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Cheaper Fuel From Self-Destructing Trees
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Wood is great for building and heating homes, but it's the bane of biofuels. When converting plants to fuels, engineers must remove a key component of wood, known as lignin, to get to the sugary cellulose that's fermented into alcohols and other energy-rich compounds. That's costly because it normally requires high temperatures and caustic chemicals. Now, researchers in the United States and Canada have modified the lignin in poplar trees to self-destruct under mild processing conditions—a trick that could slash the cost of turning plant biomass into biofuels."
Got wood, eh?
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Wood is biofuel. There is a device http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/20/0549231/carbon-negative-energy-machines-catching-on which when paired with a dense wood like Robinia pseudoacacia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinia_pseudoacacia which has as much energy as anthacite coal and when harvested dumps nitrogen into the soil so that other plants grow faster and it grows back faster than it did the first time. So why can't all our power sources be food producing, fertilzer producing, erosion stopping, medicine producing, ecology improving, and sustainable?
Apply heat and O2 to complete fire triangle.
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combine gasification generators with a nitrogen fixing energy rich wood like Robina pseudoacacia,which grows back faster and makes surrounding plants grow better after it is cut, planted around fruit trees and other useful species and then the act of harvesting wood makes plants grow and the act of generating electricity makes fertilizer. With the right generator http://www.cnet.com/news/carbo... there is only a positive environmental impact to the harvesting and generating of energy which when used in conjunction with a food/medicine forest http://www.beaconfoodforest.or... you have good hunting beautiful landscape and no reason to leave home. There are food forests around which are over 2000 years old still going and no one knows who planted them.
If all you want is the cellulose and fiber, hemp produces paper-quality fiber at nearly 4 times the rate per acre/year as even poplar trees do.
Oh, right. Gotta keep all those woodchippers employed. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
My gut says the reason it's so hard to deal with the current form of ligin is parasites would have evolved to eat anything simpler. Do they have any strategy for preventing parasites from finding the trick to breaking down the ligin in these modified trees?
Either way it does sounds pretty cool.
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Ralph says his team is already working to insert zip-lignins into corn plants.
I know we grow a lot of corn, but why not insert the gene into kudzu or some other fast growing weed that thrives on marginal land with low fertilizer inputs?
It's not like we don't already have a use for every part of the corn plant.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This tree will self destruct in 5 seconds.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So, once this genetic defect - I mean modification - crosses the line and goes wild (although Monsanto tells us it never happens), how fast and hot will those forests burn?
Which is exactly why the US need 'Splodin trees.
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Well armed forest, take that treehuggers.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Using wood to create BioFuels is extremely wasteful of both time and material.
Use hemp instead. You'll get two huge crops per year. And it's a crop made of easy-to-process plant material. No lignin involved. Just process the green matter.
Erm, wasn't there something the greenies used to say? Like save the trees? Protect the forests? Leave room for nature?
Well, obviously I must have been hallucinating all the ways through the 90ies. And don't worry, I'll see a psychiatrist about this decade-long delusion at once. But let's pretend there had been an environmental movement in the second half of the last century, when people said that there is some inherent value in nature itself. Wouldn't you think that people in this movement would have been somewhat upset about the prospect of converting huge tracts of land that used be called "forests" into industrial fuel plantations? Well, I for one would imagine they'd be, but they are not.
Hence my suspicion that I was merely hallucinating. If I don't respond, I guess I stuck in comfy happy white room.
The toughest part is to make sure they don't scream as they destruct; the licensing fees would be too expensive.
And in millions of years, the unused mine will be full of oil! This plan is like win-win-win
Whether science or not science, who cares. The Taco Cowboy's comment is just stupid. What is it exactly what he is worried about? First of all they will self destruct under processing conditions. Will the modified poplars take over the world and then mutate to self destruct without assistance or will these self-destruction genes drift to other subspecies of poplars? The self destruction, if it happened without any processing, would not be a feature that made a tree fit for survival, common sense says - so these genes wouldn't prevail anyway then.