Carbohydrate-Based Synthesis To Replace Petroleum Derived Hydrocarbons? 166
someWebGeek writes "From PhysOrg's 'Taking biofuel from forest to highway,' University of British Columbia biofuel expert Jack Saddler says, 'we will become less dependent on fossil fuels and will become more dependent on fuels made from the sugars and chemicals found in plants.' Nothing too new there; the idea of biofuels eventually taking over from petroleum distillates has been around for ages. However, Saddler contends further that 'Similar to an oil refinery that processes crude oil to make thousands of supplementary products like plastics, dyes, paints, etc., the biorefinery would use leftover agricultural and forest material to make many of the same products, but from a sustainable and renewable resource.' I remember my organic chem instructor back in '81 telling us that eventually the textbooks would have to be rewritten. There would be no presumption of fractional distillation of thousands of basic compounds from petroleum, and the teaching emphasis would shift to synthesis from simple hydrocarbons. He noted that we'd all miss 'the good, ole days' when synthetic fibers, plastics, etc. were cheap... or even an economically viable option. I can live without rayon, but, dang, I'm gonna miss polyvinyl chloride!"
Factor in one more thing though? (Score:4, Insightful)
While this is great and makes sense - I can't see this happening until much later in the peak oil scenario.
Fabricating all (most) of the stuff we make from oil now from plant matter will be a much less efficient operation and require much much more energy inserted during the production/refining process - which will of course make it much more expensive and inefficient to do. With that, I can't see it happening on any sort of serious scale until we have started running out of oil sands - let alone oil wells.
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Fabricating all (most) of the stuff we make from oil now from plant matter will be a much less efficient operation and require much much more energy inserted during the production/refining process - which will of course make it much more expensive and inefficient to do. With that, I can't see it happening on any sort of serious scale until we have started running out of oil sands - let alone oil wells.
Google for EROEI and maybe theoildrum.com re-evaluate. If you have to burn 10 barrels equivalent of crude oil to make 1 barrel equivalent of food grade veg oil, then what is the break even point? (And no, I very unfortunately do not have that backwards)
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Google came up with something about "Old McDonald had a farm..." WTF...?
Oh - you said, "EROEI," not "EIEIO". My bad...
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EROEI is a very useful metric for energy sources. The less your product resembles energy generation, the less usefull it is. As far as I know, plastics don't resemble energy generation at all.
By the way, what would you use as the numerator when calculating the EROEI of a kilogram of PET?
Re:Factor in one more thing though? (Score:5, Informative)
If you have to burn 10 barrels equivalent of crude oil to make 1 barrel equivalent of food grade veg oil
I have read and heard this so many time here on Slashdot now, and I am gonna call you on it.
If it takes a ratio of 10:1, crude to produce vegetable oil. Then how come a cheap vegetable oil can be found for a 3-4 bucks a gallon?
While the cost of 10 gallon of crude costs 30-40 dollars?
Are the producers just giving us all that crude for free out of the goodness of their hearts?
Seriously people use your brains, think for your selves.
Re:Factor in one more thing though? (Score:5, Interesting)
A barrel of crude is 42 gallons. So one barrel of crude would make, by your calculations, about 4 gallons of vegetable oil. At current prices of $105/gallon, that would be a cost of about $26 her gallon of vegetable oil.
However, I believe those 10-to-1 figures are for energy, not volume. According to wikipedia, a gallon of crude oil is a standard measurement: 1.7 MWh. Per gallon, that's 40.4 kWh. I can't readily find the energy in vegetable oil from google, however a quick conversion from calories (120 kcal/tbsp = 80,832 kcal/gal) gives us 94 kWh/gal.
That's quite a but more per gallon, giving us only 1.8 gallons of vegetable oil per barrel of crude oil, raising the cost to $56.66 per gallon. Obviously these figures aren't right.
Is that the whole story? Let's consider how vegetable oil is made. Corn oil is rather cheap, so let's look at it. You have to extract the oil from the germ of the corn. Wikipedia again tells us that one bushel of corn yields 1.55 pounds of oil. One bushel is 35.24 L dry. Corn oil has a density of 9.25 g/c^3 (g/mL). Conversions (9.25 g/mL = 77.2 lbs/gal).
