You are completely ignoring the most important question. Can methanol be produced without consuming more energy than it creates
No, I'm not ignoring that question, I'm trying to answer it. Ethanol does not do the job, methanol does.
I've seen no credible evidence that this is possible with any existing or near term likely technology
Well, I don't know, perhaps you're not up to date on the latest developments. I'm not talking about using standard "green revolution" farming techniques, I'm talking about using the native productivity of the land... understanding how that system works, and "nudging" it a bit to maximize yields of stuff we can use.
In a word, it's called Permaculture. Check it out, it's kinda cool.
starch derived ethanol is a very different process than cellulose derived ethanol
Seriously? After all this, do you still not realize that we're not talking about cellulose derived ethanol?
That's the whole point of using methanol in the first place, there's no starch or sugar required. Go ahead and grow your corn, and use the kernels for whatever you want. I'll take the rest of that plant (which is easily 90% of the biomass) and convert it directly into methanol.
And that's just using a standard green-revolution/annual crop... give me a well-managed perennial savanna and I could easily double the yield with NO petro inputs.
Perennial crops still need water, pest control, harvesting, tending, processing, and some amount of fertilizing
No, they don't. Not if you do it right.
Sure, if you try to raise a "mono-species" crop like modern-day corn or beans, you'll need inputs. But you just don't need that kind of approach. All you need is healthy, multi-species prairie (preferably fertilized by occasional ruminants) and you can mow it all down every couple of months and feed it to your fermenters. The simple fact of having a natural diversity of species means that you don't have to put any petro-inputs onto the land. There is no difference between "weed" and "crop" in this scheme... it's all just cellulose to the yeasts that digest it.
It might help a bit at the edges but there are reasons we don't use those locations beyond just the soil quality.
First: Half of all human-edible food produced today is wasted. We have a LOT more work to do on the political and economic side before we have to start worrying about our agricultural productive capacity.
Second, it has NOTHING to do with soil quality. In fact, in most cases, the "marginal" lands have much better soil, simply because they haven't been farmed as much.
Third, with only minor modifications the land can be "sculpted" to maximize productivity and minimize inputs.
There is essentially no industrial scale bioreactor on anything close to the scale relevant here.
Yeah, except for all those ethanol plants which could easily be converted to methanol production.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented in this thread. The current Dragon already matches the safety requirements of the original (pre-Challenger) Shuttle program. If push comes to shove wrt Russia, we'll be able to rapidly get a "provisional" crewed flight capability, and transition to a fully human-rated system within a couple of years.
Modern agriculture essentially converts oil into crops
"Modern agriculture" is based largely on annual crops, which deplete the soil and require massive inputs. Methanol can be made from perennial crops which can be harvested economically with little to no inputs.
And since perennials do not require tillage, there is very little environmental degradation. Indeed, if herbivores are incorporated in the farming scheme, the combination can actually increase the topsoil. Without tillage, such crops can be raised on lands which are currently considered marginal or unusable for conventional row-cropping. So methanol (unlike ethanol) would not compete with food crops at all.
How do you think methanol would be produced at industrial scale?
It already is produced at industrial scale. It's one of the most common "industrial" chemicals on the market. Unfortunately, a good chunk is currently produced from natural gas, but it is (and has been) made from various feedstocks for more than a century.
Even so, growing corn to make ethanol is just dumb. Methanol would be a much better choice, since it can be made from any biomass, not just starch or sugar. The only reason we use ethanol is as an excuse to grow so much corn, which is heavily subsidized. Also, methanol is CHEAP... about $1.50/gal.
An easy solution would be to enact a flex-fuel standard for automobiles, which would require that all new cars be fully flex-fuel capable: able to run on any mixture of gasoline, ethanol, methanol, or butanol. (In most cases, the "flex-fuel" cars on the market today can only use ethanol, not methanol.) To convert an existing car costs 500 bucks, but if it's built that way at the factory, it only adds about $100 to the cost of the vehicle.
