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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.
It's tough to believe a manufactured source of fuel would yet be more economical than exploiting one you just suck out of a well.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
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I am a vegan rather than a herbivore but if anyone would like to make me an offer for my gut flora, please PM me.
Is it even true that many environmentalists get so excited ? I've heard several environmental groups express the same concerns as you.
Why do many environmentalist hate oil and diesel that occurred naturally on our planet, but get so excited about bio-diesel that takes up land and energy to produce that could be used for feeding people or other positive purposes?
Even the name bio-diesel is sideways and laughable.
You mean why do environmentalists like bio-diesel? They don't. But smart people realize that the industrial processes involved in petroleum extraction are a bit injurious to the environment, and the political complications are even worse. Wouldn't you rather be able to make all the petroleum products we need rather than pay money to the various Oil Barons across the world? Yes, farming and agriculture have their perils, but those can be mitigated, and it would be useful to keep some hydrocarbons in usage as we transition other options, like most internal combustion engines, to other mechanisms that are less burdensome.
But really, you won't find a lot of environmentalists cheering on bio-diesel. This is for the industrialists who hate being beholden to foreign powers.
I'm going to start selling organic-oil, it's exactly like regular oil, only it makes leftist feel better when consuming it.
That's ok, I'll sell you Orphan Oil, it's made by bio-engineering orphans, and will satisfy your desire to be smug.
Water desalination takes an awful lot of energy, though, and pumping it through the desert takes quite a bit too, and then you still need the nutrients and something to protect the soil from wind erosion. It's probably smarter to put some EV panels in the desert and drive electric cars.
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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As a bonus, I hear that this new gut microbe biodiesel does not smell like hamburgers nor french fries...
There is already "green diesel", which is diesel made from bio sources but instead of using transesterification via ethanol or methanol and KOH they use a distillation column essentially the same as what is used for cracking petroleum. It has none of the problems of biodiesel like excessively high gel temperature or funny smells, although I always thought the fried food smell was a feature and not a bug.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
In most cases, those aren't "rolls of straw". They're rolls of hay and they're being left in the field to ferment, thereby increasing their nutritave value to the ruminants they will be fed to. Look up silage.