Yeah, I thought about that after posting. I used 'lignin' as a blanket statement for any and all methods here. But this has been tried before, as I implied; here's a 1979 news clipping about floating kelp being gasified into methane for use as fuel, for instance. (I can't load these Google News archive pieces in Chrome for some reason, btw).
There have been heaps of schemes for sea-based algae farms growing biofuels, too. Lignin isn't an issue there either. There seems little new in this approach; would it be able to compete with good ol' corn based ethanol? There's so much built infrastructure for that already, and massive corporations throwing their weight behind it. TFA mentions a potential yield of 1% of US demand being met by about 1% of available offshore area, which might be utilized for fuel additives; but how could such a scheme compete with their terrestrial equivalents? Which is why I've always had my doubts about these approaches, to justify going offshore for any resource you need something with high yields and profits, meaning hydrocarbons or fish, pretty much. It just isn't worth it attempting to mine the seafloor yet.
The WSJ had an article last month on the Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle. The various approaches just haven't worked at all. Try whatever tabletop approach catches your fancy but in the real world lignin just doesn't scale up to anything approaching meaningful commercial volumes, as of yet anyway. And our tax dollars go towards these attempts, keep in mind.
People have been fiddling about with these approaches for almost a century too, and making all manner of grandiose claims; I've parsed news clippings from the 1920s promising a coming era of limitless cheap ethanol to replace rock oil. It would take catastrophically high crude oil prices to really spur development here, but chances are we'd also turn to dirtier approaches like coal-to-liquids which are somewhat more profitable and scalable; or simply employ conservation to the point where the price would drop back down anyway. The International Energy Agency had an excellent document on approaches for Saving Oil in a Hurry, which may be of interest.
What are these sites like the one mentioned in TFS, and these alternatives you guys keep talking about? All I'm familiar with is the Uncyclopedia. Seems bona fide.
On the front page today:
Please note: As soon as we get around to setting something up, the English Uncyclopedia will do... something. Possibly. If we remember.
Today's Featured Article - Twilight (novel)
Words are hard. Math is hard. Life is hard. Having a boyfriend is hard — but important. Jacob's hands are hard, too. So are his teeth. But he's not the vampire; that's Edward. And you know what? Edward is hard — and cold — and a boyfriend; he is, along with Jacob, one of the stars of Twilight. Twilight is a book about hardship and boyfriends and vampires, and it is also hard — to read, that is; the author, Stephanie Meyer, fills it with parentheticals and asides that sometimes get so far off track that it's hard to tell what the sentence, let alone paragraph, was even about, and sometimes, sometimes it gets to the point where the entire thing might as well be a nice, long, careening, self-contradictory minivan, because it's hard to tell where the entire thing is going when it's not going anywhere — which is hard, like Edward Cullen and Jacob... Jacob whatever his last name is; everyone just refers to him as Jacob (and he doesn't even appear much in this one anyway).
In the news
Huntsman ends presidential bid, backs China’s Hu Gingrich calls kettle black, GOP monkey house continues Titty-twisting celebrity arrested in Disney World Titanic comparisons endured after Italian ship disaster (pictured) Suspicious Bases Outlawed John Lennon actually said "we are bigger than cheeses," proved right in any case Cuban bicycles to freedom, quickly returns US denies raucous bomb attack on Iran unclear scientist
They're working on a 98 MW expansion. Local wastewater is reinjected. Looking for 'Geysers geothermal superfund' about all I find is Wiki on the Sulphur Bank Mine, with a 2009 quote referring to plans to send its wastewater to the Geysers, meaning it's still only a notion. Perhaps you have your Superfunds mixed up? I don't doubt there's a bit of mess involved in geothermal. Powering up Newberry would have to mean stringing a bunch of HVDC lines to get the juice to where it's needed. No doubt this would mean a lot of pissing and moaning, witness the uproar in recent years over bringing in LNG to the mouth of Columbia and piping the gas to destinations south. There are no end of signs here in the Willamette Valley saying "NEVER LNG" etc which haven't been taken down in over a decade. Although perhaps they could strategically direct the lines around highways, behind those bits of forest they don't bother to cut down, to maintain that illusion of the pristine...