Phew! So that 35.24 L (one bushel) of dry corn only yields .02 of a gallon of corn oil! So you need FIFTY bushels of corn to yield one gallon of corn oil!
How much energy is in 50 bushels of corn? Conversions again: one cup of corn (raw) is 132 kcal. So that's 2112 kcal/gal. A bushel is defined as 8 gallons dry, so there are 16,896 kcal/bushel of raw corn. 50 bushels of corn means you need 844,800 kcal of corn to make one gallon of corn oil, which is only 80,832 kcal.
There's your missing energy. You need about 10.5 calories of corn for every calorie of corn oil. Or to put it another way, you need 982.5 kWh of corn energy to produce 94 kWh of corn oil energy.
Take our earlier estimate of 10-to-1 gallon-for-gallon of $56.66, divide by 10.5, and you get a much more reasonable $5.40 for a gallon of corn oil. Figure in some government subsidies, and differences in the two markets and some market fluctuations, and you are very close to your $4 a gallon bulk price for vegetable oil.
Use your brain, think for yourself, but be sure you have all he data and knowledge you need to draw a valid conclusion. The 10-to-1 figure is a general estimate that I just demonstrated is reasonably accurate. Adjust your tinfoil hat and start scrutinizing your conspiracy theories a little more closely. :)
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And of course, now I see I've posted this twice. Haha. My bad!
Oh well, my karma is excellent, I don't need to be modded up, I guess. :D1
Re:Factor in one more thing though? (Score:4)
You are off by a factor of ten on the density of corn oil. 77 pounds per gallon should throw a red flag, since that is almost as heavy as lead. End result is corn oil has almost as much energy as the corn itself.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_density_of_corn_oil [answers.com]
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barrel, gallons, $/gallon, MWh, kWh, kcal/tbsp, kcal/gal, kWh/gal, bushel, pounds, L g/c^3, g/mL, lbs/gal,
bushels/gallon, kcal, kcal/gal, kcal/bushel
You guys need to lay off those medieval units and stop wasting 60% of your clock cycles on UNIT CONVERSION.
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I just wrote a long post explaining it, and somehow I wasn't logged in, it got posted as AC, and now it's not here anymore. I am very frustrated because I spent about 20 minutes doing calculations.
Here's the gist of what I had put:
The 10-to-1 figure is for energy, not volume.
A barrel of crude is 42 gallons and has 1.7 MWh of energy. Current market price is $105 per barrel. That's 40.5 kWh/gal. Corn oil has 94 kWh/gal. (Calculated from 120 kcal/tbsp.)
That would mean you could make 1.8 gal of corn oil from a
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There are two things that you are forgetting. First one gallon of crude oil does not make one gallon of gas. That, and all of the energy that is required to turn the crude oil into gas makes gas much more expensive than crude oil. Secondly, corn, and by extension, corn oil, is highly subsidized in the US. Corn is a major ingredient in most "vegetable oil" and fuel grade ethanol in the US. Please note, I do not know whether or not you are right. I just had to make those two points.
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The problem isn't the cost of a barrel of veg oil vs. a barrel of crude, the issue is production to run things. Ultimately we'll need to balance our energy needs between the Big 4 (Wind, Solar, Hydroelectric, and Hydrogen). Biofuels are great but fall short of being able to cover the loss of oil as an energy source. Course I also support the Big 4 as a major turning point for humanity and wish for it to come sooner. It will be a great source for transportation though. I could totally see most cars in t
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Hydroelectric is maxed out in the US, and hydrogen isn't an energy source at all, just a possible storage mechanism. Wind and solar alone will never meet our energy needs. It actually takes more energy to transport food than it does to grow it, and your brave new world can't get food to the grocery store on 3 gallons of biofuel.
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Hydroelectric on a large scale is maxed out. We have many small scale choices to use. Hydrogen is our greatest future asset in storing power from both the sun and wind. Ultimately I look at the reality of our lives requiring far less power as the way out of a great deal of this issue. In the past 5 years has been the first time in history electrical consumption went down on average as CFLs took over for regular incandescent light bulbs. With power savings occurring in each new device we buy for mobilit
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Wind alone can meet our energy needs: offshore wind potential in the U.S. is 900,000 MW, which is just about equivalent to our current generation capacity. Add solar, and efficiency improvements and a wind-solar world is in our reach.
