Name your favourite BioFuel Technology

And the huge total land areas throughout Europe that farmers are currently paid not to grow anything on? You don't think that might be gainfully employed?
I didn't say that there was no such land, I simply said it may not be worth destroying the soil and causeing other environmental damage for a small net gain of energy.
 
cato said:
...I simply said it may not be worth destroying the soil and causeing other environmental damage for a small net gain of energy.
Can you support any of these three implicit claims?

True there are many old studies of US production of alcohol fuel that show it is negative net energy but most everyone now agrees that even in the US it can be a small positive energy source. It is very good use of land and definitely positive and economically attractive to make cane based alcohol in tropical lands.

As far as "enviromentaly damaging", yes there is some polution produced by the fluid discharged after the alcohol has been distilled from it, if it is just dumped in the river etc, but not hard to do this with zero enviromental impact*. Certainly crop produced alcohol is the only economically feasible way to REDUCE CO2 already released into the air as part of an energy system.

As part of the cane plant (roots and lower stock) is plowed under and the crushed cane after passing thru a cow makes the soil more fertile why do you speak of "destroying the soil"?

Support you implicit (and I think false) claims or retract them.
______________________________________
* It is not a toxic discharge like associated with solar cell production. You could drink a gallon every day and probably the worst that would happen is your teeth might decay more often.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
soil distruction:
Reports during the 1970's indicated that large-scale agricultural techniques in the United States were depleting the soil about 8 times faster than they were being created naturally. Recently, in 1994, the United States Department of Agriculture reported that approximately 12,000 pounds of soil were being lost per acre per year from wind and water erosion of U.S.
http://www.growbiointensive.org/biointensive/soil.html

other damage:
Producing food and fiber involves many activities and practices that can affect the quality of water resources under and near the field. For example, tilling the soil and leaving it without plant cover for extended periods of time can accelerate soil erosion. Residues of chemical fertilizers and pesticides may wash off the field into streams or leach through the soil into ground water. Irrigation can move salt and other dissolved minerals to surface water. Livestock operations produce large amounts of waste, which if not properly disposed, can threaten human health as well as contribute to excess nutrient problems in streams, rivers, lakes, and estuaries. When pollutants degrade water quality, they impose costs on water users. These costs are in the form of degraded ecosystems that people wish to remain healthy, reduced recreational opportunities, reduced commercial fishing catches and shellfish bed closings, increased water treatment costs, threats to human health, and damage to reservoirs and water conveyance systems. These costs provide the impetus for policies to reduce water pollution.
link:http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/arei/ah722/arei2_3/arei2_3waterqimpacts.pdf


Among the many environmental costs that need to be considered in a full cost accounting of industrial agriculture are

* the damage to fisheries from oxygen-depleting microorganisms fed by fertilizer runoff

* the cleanup of surface and groundwater polluted with animal waste

* the increased health risks borne by agricultural workers and farmers exposed to pesticides
link:http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_envi...s-and-benefits-of-industrial-agriculture.html
 
I think the reason people think it is a good idea is because it looks like one on paper. at least until realize what the real costs may be. paying less for fuel may be offset by the cost of clean water and lower crop yield increasing the cost of food.
 
Singularity said:
Billy T

I think methane is bad for Enviornment
It is, but less so than most other fuels. It is CH4 so when it burns you get CO2 + 2H2O. I do not recal the heats of combustion of carbon and hydrogen but am reasonably sure hydrogen's is greater, so perhaps 75% of the energy release is associatd with water production. - Zero enviromental damage. That is, compared to the combustion of coal, which gets 100% of the energy release from carbon combustion , methane combustion is only about 25% as damaging as coal fuel. (this of course is assuming that the CO2 man is releasing is damaging to the environment, as many believe, but quite a good case for the opposite can also be made, especially in a world needing to grow more food.)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
cato said:
Yes it is possible to destroy soil, create polution etc, but not necesary. Your references speak of large scale industrial agriculture as sometime practiced in the US and of leaving ground without plant cover for long periods and of fertilizer (chemical, I assume) run off into streams. etc.

Based on these possible mal practices, you are claiming that one should avoid biofuel production? In Brazil, very little chemical fertilize is used for growing cane and the crushed cane produced,after juice is extracted for the sugar, is often passed thru cows to fertilize the ground in a very natural way. (Some is burned to facilitate the distilation and/or produce electric power locally.) The main erosion problems are associated with areas that have had their virgin timber clear cut and then DO NOT GET PUT TO AGRICULTURAL USE. I have never seen coutour plowing as widely used as I have in Brazil, where once one leaves the steep, fully-forested, coastal mountins, the land is gentil sloping for the most part with little errosion.

Summary, Yes you can rape the land, but you need not when using it. I have already agreed that growing biofuel in US is not as economically or energetically efficient as in tropical countries, but just because the US FDA can find examples of poor pratices in US does not mean that all agriculture or even biofuel agriculture is not worth the enviromental cost for the "small" energy gain as you asserted.

Agriculture is the most economically attractive form of solar energy utilization and properly done, self sustaining, if not actually soil improving. Just look at the Amish / Plain People of the Pennsylvania - after 200 year of farming the same land it is more fertile than when they started. They too don't use chemical fertilizer, whose production eats up much of the net energy yield of biofuels and makes the system net "small," perhaps even negative for Iowa's corn derived alcohol.
 