The lakes you refer to are actually in the collapsed caldera of the volcano. A lava flow divides the caldera in two. The article mentions geologists who say that Newberry was once a 10k ft tall stratovolcano that collapse, but as far as I know it's always been classed as an unconventional shield volcano, with a variety of flows and the typical low profile of these mountains. Indeed it's difficult to recognize as a volcano when you drive nearby. Nonetheless it's the largest volcano in Oregon, and has always been considered our richest geothermal resource.
Bend has had problems with water shortages in recent times, being on the dry east side of Oregon. TFA says an environmental impact study says they're good to go anyway. Drillers have been fracking the crap out of the Permian Basin in Texas in recent years, which is even drier, suggesting that if you have the $$$$ you can truck in enough water for the job, given a solid enough profit margin. Bend is overrun with left leaning types these days, who'll in all likelihood stand up for clean power, even if it means the odd temblor. Indeed a lot of them have invaded OR from CA in the first place, and won't be strangers to the odd bit of shaking.
The Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) Project consists of six small (11-cm diameter), wide-field automated telescopes based at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, in Cambridge, Mass., and The Submillimeter Array atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
FLWO, as distinct from Cambridge MA, was the author's intent, I believe. Agree that the wording could be clearer. FLWO is owned and operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge.
Toyota says "the National Highway Transportation Administration (NHTSA) has found that almost 40% of all the fatalities on US highways are caused by driving off of the road." Hence the irritating tweets. Heh, it functions from 50 to 112 mph. Thoughtful of Toyota to be looking out for the wellbeing of DeathRace participants.
Are the lives this saves worth the extra added weight and complexity? It's a premium feature too. Not tweeting for those on a budget.
Have we looked for buried magnetic anomalies? You know, the kind that are 1:4:9.
I posted in some other story about the probes gravity mapping the moon, perhaps they'll find something odd subsurface. Wonder what the resolution for those probes is. The corresponding probes that examined Earth look to have had pretty gross imaging, just going by what's shown in the infographic for that story.
ARTHUR: Fine, um, I don't want to waste anymore of your time, but, uh
I don't suppose you could, uh, tell us where we might find a, um,
find a, uh, a, um, a uh--
TIM: A what...?
ARTHUR: A g--, a g--
TIM: A GRAIL?!
ARTHUR: Yes, I think so.
KNIGHTS: Yes, that's it. Yes.
TIM: Yes!
KNIGHTS: Oh, thank you, splendid, fine.
[boom pweeng boom boom]
Australians have told me they consider their country's accent closer to American English, while Canadians have said their accent is closer to that of Britain. To my ear the converse is true, and perhaps these statements are more indicative of feelings about national identity.
Slashdot Mirror
It stinks!
MST3K also riffed on Pumaman. Plus you have P.U.M.A. EN-V to contemplate. Sounds like someone in marketing is having a bit of fun here.
They were too busy saying things like "Jesus H Christ in a chicken basket."
SG: And we've also now admitted that there were nuclear experiments done where people were literally injected and infected with plutonium, the deadliest substance known to man. So I think that the world didn't fall apart then; it was acknowledged that those things happened. I think that many people understand that extreme measures are taken in the fog of war, or in the fog of confusion of dealing with something like this. I don't know that people would be happy with it - they weren't happy when those other things were disclosed. But of course, the point that we've always made about disclosure, and I think it has to go from disclosing information and documents about UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence to the next phase, which is what we're working on now, and that's the disclosure of the raison d'etre for the secrecy, meaning of course the actual very powerful energy and propulsion systems that are well known in very classified, corporatized projects, but which of course would result in the termination of the fossil fuel industry including all oil, coal, gas, centralized utilities and what have you. But this sort of disclosure is something which can be a positive event and again, one of the things I said many years ago to one of the senior Pentagon people is that if a disclosure is done that hits all the "hot buttons" of paranoia, and fear and insecurity that humans have..