False. This ignores the nature of power generated by wind energy, as well as the issues related to storage for peak use and transporting power inland 2,000 miles. The tractor trailers used to for distribution of just about every consumer good are nowhere near being able to run on anything but diesel
Incorrect. While this is an article of faith among "localvores", in point of fact food production and processing uses more energy. According to the Worldwatch Institute,
Worldwatch Institute has an agenda (similar to yours, I assume), and have cooked the numbers to make it look like transportation of food is irrelevant. Incorrect. Throwing in every packing plant, processing p
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Human beings on omnivores - which means we can live on plant or animals. So while you may not be a rabbit, you can lives on plants.
Aside from the typos in your claim, it's false. Humans require meat and animal products, milk and eggs at a minimum, for a healthy diet. No plant natively contains all the essential amino acids required for human nutrition. And I refuse to give up natural food for heavily processed ones (which is the only way to get adequate proteins from tofu - still a lower-quality protein than from meat and fish).
And bacon. I needs me some bacon.
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Humans require meat and animal products, milk and eggs at a minimum, for a healthy diet. No plant natively contains all the essential amino acids required for human nutrition.
And bacon. I needs me some bacon.
Humans do not in any way require meat, milk or eggs for a healthy diet. Avocado, quinoa, and soybeans each contain all of the essential amino acids the body needs. Besides that, combining vegetarian foods can supply one with plenty of essential amino acids; like the famous beans and rice, or peanut butter on whole wheat bread. Saying we need milk is a little silly, considering it is produced by a completely different species for its own young. If you think about it, drinking milk is actually a little st
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Humans do not in any way require meat, milk or eggs for a healthy diet. Avocado, quinoa, and soybeans each contain all of the essential amino acids the body needs.
No, they don't.
or peanut butter on whole wheat bread.
Like many others (sometimes estimated at 15% of the population), I cannot tolerate gluten, which severely restricts the vegetable protein available to us.
Saying we need milk is a little silly, considering it is produced by a completely different species for its own young. If you think about it, drinking milk is actually a little strange; ours is the only species that drinks the milk of other species.
Yet human digestion has evolved, in most people, to break down lactose and utilize animal milk as an important source of nutrition, protein, and good fats.
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Studies have shown that Wind power can generate more than enough power for the planet.
Is this like the "studies" that have shown gerbils on treadmills can generate all the power we need?
There are so many problems with this assertion I don't know where to begin. Wind is intermittent, and wind farms usually have two power ratings: A capacity number, and a capacity factor number. The capacity of a wind farm might be 300 megawatts, but how much electricity it will actually produce depends on many factors, and if you look at the average production of all those wind turbines over a certain perio
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That makes an unfortunate presumption that the energy must come from compustion, and not some other source.
Energy comes in more forms than black gold my friend. The problem is getting people to stop measuring energy in "equivalent barrels of oil". Energy is better measured in units designed for it, like joules.
When you agnosticize the unit, and permit non-oil energy sources for the reaction, and further eliminate the notion of creating the oil for the purposes of combustion (the whole idea is to stop doing
Another couple of factors (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, I've read we're burning about 400 years worth of laid-down plant carbohydrate per year, in the form of fossil fuels.
That's right. To obtain the equivalent amount of energy from non-fossil biofuels as we're currently getting from fossil fuels, we'd have to increase the amount of plant material being grown on Earth by a factor of 400 times current production, and use all of that for biofuels. (Assuming various conversion factors work out roughly equivalently for the two processes.)
Second, people need food more than cars, and forests need trees (and the Earth ecosystem needs robust biodiversity as opposed to massive tracts of mono-culture biofuel tree-farms).
Re:Another couple of factors (Score:5, Informative)
Right now, I've read we're burning about 400 years worth of laid-down plant carbohydrate per year, in the form of fossil fuels. That's right. To obtain the equivalent amount of energy from non-fossil biofuels as we're currently getting from fossil fuels, we'd have to increase the amount of plant material being grown on Earth by a factor of 400 times
No that is not what it means at all, in any way shape or form.
What it means is that we are using fossil fuel at an rate of 400 times of which new fossil fuel is produced by natural processes. Only a small percentage of biomass will ever become trapped in the correct anaerobic environment and then fossilized over millions of years. So there is lots of biomass available for use as fuel.
