetime of the panel? Yeah, for damn sure, since you have to burn up all the plants right away just to get the first watt or two - so they are done and the panel keeps ticking.
You left out too many variables, so the answer to your question is yes, no, maybe, someday, whatever, and Jeebus.
You likely will enjoy the 'fittings' used to hook you up to the engine.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In Australia there is a heavy research emphasis on algal sourced bio-fuels (bio-oils). Still research and pilot plants only, but they speculate that Australia could produce five times as much (bio) oil as it currently imports.
" see how a company is test-growing a relative of sugarcane, which is expected to yield 5 times the ethanol per acre compared to corn."
So, in other words, the same yield as sugarcane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
They're growing a relative to sugarcane that produces Ethanol like sugarcane? Stop the presses!
Corn is used for Ethanol because the corn lobby is huge and managed to get subsidies for it. Nothing wrong with Ethanol as a renewable fuel, but corn to Ethanol is only marginally more energy efficient than tar sands to gasoline (if you're still using the starch for animal feed -- over 50% of all US corn is for meat production -- the efficiency rises considerably, but that's not always done). So this should be a slam-dunk. Sugar cane is about 6x as efficient, but so far, my house in South Jersey is still surrounded by corn.
-Dave Haynie
whatever happen to hemp? still a great plant.