I don't think it is possible to produce the amount of biofuel required to put a dent in demand without harming the environment. yeah, the bazillions can produce cheap biofuel, because they cut down the rain forest, and use that soil. producing cheap biofuel and maintaining the environment is likely impossible. you should show me the research that has been done that proves that you can manage the land like the Amish and still produce large amounts of cheap biofuel.

I agree that it is probably better than current solar cells, thats why I think algae is a good idea. but the problem of maintaining the large pools required for such an operation needs to be solved. it may not be possible to solve the problems with biofuel. we may simply have to choose to wait until our fossil fuel supplies become low enough that it becomes economical to grow biofuels and maintain the environment.
 
Heres my latest Idea.

Use fine Crushed Stones for farming in deserts. Mix the fine dust in to desert sand and use it for production of BioFuels. Use the vast deserts.

Singularity,

I think its a greate idea, GM BioFuel can be genetically as fucked up as possible, ie. no ones gona eat it so it should be fair to have no limits on fucking upt the genome of thoes plants to get as much fuel as possible.

Sorry but the Anti-GM food activists think GM is Fucking up food.
 
cato said:
...you should show me the research that has been done that proves that you can manage the land like the Amish and still produce large amounts of cheap biofuel.
I agree that it is probably better than current solar cells, thats why I think algae is a good idea. but the problem of maintaining the large pools required for such an operation needs to be solved. it may not be possible to solve the problems with biofuel. we may simply have to choose to wait until our fossil fuel supplies become low enough that it becomes economical to grow biofuels and maintain the environment.
I already posted a study by best university in Brazil in technical agriculture area that surveyed Brazil and found the currently available land with good soil (rainforest does not have it and is being raped for the timber), road access, good rain, etc. and forget the acreage results but if all placed into cane production (would not be as other crops need to be rotated) could supply both US and Brazil's entire mobile fuel needs.

Sugar cane is one of only a few plants that convert solar energy via a four step, rather than three step process. The four step process is more efficient. Algae would be less efficient than cane until GM gets to work on it, but the real break thru is via "enzymatic processing" of any cellulose source. (Brazil's agricultural centers are working hard on this. - Brazil is very good in modern biotech. Brazil has been on the cover of Science Magazine for some of their DNA sequencing work, etc. A real world leader, but mostly applied to making crops more productive, diseases resistant, etc, except for their cloned cows etc. now in "second generation cloned" work/ studies.)

Brazil is the world leader in eucalypts* pulp production (for newspapers etc.) Much of the leaves, small limbs, etc are not currently worth transport/ trouble and cost. What is discarded now in the fields will probably supply all US mobile fuel needs some day if cutting the unused grass wet lands, etc is not cheaper or legally prohibited to keep them as wild life tourist attactions.

PS, current oil prices make "biofuels" produced in Brazil (and in many other lands with 12 month growing seasons, cheap land, cheap labor for cane cutting.) "economical." Why do you think my "flex fuel" car has had only about 50 liters (~ 15 gallons) of gas put into it in the last 2.5 years I have had it? Answer: 100% alcohol is cheaper per mile and adds less air pollution to Sao Paulo's air, which I breathe.
_____________________________________
*Amazing how fast the genetically selected trees grow. Some that I know were only a few feet tall three years ago are at least 30 feet tall now! Eucalypts, is not native to Brazil, so it is legal to treat it like a crop, plant young trees between the rows of older trees and havest a crop every 4 or 5 years. All the big paper companies are here, "farming pulp" year after year and their capital (the soil) is getting better annually.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Someone a while ago brought up the interesting point that growing crops like corn for ethanol will not mitigate the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now I don't know if it's really true or not, but I think that extracting biogas from waste isn't such a bad idea because assuming that it displaces ethanol, it will save land space to plant trees and such that will shift the carbon equilibrium towards the earth and not the atmosphere.
 
While bio mass fuels do not decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they do not increase it, as fossil fuels do. That is their value.
 
Ophiolite said:
While bio mass fuels do not decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they do not increase it, as fossil fuels do. That is their value.
Hmmm... I propose theists as our new bio mass panacea, would solve a lot of problems :p
 
I guess you have a point Billy T =], I have been thinking along the lines of America the whole time. however, I still think it would deplete the soil. other farming may be less harmful to soil, but I think that any technique that produces biofuels would leave too little waste to mulch back to usable soil.

When U grow plants and trees, arent U converting carbonDioxide into hydrocarbons ?
well, any co2 you get from the air when it is growing is just going to be sent back into it when its burned + whatever was taken from the ground.
 
Singularity said:
When U grow plants and trees, arent U converting carbonDioxide into hydrocarbons ?
As I said earlier, undereducated. You obviously don't know the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates. Yes, you can burn sugars, starches, etc. but I wouldn't advise trying to eat any hydrocarbons. :D
 
Don't know if its true, the company Genecor says it has developed tech that can reduce the cellulase cost of making a gallon of ethanol from $5/gallon to about 20 cents/gallon.
http://www.genencor.com/wt/gcor/ethanol

Genecor's the same company that makes the stain-dissolving enzymes used in Tide laundry detergent.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top