Re:Another couple of factors (Score:4, Informative)
Your figure assumes that 100% of the plant matter per year is transformed into coal/oil/etc. This is not even close. Only about 0.0093% of the carbon in plant matter becomes fossil fuels. The remainder stays in the carbon cycle.
That comes to 3.72% of annual plant matter generation to supply the same energy. Though probably at least double that to account for efficiency.
Whether that amount is sustainable is left as an exercise for someone else.
http://plus.maths.org/content/burning-buried-sunshine [maths.org]
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Right you are. My bad.
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have no clue if you had a point??
at 42 gallons to the barrel though, that is $210 for your veg oil....
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While I don't have the background to refute this, it makes sense to me, but only when you consider the fuel production side of the equation.
It seems to me that there are other factors that might make up, in part or whole, for the lessened ef
Re:Factor in one more thing though? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can the waste product(s) of using plant matter used to create biofuels be reclaimed and used elsewhere? To make paper, or perhaps clothing? Fertilizer? Feed?
Biofuels would not be likely. If they are trying to make oil replacements, then the majority of the energy contained in the plant matter would be going into oil replacement. The problem is that the very high energy density of oil/petroleum products are the exact thing that makes it appealing. Breaking the carbon chains in oil releases a very large amount of energy proportional to the amount of fuel. Granted, there are much more energy dense forms of fuel - but they are also very expensive. To make something that can store as much energy as oil from something like plants will always require that a lot of energy is inserted - so that later when the fuel is used it releases more. While it isn't impossible and is being improved all the time, it still basically requires the right fungus/bacteria/whatever to convert from low energy plant matter to something that is usable for us.
Sorry not to use a car analogy, but this one is much more fitting: Consider oil to be steak and plant matter to be plant matter. Currently we are able to drill for steak and eat it. It is a great source of energy for us. Sadly, our supplies of steak are starting to run a bit low. Now, someone comes along with a cow and says that they can convert normal grass into steak with this beast that wanders around eating grass and converting it into much higher energy dense food. The problem is that for this cow thing to make steak, it has to slowly wander around, eating huge amounts of grass and then very slowly over many years convert that plant matter into meat. This is the exact same scenario, but rather than having to wait years for a cow to make steak, oilfields are created over many, many thousands of years.
To make a high density fuel (basically something that we want and is useful) that energy had to be inserted at some point. If someone can work out how to make a cheap, clean energy source that doesn't require a vast investment of time waiting for it to mature - then there will be nobel prizes, presidential handshakes and all the gratitude of the world waiting for them.
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Currently we are able to drill for steak and eat it.
Quoted for truth.
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If someone can work out how to make a cheap, clean energy source that doesn't require a vast investment of time waiting for it to mature
We already have that part in the form of solar thermal. Infinite free and clean energy. The problem is storing it, basically we need better batteries that charge fast and have a higher energy density.
We should be throwing money at developing better batteries.
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We already have that part in the form of solar thermal. Infinite free and clean energy.
Not really. Our current technology in making solar cells is highly toxic and leaves a lot of waste behind. Sure, the energy that the solar cell itself makes is clean and infinite - if you don't take into account the degradation of the cell itself. but therin lies the problem. Photovoltic cells degrade over time and produce less and less charge. Solar thermal plants produce many by-products in their upkeep and regular maintenance.
Even keeping all this at bay, batteries are still a problem. We do indeed have
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Our current technology in making solar cells is highly toxic and leaves a lot of waste behind.
Newer technology does not. Organic solar cells in particular.
Solar thermal plants produce many by-products in their upkeep and regular maintenance.
No they don't. What by-products are you talking about?
Plus you don't just have to generate electricity, you can use it on your house to heat water.
Wind isn't always there, and solar cycles on a regular basis.
Do some research. There are plenty of places on earth where wind is completely reliable, 356 days of the year. It never stops so all you need is sufficient capacity for the lowest speed. If these winds did ever stop we would have bigger things to worry about.
As for solar it doesn't matter that the sun g
Death Throes (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Death Throes (Score:4, Informative)
One has to wonder just how hard the petroleum industry will fight these developments, though.
Until we have a better means of producing the carbohydrates, I'm guessing you'll see more death throes from the people who are starving because of the food we'r'e not growing.