Props for providing an honest to God LOL, /.
That would be interesting, but I'de hate to see what happens when that breaks down.
You call Otis?
And hey, there are hurricane-force winds on Venus. See how it all comes together?
Your post rocked me like a hurricane.
What's the environmental equivalent of a firewall, then? Should I buy Norton AntiDesertification 2012?
We need to be protected from the devastation wrought by more Keanu Reeves movies. I mean...whoa...
Yeah, I thought about that after posting. I used 'lignin' as a blanket statement for any and all methods here. But this has been tried before, as I implied; here's a 1979 news clipping about floating kelp being gasified into methane for use as fuel, for instance. (I can't load these Google News archive pieces in Chrome for some reason, btw).
There have been heaps of schemes for sea-based algae farms growing biofuels, too. Lignin isn't an issue there either. There seems little new in this approach; would it be able to compete with good ol' corn based ethanol? There's so much built infrastructure for that already, and massive corporations throwing their weight behind it. TFA mentions a potential yield of 1% of US demand being met by about 1% of available offshore area, which might be utilized for fuel additives; but how could such a scheme compete with their terrestrial equivalents? Which is why I've always had my doubts about these approaches, to justify going offshore for any resource you need something with high yields and profits, meaning hydrocarbons or fish, pretty much. It just isn't worth it attempting to mine the seafloor yet.
Whoops, forgot that link: Saving Oil in a Hurry.
The WSJ had an article last month on the Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle. The various approaches just haven't worked at all. Try whatever tabletop approach catches your fancy but in the real world lignin just doesn't scale up to anything approaching meaningful commercial volumes, as of yet anyway. And our tax dollars go towards these attempts, keep in mind.
People have been fiddling about with these approaches for almost a century too, and making all manner of grandiose claims; I've parsed news clippings from the 1920s promising a coming era of limitless cheap ethanol to replace rock oil. It would take catastrophically high crude oil prices to really spur development here, but chances are we'd also turn to dirtier approaches like coal-to-liquids which are somewhat more profitable and scalable; or simply employ conservation to the point where the price would drop back down anyway. The International Energy Agency had an excellent document on approaches for
Saving Oil in a Hurry, which may be of interest.
Oh great. "Welcome to Planet Slashdot. In Planet Slashdot your order takes you."
What are these sites like the one mentioned in TFS, and these alternatives you guys keep talking about? All I'm familiar with is the Uncyclopedia. Seems bona fide.
On the front page today:
Please note: As soon as we get around to setting something up,
the English Uncyclopedia will do... something. Possibly. If we remember.
Today's Featured Article - Twilight (novel)
Words are hard. Math is hard. Life is hard. Having a boyfriend is hard — but important. Jacob's hands are hard, too. So are his teeth. But he's not the vampire; that's Edward. And you know what? Edward is hard — and cold — and a boyfriend; he is, along with Jacob, one of the stars of Twilight.
Twilight is a book about hardship and boyfriends and vampires, and it is also hard — to read, that is; the author, Stephanie Meyer, fills it with parentheticals and asides that sometimes get so far off track that it's hard to tell what the sentence, let alone paragraph, was even about, and sometimes, sometimes it gets to the point where the entire thing might as well be a nice, long, careening, self-contradictory minivan, because it's hard to tell where the entire thing is going when it's not going anywhere — which is hard, like Edward Cullen and Jacob... Jacob whatever his last name is; everyone just refers to him as Jacob (and he doesn't even appear much in this one anyway).