Such a requirement would change the market. With millions of cars able to use it, gas station owners would start selling methanol on one or two pumps. This would effectively break the current monopoly that petroleum has on transportation fuel.
According to this recent talk by Joel Salatin, cotton farmers in the south nowadays have to pay $70/acre to have people manually chop down the Roundup-resistant weeds before they harvest. Apparently they grow so big that they tear up the combine, and since Roundup won't kill 'em, they have to be hacked out with a machete.
As Salatin puts it, "This is a crack in the paradigm." The whole system of industrial scale, petro-chemical dependent, mono-species farming is about to fall apart.
If you've always wanted to start a backyard garden (or even if you haven't) now might be a good time to start.
This particular effect is not attributed to global pollution levels, but specifically to the northern Pacific zone. Given the known, prevailing wind patterns, it's pretty clear that China has the greatest impact on this particular area.
Of course, AGW is also a huge part of the overall problem, and the USA is a major contributor (the major contributor per capita), but TFA article is not really about AGW per se, it's about a a regional weather trend which happens to affect a neighboring region, North America.
IIRC, they're not trying to land this 1st stage on land, instead they're going for a "soft splashdown" in the ocean. But if they get good "numbers" from this attempt, they will probably try a "dry" landing in the near future.
Can someone explain to me in a sentence or two how and why Twitter is useful? I've had an account for many years, but every time I log in to check, it just looks like a mess. And yet there are millions of people who (apparently) think it's awesome, so I must be doing something wrong.
I would love to hear some examples of how others have found Twitter useful.
Yes. The "obstacle" causing the delay was a problem with a backup unit, while the primary is still functioning fine. They had originally scheduled a spacewalk to fix the backup, but presumably, in the event of a failure, they could just "park" the Dragon a convenient orbit to await repairs. So they're better off launching now instead of waiting for the repairs.
Sounds good to me... I just want to see another Falcon fly...;-)
And if I'm not mistaken, this next flight will also be their first attempt to recover the first stage by propulsive landing. Demonstrating such a capability would be a game changer in itself.
Fuel was certainly the critical factor in the final victory. The Germans had nothing but coal, which they used in very creative ways, but they depended on a couple of refineries they'd captured from Russia. In particular, there was a place called Pleisse (or something like that) which was destroyed in the spring of 1945. One high-ranking general later wrote in his memoir that he knew on that day that it was all over.
And time is running out to create such protocols before the last remaining "uncontacted" tribes are found and exposed. They'll never be able to enforce a "no contact" rule in such a remote area. It's bound to happen eventually. In the meantime, we ought to use whatever safe means are available to study these cultures.
The farmer and author/activist Joel Salatin describes this mentality as "environmentalism by abandonment" -- ie: the only way we can protect the land is to not touch it at all. He says this is ludicrous because we are a part of the biosphere. We affect (and are affected by) the food chain, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, etc.. Our goal should be to optimize our impact rather than to minimize it.
For example, one way to study these cultures would be to drop some "fake rocks" containing cameras and transmitters into a tribal village. Better yet, make a few that are shiny and easily noticed, on the hope that some member of the tribe will bring it home to show the others. You could record hours of conversation as they try to figure out what it is and what to do with it. Then have your Cunning Linguist [TM] figure out their language.
Obviously, you'd also want to screen the anthropologists to avoid any carriers of infectious diseases. But there should be plenty of ways to study the culture "remotely" before sending them in anyway.
FFS, why do we have this ethanol fetish? Just make methanol instead, so you don't have to worry about lignin in the first place.
I know, I know... Monsanto gets massive gubmint kickbacks for growing corn, not trees. But the rest of us can run our cars on methanol just as easily as ethanol (assuming you've got a fully flex-fuel vehicle). Last time I checked, methanol was selling for about $1.50/gal. Granted, it's only 80% as energy dense as gasoline, but that's still a pretty good bargain at current prices.