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Except of course that there's tons of land that isn't suitable for growing food crops that we can use to grow crops for industrial material. There's quite a lot of contaminated land out there, for example.
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The plant material will be heavily physically and chemically processed before being used in much the same way that crude oil is now. A good deal of the contaminated land I'm talking about is contaminated with petrochemicals or even natural crude oil in the first place. Given that the source materials for most of our current plastics and fuels are contaminated by definition already, using plants grown in contaminated soil shouldn't really be a problem. The crops won't meet standards for human consumption any
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They will fight it as long as it is more profitable for them to exploit their existing manufacturing base for crude oil.
Re:Death Throes (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is profitable, "the petroleum industry" will most likely not fight it, but adapt and probably become large investor and user of this technology (probably ruining many ecosystems in some poorer countries as a side effect). The oil processing multinationals (not the well owners, these are mostly state-owned in feudal countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia) have been considering the "peak oil" and what it means to them long before it became a fashionable topic on the internets. They realize that the less oil there is, the more vulnerable they are.
They got a taste of it after the oil rose significantly after certain events from 2003 onwards. Many oil-exporting countries started to re-evaluate their contracts with the big oil multinationals. Competition for the wells from companies from rising developing countries is increasing, and control of technology may not be a very viable option.
So, everyone in the field seems to have some alternative strategy. Some have invested heavily in shale oil, some in underwater extraction, some in biomass, some in totally unrelated stuff. You can fully expect that if this thing shows promise beyond an article on physorg.com many will look into it.
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You won't miss polyvinyl chloride... (Score:2)
End of oil for fuel != end of oil. (Score:4, Informative)
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Why wait?
And yes, I know the answer is "money". But isn't waiting too much exactly what did put we in the situation we are now with energy? Let people research.
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apply your gut check numbers to fresh water (Score:2)
it's scarier
http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/water2/page/3209.aspx [grida.no]
"It is estimated that two out of every three people will live in water-stressed areas by the year 2025. In Africa alone, it is estimated that 25 countries will be experiencing water stress (below 1,700 m3 per capita per year) by 2025. Today, 450 million people in 29 countries suffer from water shortages."
that's in 13 years... not 70... and it's freaking WATER! (pop quiz, what do you require, oil or water to live?)
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There is plenty of water, just not a lot of fresh water. If you have energy you can turn salt water into fresh water. It just means that water is going to be very expensive and so food will have to be grown using less water. There are hydroponic and aquaponic systems already that use as little as 10% of what is used for dirt farming.
The real issue is still energy.
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Oil ISN'T going any anytime soon. Oil is created as a biological process of decomposition of organic matter.
What's ending is the era of CHEAP, EASILY ACCESSIBLE oil. There's lot of oil, but it's going to get increasingly expensive to get at.
In fact, we should get used to gas prices. Just 15 years ago oil prices bottomed out and we enjoyed $1/gallon gas. Now it's over $3 a gallon. Prior to the economic meltdown (which is responsible for keeping gas and oil prices low) we're seeing $4 a gallon. When the econo
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Except that people have been doing that calculation, and coming up with similar numbers for 80 years.
Over the last 3 decades, we've consumed more than 3x the worlds TOTAL known reserves in 1976. And today's proven reserves are 2x what they were then.
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I guess it depends on what you mean by "plenty of time". I don't think that less than 50 years for the end of the "cheap petroleum era" is "plenty of time". And a decade or two before supply starts declining is even closer. A decline in supply of a couple of percent a year after the peak could be pretty economically painful.
Wood wasn't enough to fuel the Middle Ages (Score:5, Interesting)
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While you have a good point, there are a few points to consider:
- The wood was not being used efficiently. A startling amount of the energy in the wood was going up the stack.
- The forests were not being managed in any real way. No replanting, clear cutting. Forestry in North America, for all its warts, is currently sustainable.
- We aren't limited to wood from trees - switchgrass gives you a bunch of cellulose and grows much faster than a tree.
- This discussion isn't about energy, but about raw materials.
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Europe, not being under a uniform set of rules, has a mix of history when it comes to forest management. Some rulers saw their strategic importance and took steps to protect them, some were unable to, and others just went for the short-term. Japan had the good fortune(?) to have an emperor who claimed all forests to be exclusively his, thus preserving them. These are exceptions rather than the general rule - most cultures use their forests up entirely.