In the news
Huntsman ends presidential bid, backs China’s Hu
Gingrich calls kettle black, GOP monkey house continues
Titty-twisting celebrity arrested in Disney World
Titanic comparisons endured after Italian ship disaster (pictured)
Suspicious Bases Outlawed
John Lennon actually said "we are bigger than cheeses," proved right in any case
Cuban bicycles to freedom, quickly returns
US denies raucous bomb attack on Iran unclear scientist
They're working on a 98 MW expansion. Local wastewater is reinjected. Looking for 'Geysers geothermal superfund' about all I find is Wiki on the Sulphur Bank Mine, with a 2009 quote referring to plans to send its wastewater to the Geysers, meaning it's still only a notion. Perhaps you have your Superfunds mixed up? I don't doubt there's a bit of mess involved in geothermal. Powering up Newberry would have to mean stringing a bunch of HVDC lines to get the juice to where it's needed. No doubt this would mean a lot of pissing and moaning, witness the uproar in recent years over bringing in LNG to the mouth of Columbia and piping the gas to destinations south. There are no end of signs here in the Willamette Valley saying "NEVER LNG" etc which haven't been taken down in over a decade. Although perhaps they could strategically direct the lines around highways, behind those bits of forest they don't bother to cut down, to maintain that illusion of the pristine...
The lakes you refer to are actually in the collapsed caldera of the volcano. A lava flow divides the caldera in two. The article mentions geologists who say that Newberry was once a 10k ft tall stratovolcano that collapse, but as far as I know it's always been classed as an unconventional shield volcano, with a variety of flows and the typical low profile of these mountains. Indeed it's difficult to recognize as a volcano when you drive nearby. Nonetheless it's the largest volcano in Oregon, and has always been considered our richest geothermal resource.
Bend has had problems with water shortages in recent times, being on the dry east side of Oregon. TFA says an environmental impact study says they're good to go anyway. Drillers have been fracking the crap out of the Permian Basin in Texas in recent years, which is even drier, suggesting that if you have the $$$$ you can truck in enough water for the job, given a solid enough profit margin. Bend is overrun with left leaning types these days, who'll in all likelihood stand up for clean power, even if it means the odd temblor. Indeed a lot of them have invaded OR from CA in the first place, and won't be strangers to the odd bit of shaking.
FTFA:
The Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) Project consists of six small (11-cm diameter), wide-field automated telescopes based at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, in Cambridge, Mass., and The Submillimeter Array atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
FLWO, as distinct from Cambridge MA, was the author's intent, I believe. Agree that the wording could be clearer. FLWO is owned and operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge.
Toyota says "the National Highway Transportation Administration (NHTSA) has found that almost 40% of all the fatalities on US highways are caused by driving off of the road." Hence the irritating tweets. Heh, it functions from 50 to 112 mph. Thoughtful of Toyota to be looking out for the wellbeing of DeathRace participants.
Are the lives this saves worth the extra added weight and complexity? It's a premium feature too. Not tweeting for those on a budget.
R'n lm gl blf.
That would be the monkeys spanking, correct?
Richard Hoaglund must be fired up about this. They ever figure out what that equilateral triangle in that one crater was?
Have we looked for buried magnetic anomalies? You know, the kind that are 1:4:9.
I posted in some other story about the probes gravity mapping the moon, perhaps they'll find something odd subsurface. Wonder what the resolution for those probes is. The corresponding probes that examined Earth look to have had pretty gross imaging, just going by what's shown in the infographic for that story.
Here's the appropriate soundtrack for reading these comments.
ARTHUR: Fine, um, I don't want to waste anymore of your time, but, uh
I don't suppose you could, uh, tell us where we might find a, um,
find a, uh, a, um, a uh--
TIM: A what...?
ARTHUR: A g--, a g--
TIM: A GRAIL?!
ARTHUR: Yes, I think so.
KNIGHTS: Yes, that's it. Yes.
TIM: Yes!
KNIGHTS: Oh, thank you, splendid, fine.
[boom pweeng boom boom]
I see that they're crashing both probes when their work is finished, too. NASA's really going skimpy on the delta V here.
Australians have told me they consider their country's accent closer to American English, while Canadians have said their accent is closer to that of Britain. To my ear the converse is true, and perhaps these statements are more indicative of feelings about national identity.