There was talk a few years ago about an "Open Fuel Standard Act" in Congress, but it didn't pass. This really ought to be resurrected. It would simply require that all (or most) cars sold in the USA would be fully flex-fuel capable. (If done at the factory, this only adds about $100 to the cost of the vehicle... several times more if you do a conversion later.) The point would be to put real competition into the market for transportation fuels. This would drive down the price of petroleum and break the current monopoly.
I always wondered about that bit from Hunt For Red October (the book) about "Hollywood showers" -- a 30-minute extravaganza the skipper would occasionally allow as a reward for excellent performance. Is that common? I only know one guy who served on a sub (he was a nuke), but they didn't do that on his boat.
Depends what your lifestyle and climate are like. If you're a hunter-gatherer living next to a waterfall in Hawaii, you might take a rinse every few days just for fun, but you would seldom "need" a shower. If you're living in a "tuna can" with three other people, taking daily outdoor excursions wearing a "moon suit" in Hawaii, things are going to start getting ripe pretty rapidly.
I imagine they will combat this tendency with daily sponge baths, etc.. One has to wonder how effective this would be. OTOH, they've been dealing with a similar situation on ISS for quite a while already.
This is just scratching the surface on the kind of deception that frequently passes for "journalism" in the modern age. With a bit of clever editing, you can make anyone "say" virtually anything you want.
Slashdot Mirror
You are completely ignoring the most important question. Can methanol be produced without consuming more energy than it creates
No, I'm not ignoring that question, I'm trying to answer it. Ethanol does not do the job, methanol does.
I've seen no credible evidence that this is possible with any existing or near term likely technology
Well, I don't know, perhaps you're not up to date on the latest developments. I'm not talking about using standard "green revolution" farming techniques, I'm talking about using the native productivity of the land... understanding how that system works, and "nudging" it a bit to maximize yields of stuff we can use.
In a word, it's called Permaculture. Check it out, it's kinda cool.
starch derived ethanol is a very different process than cellulose derived ethanol
Seriously? After all this, do you still not realize that we're not talking about cellulose derived ethanol?
Roughly speaking:
Starch + Yeast = Ethanol
Cellulose + Yeast = Methanol
That's the whole point of using methanol in the first place, there's no starch or sugar required. Go ahead and grow your corn, and use the kernels for whatever you want. I'll take the rest of that plant (which is easily 90% of the biomass) and convert it directly into methanol.
And that's just using a standard green-revolution/annual crop... give me a well-managed perennial savanna and I could easily double the yield with NO petro inputs.
Perennial crops still need water, pest control, harvesting, tending, processing, and some amount of fertilizing
No, they don't. Not if you do it right.
Sure, if you try to raise a "mono-species" crop like modern-day corn or beans, you'll need inputs. But you just don't need that kind of approach. All you need is healthy, multi-species prairie (preferably fertilized by occasional ruminants) and you can mow it all down every couple of months and feed it to your fermenters. The simple fact of having a natural diversity of species means that you don't have to put any petro-inputs onto the land. There is no difference between "weed" and "crop" in this scheme... it's all just cellulose to the yeasts that digest it.
It might help a bit at the edges but there are reasons we don't use those locations beyond just the soil quality.
First: Half of all human-edible food produced today is wasted. We have a LOT more work to do on the political and economic side before we have to start worrying about our agricultural productive capacity.
Second, it has NOTHING to do with soil quality. In fact, in most cases, the "marginal" lands have much better soil, simply because they haven't been farmed as much.
Third, with only minor modifications the land can be "sculpted" to maximize productivity and minimize inputs.
There is essentially no industrial scale bioreactor on anything close to the scale relevant here.
Yeah, except for all those ethanol plants which could easily be converted to methanol production.
We can make methanol from your lawn mower's grass clippings. America currently has about 30 million acres of lawn.
'Nuff said?
