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Fungi From Guts Of Herbivores Could Help Us Make Biofuel (dispatchtribunal.com)
hypnosec writes: Researchers have revealed through a new study that fungi from the gut of herbivores like goats, horses and sheep could be used to make biofuel. According to researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara, the fungi retrieved from these animals are capable of converting plant material into sugars that can be easily used to make biofuel and other products at the same efficiency as the best fungi engineering in the industry. Michelle O'Malley, lead author of the paper and professor of chemical engineering at the University, explains that these fungi naturally have the best possible set of enzymes for the job of breaking down biomass and as per their findings, these enzymes work together to break down stubborn plant material.
BP and DuPont's company Butamax has been fighting with GE Energy Venture's biofuel concern Gevo over who gets to make Butanol for years now. Butamax has got their hands on some basic patents for making the process cost-effective, based on technologies developed at public university and partially with your tax dollars. Recently the patent office declared all of the claims of one of Gevo's central patents invalid, which is unfortunate for you and I because Butamax is not actually trying to sell us fuel and Gevo is.
We therefore already have the technology to make a 1:1 replacement for gasoline which can be made from any organic matter, by bacteria, and we could be running our cars on it right now if only our government had not become primarily a tool for bludgeoning common sense soundly about the neck and head for the sake of profit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I keep hearing about how we can use "agricultural waste" to make bio-fuel but that is a lie, there is no agricultural waste. What is this "waste" exactly? What do you think happens to it now?
This "waste" is usually described as cornstalks and other chaff made from the growing of (obviously) corn and other food crops. I grew up on a dairy farm and we'd use those corn stalks as bedding for the cattle, so they'd have a warm and dry place to rest. After those cornstalks are soaked with cattle manure it is collected and spread on the fields. Those corn stalks return vital nutrients to the soil, control erosion, and hold that manure (and other fertilizers) in place for the next crop.
I suspect a lot of people that live in high rise apartments, that never saw a cow that wasn't served on a plate, think that these corn stalks are hauled off to put in landfills. If we convert cornstalks to fuel then we are going to see another dust bowl in the Midwest.
I suspect that some vegan would like to point out how we should not be eating meat or drinking milk anyway, we don't need to bed cattle with cornstalks or feed that cattle corn. Okay then, if we harvest all that corn to eat, and haul off the stalks for fuel, then what is holding the soil in place? What is going to keep that topsoil from just blowing away and get carried out to sea by rivers? Answer, the corn stalks that should not be taken out of the field.
I read an interesting paper on how we could mine basalt, grind it up, and spread on farm land to return nutrients to the field and fix carbon out of the air into the soil. That's something I can support. Use nuclear power to produce that basalt fertilizer rather than the fossil fueled lime kilns we use now, we'd go from carbon positive to carbon negative. We'd also be building up topsoil rather than hauling it away to make fuel. This fuel, by the way, could also be produced from nuclear power in a carbon neutral or perhaps even carbon negative way.
I'm not even a agronomist or anything like that. I'm just an Iowa farm boy that grew up to write code. Even I see this as an environmental disaster. Do these bio-fuel people even talk to farmers? Did they not do some sort of environmental impact study on removing vital erosion control material, like corn stalks, from fields? Perhaps they did do their homework and I'm missing something important. If so then I'd like someone to point out what I'm missing.
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I do not think that producing biofuel is such an disaster, of course depending on how you implement it. In Germany quite a few farmers already produce biogas using large fermenters on their farm, most often then to directly use it for electricity and heat production, as pressurizing it is too costly. But well, all you are doing is pumping some cubic metres of liquid manure and some other decomposable materials in a huge tank and let anaerobic digestion do their work. As it turns out this even improves the fertilizing properties of the leftovers, since you create an optimal environment for the bacteria involved in the rotting process, just like in a well structured composter.
Holding the soil in place can be done via in-between-cultures like mustard or spinache. Of course then one can not use only one crop specifically designed to withstand herbicides and kill off absolutely all other plants on the ground, as it is commonly practiced and doing a huge environmental damage, not only on the soil itself, but also on the surrounding ecosystem (bee colony collapse for example).
The real problem here is that bio fuel is often used as an incentive to further subventionize farmers and the malpractice of huge mono cultures, especially of corn. Mining stuff to undo a bit of the damage done by these is just another bad idea.
The nutrients can be returned but by breaking down the straw the erosion control properties are lost.
Bio-fuels are a waste of time. We can do better with nuclear power driving a synthetic fuel process. The sooner we learn that the better.
Let's assume we can make bio-fuel from straw without the problems of reducing the quality of the soil. Then we get back to the problem of having to farm much more land to get enough sun to make our food and our fuel. That means plowing up even more land, forced irrigation, more artificial fertilizers, reduced bio-diversity, and all kinds of other environment impacts. That's assuming you live in a country with enough land mass to grow all these crops. If a given country does not have enough land then that country is now reliant on trade for their survival. That is a political problem that no nation wants to be in.
What of all the oil that the USA imports? The USA has enough oil to fuel its economy and then some, the federal government merely believes it is doing it's citizens a favor by placing those reserves off-limits. Also, just about any nation has access to enough fissile material to produce all the fuel it needs with hydrocarbon fuel synthesis. This is absolutely true for any nation with a port open to the sea.
bio-fuels are a distraction, the real solution is nuclear.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.