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."

Comments

Nature's solar panel

[schneidafunk]

So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?

Re:Nature's solar panel

[ShanghaiBill]

how does your solar panel work on cloudy days, rainy days, snow days and at night?

In sunny places, electricity demand is strongly correlated with hot, sunny days when the AC is running. Solar is not good for base load, but that really isn't an issue as it currently generates less than 0.2% of the electric power. This is something to worry about when it gets to about 10%. If that ever happens, we can deal with it by energy storage, long distance transmission, and/or load shifting.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[iotaborg]

Actually it isn't that terrible on cloudy/rainy days. We have a solar panel installed on our house in the pacific northwest of the US, which is 100% cloud/rain in the winter months. Energy generated is 100-300 kWh per month in the winter, 500-700 kWh per month in the sunny summers. Obviously nothing in the nights. Excess production in the summer pays for the shortfall in the winter (paid by utility company), so it works out.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?

I suspect that the break-even point varies depending on what you want to do. If you want electricity, photovoltaics get a substantial boost (plants may still turn out to be cheaper, for sufficiently large installations, if you can grow a zillion acres of generic combustables with minimal human intervention and then shovel them into a slightly converted coal plant or something; but the poor efficiency of the conversion from thermal energy to electrical energy will hobble you, and it will cripple you in small-scale installs). If you want a hydrocarbon-fuel substitute, the ability of organisms to synthesize all kinds of neat organic compounds is going to be quite a trick to replicate, even if you have unlimited electricity.

Also depends on location: given suitably robust solar cell packages(ideally with some fancy catalytic autocleaning coating), you could convert surface area on large structures into PV sites with just an occasional visit by the installers-with-climbing-gear. You wouldn't want to try crops under those conditions. A desert area, with plenty of sun but next to no water, would also be decent PV territory but bad planting ground. A large patch of arable land would have the opposite conditions(though it might also have competing food producers; but luckily, while it's illegal to use poor people for biofuel, it's legal to use food for biofuel and let poor people starve.)

Re:Nature's solar panel

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole issue of sugar to ethanol suffers from several false economies including the usefulness in this case of water from the Colorado river which is not exactly surplus, and from the energy to distill and etc. Damage to the soil is a problem as is the whole issue of fertilizers etc. The USA is barking up the wrong tree with ethanol. It is a bad bad idea.
In the issue of a parent post regards competing with solar vs plants. Plants are at best thermally 1.5 to 2 percent efficient of sunlight. Solar cells are currently about 21%. The whole issue revolves around trading energy for which we currently have no effective use for energy that we can use. Biomass doesn't work well in cars so we only see it as a plus in the equation assuming we in our segmented economy fail to look at the total lifecycle costs.
Solar is already competitive and on price with standard generation means by fossil fuels.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[mlts]

One advantage of solar power is that it is distributed, which helps with redundancy on the grid.

Plus, there are multiple ways of using solar power. Grid tie is one way. However, with the fact sometimes it is more expensive to pay a utility company to string a wire to a remote property than it is to set up an off-grid solar panel array, charge controllers, battery bank, and inverters, it isn't too far-fetched for people to just go with a bunch of panels and not bother with the electric grid whatsoever.

Solar is getting cheaper, mainly because China now has the critical mass of technology and willpower to stand behind it. It is only a matter of time before we start seeing each cell having a small MPPT controller so partial shading's impact is minimized, and perhaps even having the charge controllers or inverters built into each panel, so adding more usable watts might just consist of dropping another row of panels, plugging two power cables and a CANBUS cable, and letting the electronics do the rest. China wants this technology because it means that they don't have to deploy as many coal plants, thus less pollution.

Solar is coming to a point where it is less of a matter of "why", but a matter of "why not"?

To boot, solar panels have a long life. In 20-30 years, where most energy plants need to have a complete overhaul, solar panels might need to be washed every so often. An investment now may seem foolish, but given a steady return over the years, it may be wise over the long run. This is something that Germany understands, and is allowing them to wean completely off of both nuclear energy and Russian gas.