Also, imagine the economic boost when we no longer have to send $400 billion per year to Middle Eastern states that don't really like us very much.
+1 Informative
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented in this thread. The current Dragon already matches the safety requirements of the original (pre-Challenger) Shuttle program. If push comes to shove wrt Russia, we'll be able to rapidly get a "provisional" crewed flight capability, and transition to a fully human-rated system within a couple of years.
Mod parent up!
Modern agriculture essentially converts oil into crops
"Modern agriculture" is based largely on annual crops, which deplete the soil and require massive inputs. Methanol can be made from perennial crops which can be harvested economically with little to no inputs.
And since perennials do not require tillage, there is very little environmental degradation. Indeed, if herbivores are incorporated in the farming scheme, the combination can actually increase the topsoil. Without tillage, such crops can be raised on lands which are currently considered marginal or unusable for conventional row-cropping. So methanol (unlike ethanol) would not compete with food crops at all.
How do you think methanol would be produced at industrial scale?
It already is produced at industrial scale. It's one of the most common "industrial" chemicals on the market. Unfortunately, a good chunk is currently produced from natural gas, but it is (and has been) made from various feedstocks for more than a century.
Even so, growing corn to make ethanol is just dumb. Methanol would be a much better choice, since it can be made from any biomass, not just starch or sugar. The only reason we use ethanol is as an excuse to grow so much corn, which is heavily subsidized. Also, methanol is CHEAP... about $1.50/gal.
An easy solution would be to enact a flex-fuel standard for automobiles, which would require that all new cars be fully flex-fuel capable: able to run on any mixture of gasoline, ethanol, methanol, or butanol. (In most cases, the "flex-fuel" cars on the market today can only use ethanol, not methanol.) To convert an existing car costs 500 bucks, but if it's built that way at the factory, it only adds about $100 to the cost of the vehicle.
Such a requirement would change the market. With millions of cars able to use it, gas station owners would start selling methanol on one or two pumps. This would effectively break the current monopoly that petroleum has on transportation fuel.
According to this recent talk by Joel Salatin, cotton farmers in the south nowadays have to pay $70/acre to have people manually chop down the Roundup-resistant weeds before they harvest. Apparently they grow so big that they tear up the combine, and since Roundup won't kill 'em, they have to be hacked out with a machete.
As Salatin puts it, "This is a crack in the paradigm." The whole system of industrial scale, petro-chemical dependent, mono-species farming is about to fall apart.
If you've always wanted to start a backyard garden (or even if you haven't) now might be a good time to start.
Like an Onion headline.
This particular effect is not attributed to global pollution levels, but specifically to the northern Pacific zone. Given the known, prevailing wind patterns, it's pretty clear that China has the greatest impact on this particular area.
Of course, AGW is also a huge part of the overall problem, and the USA is a major contributor (the major contributor per capita), but TFA article is not really about AGW per se, it's about a a regional weather trend which happens to affect a neighboring region, North America.
IIRC, they're not trying to land this 1st stage on land, instead they're going for a "soft splashdown" in the ocean. But if they get good "numbers" from this attempt, they will probably try a "dry" landing in the near future.
Can someone explain to me in a sentence or two how and why Twitter is useful? I've had an account for many years, but every time I log in to check, it just looks like a mess. And yet there are millions of people who (apparently) think it's awesome, so I must be doing something wrong.
I would love to hear some examples of how others have found Twitter useful.
Yes. The "obstacle" causing the delay was a problem with a backup unit, while the primary is still functioning fine. They had originally scheduled a spacewalk to fix the backup, but presumably, in the event of a failure, they could just "park" the Dragon a convenient orbit to await repairs. So they're better off launching now instead of waiting for the repairs.
Sounds good to me... I just want to see another Falcon fly... ;-)
And if I'm not mistaken, this next flight will also be their first attempt to recover the first stage by propulsive landing. Demonstrating such a capability would be a game changer in itself.
Now I can see the potholes as they rattle my bones in real time. Kewl! ;-)
Fuel was certainly the critical factor in the final victory. The Germans had nothing but coal, which they used in very creative ways, but they depended on a couple of refineries they'd captured from Russia. In particular, there was a place called Pleisse (or something like that) which was destroyed in the spring of 1945. One high-ranking general later wrote in his memoir that he knew on that day that it was all over.
Sorry I can't recall the details better. I heard this in an @Google Talk by Robert Zubrin about becoming energy independent by establishing an open "flex-fuel standard" for vehicles.
^This.
And time is running out to create such protocols before the last remaining "uncontacted" tribes are found and exposed. They'll never be able to enforce a "no contact" rule in such a remote area. It's bound to happen eventually. In the meantime, we ought to use whatever safe means are available to study these cultures.
The farmer and author/activist Joel Salatin describes this mentality as "environmentalism by abandonment" -- ie: the only way we can protect the land is to not touch it at all. He says this is ludicrous because we are a part of the biosphere. We affect (and are affected by) the food chain, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, etc.. Our goal should be to optimize our impact rather than to minimize it.
For example, one way to study these cultures would be to drop some "fake rocks" containing cameras and transmitters into a tribal village. Better yet, make a few that are shiny and easily noticed, on the hope that some member of the tribe will bring it home to show the others. You could record hours of conversation as they try to figure out what it is and what to do with it. Then have your Cunning Linguist [TM] figure out their language.
Obviously, you'd also want to screen the anthropologists to avoid any carriers of infectious diseases. But there should be plenty of ways to study the culture "remotely" before sending them in anyway.
Sure, it's all fun and games until somebody gets segmentation fault in the left temporal lobe...
I still have an XP installation running in a vbox, just because it's easier than trying to get SlingBox to run under wine.
Maybe this is just a clever ruse to trick fundamentalists into avoiding the internet, to reduce the troll count.
FFS, why do we have this ethanol fetish? Just make methanol instead, so you don't have to worry about lignin in the first place.
I know, I know... Monsanto gets massive gubmint kickbacks for growing corn, not trees. But the rest of us can run our cars on methanol just as easily as ethanol (assuming you've got a fully flex-fuel vehicle). Last time I checked, methanol was selling for about $1.50/gal. Granted, it's only 80% as energy dense as gasoline, but that's still a pretty good bargain at current prices.
There was talk a few years ago about an "Open Fuel Standard Act" in Congress, but it didn't pass. This really ought to be resurrected. It would simply require that all (or most) cars sold in the USA would be fully flex-fuel capable. (If done at the factory, this only adds about $100 to the cost of the vehicle... several times more if you do a conversion later.) The point would be to put real competition into the market for transportation fuels. This would drive down the price of petroleum and break the current monopoly.
I always wondered about that bit from Hunt For Red October (the book) about "Hollywood showers" -- a 30-minute extravaganza the skipper would occasionally allow as a reward for excellent performance. Is that common? I only know one guy who served on a sub (he was a nuke), but they didn't do that on his boat.
you're conducting this very experiment in order for us to send people on a one-way trip to Mars.
You must be confusing this with the Mars-One project. TFA is a NASA project. There are no "one-way tickets" here.
Depends what your lifestyle and climate are like. If you're a hunter-gatherer living next to a waterfall in Hawaii, you might take a rinse every few days just for fun, but you would seldom "need" a shower. If you're living in a "tuna can" with three other people, taking daily outdoor excursions wearing a "moon suit" in Hawaii, things are going to start getting ripe pretty rapidly.
I imagine they will combat this tendency with daily sponge baths, etc.. One has to wonder how effective this would be. OTOH, they've been dealing with a similar situation on ISS for quite a while already.
This is just scratching the surface on the kind of deception that frequently passes for "journalism" in the modern age. With a bit of clever editing, you can make anyone "say" virtually anything you want.