Other people want to wet their beaks now?

[Kohath]

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?

Video link in summary

[noh8rz10]

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?

Re:Video link in summary

[noh8rz10]

It's not that my attention span is short, it's that I can absorb info like a fire hose, while real time video is a trickle. I can type faster than conversation speed as well. Given the mods on my original comment, I think many people agree with me!

Re:Video link in summary

[Zalbik]

I can type faster than conversation speed as well.

Really?!? People can easily understand conversation up to 150 - 160 words per minute.

For comparison, the world champion of typing speeds obtained an average rate of 150 wpm in 2005.

So if you are outputting information, speech tends to win hands down.

However if you are receiving information, people can read at 250-300 wpm....

Which is why I also hate video posts. That and:
1) Basically impossible to skim
2) Harder to "re-read" items that may require a second viewing
3) Harder to reference / quote specific points in the video
4) Accents and/or poor audio setups can make video difficult to understand
5) Bandwidth limitations (e.g. mobile devices)
6) Ugly people

Small economics

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Do these take up areas that food crops grow?

[mlts]

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.

Re:Do these take up areas that food crops grow?

[H0p313ss]

The great thing about CO2 emissions for plant-derived biofuels is that they won't modify the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Think about it for a moment: what you're doing is extracting carbon from the atmosphere, turning it into complex hydrocarbons using energy from the sun, and then burning it to release that energy. Any CO2 released was *already in the atmosphere* to begin with, so biofuels net zero greenhouse emissions (to first order at least, maybe there's some weird combustion products or whatever). Hard to get much lower than that.

Well, yes and no. Biofuel will only be carbon neutral if all the production, transportation and fertilization was done with biofuels as well. A great goal, but I don't think it's been realized anywhere yet.

And of course, that still leaves the whole fuel vs. food issue open. Now if we could manage to come up a biofuel production process that includes the net fixation of atmospheric CO2 (net reduced or zero carbon footprint), with close to zero ecological impact that is not using precious agricultural land then I'd be all over it. But at the moment it's a bit of a pipe dream.

Re:Do these take up areas that food crops grow?

[Belial6]

You don't have to worry about the CO2 emissions. One of the benefits of bio-fuel is that the carbon in the plants was taken out of the air. With bio-fuels you only add as much CO2 to the air as you take out.

Re:Sugar Beet

[mcgrew]

Beets are perfect for fuel. Nasty vegetable! Yech! When I see beets I say "beat it, beet."

Now, buttered corn, yum. Corn fed beef? Even better! Corn is for eating, beets are best used as fuel.

immediately if cost was not a factor

[peter303]

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.

Re:Sugar Beet

[ShanghaiBill]

Corn and sugarcane got nothing on the sugar beet.

Acre for acre, sugar beets get more subsidies than corn, if you include the protective tariffs on sugar imports. There is no way that beets can compete with cane in a free market.

Sorghum

[MrWin2kMan]

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.

Re:Sugar Beet

[Hatta]

I think beets get a bad name due to everyone using canned beets. I haven't prepared fresh beets myself, but I've had beet coleslaw made from fresh beets that was fantastic. Julienned beets, red cabbage, shallots, oil & vinegar, IIRC. Really pretty too.

Obligatory Michael Jackson

[dkleinsc]

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!

Re:Sugar Beet

[rycamor]

Yes, there's a world of difference between fresh beets and the canned garbage you buy. And there is another world of difference between 5-day-old beets you get in the produce section and beets you just picked from your own garden. Fresh beet juice isn't half bad, also.

Beets are easy to grow, and since they are in the brassica family (along with broccoli, collards, kale, etc..) the leaves are quite healthy for you (yes, broccoli leaves are good eating), and good in a salad, or cooked form. I didn't find out any of this until I started growing my own garden.