But don't worry, thanks to wood pellets being used as a replacement for heating oil,
So far, those are being made out of scrap (at least in N
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Ah, that's too bad - you should never have given up Canada! :)
In all seriousness, I suppose that wood plantations are better than clear cutting whatever forest you have left.
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Erm, wood plantations *are* clear cutting whatever forest you have and treating trees as something like grain or whatever.
Right, but you aren't cutting down any new forest - presumably just using existing cleared land. It is sustainable so long as good farming practice is used and the land is not exhausted.
true forests are exceedingly rare e.g. less than 1% of all German "forests").
Yeah, I remember that from traveling through Germany. The "Black Forest" sure wasn't what it was when the Romans wrote about how it blocked out all light! :)
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The problem of replacing oil for transport is much smaller than the problem of replacing fossil fuels entirely. (Whether it is enough smaller remains to be seen.) Nobody is talking about relying on trees as fuel for power stations and steel refineries.
(Also, I don't think they deforested Europe like this - trees for charcoal were (or certainly could be) managed sustainably - it is just that supply could not keep up with growing demand as steel production increased.)
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Re:Wood wasn't enough to fuel the Middle Ages (Score:5, Informative)
Trees are about as effective in doing photosynthesis as any other plant.
That's not true, there's significant differences in efficiency between various species of plants. Most grasses for example are much more efficient than trees, which is why grassland can support huge herds of large animals, but a forest can't.
See: Photosynthetic Efficiency [wikipedia.org], where it has a table of some typical efficiencies:
Plants, typical : 0.1%
Typical crop plants: 1-2%
Sugarcane: 7-8% peak
This is because more than one kind of photosynthesis has evolved, with somewhat different chemical processes. Look up C3 carbon fixation [wikipedia.org] and C4 carbon fixation [wikipedia.org] for the differences.
There is a significant research effort going on looking into ways of taking the genes for the more efficient types of photosynthesis and merging that into less efficient plants. This could be used to make fruit trees grow much faster, or to create algae that can be used to produce alcohol or oil at efficiencies approaching those of solar electric power.
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Are you selling something? (Score:2)
people who aren't mixing up average and peak efficiencies get wildly different results.
From the linked page: "Purchase this article from the publisher for $14.00 USD"
The diffuse nature of the energy collected... (Score:2)
... argues against it. This is why I am perpetually skeptical of all solar, wind, and tidal energy schemes: they inevitably and always elide crucial details about the economic availability of storage, or of the energy/dollar cost (the latter reflecting the former) of buildout, frequently demanding subsidy to bring them to parity with fossil fuel systems. Biofuels have even worse things to contend with, including biologic sequestration from competing species (expensive containment), and corresponding reducti
I am not an environmentalist (Score:3)
Because that term is far too anthropocentric (it's all about me me me and MY environment, which surrounds and exists for me me me.)
But my sense of ethics (and my theory of wise action) does extend to eco-systems, and runs along the lines of:
It is almost certainly wise, and probably ethically sound and morally advanced, to allow a good number of the complex eco-systems on Earth of all scales to evolve in a context which is not dominated by human intervention.
And no, that view cannot be equated to the world b
Re:Storage is hard (Score:2)
Optimistic much?...
How hard is storage compared to how hard building the current grid was? 100s of times harder? I think not.
Secondly, efficient long-distance transmission (HVDC? Super-conducting?) and smart switching can be combined with storage to provide a comprehensive solution to intermittent power leveling. Intermittent sources and demand response negawatts can become a large part of the "new base load". We have computers and digital communications network nowadays. May as well use them.
Not at current energy consumption (Score:2)
A paper by a professor named Jeff Dukes back in 1997 calculated that in that year we burned 400 years worth of biomass using fossil fuels.
http://plus.maths.org/content/burning-buried-sunshine
The idea we can consume the same amount of energy by growing biomass is a pipe dream. Many of the processes that produce liquid fuels via biological processes end requiring more input energy that can be extracted, usually because water has to be removed from the final product which requires heat. That is why so many com
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I don't see where it's refuted by the same qualitative source as a published scientific paper. And cellulosic ethanol? That's been attempted for over 100 years and nobody has been able to scale it up to get a positive energy return on it for the reason I mentioned. It simply takes too much energy to remove the water.
Rayon isn't synthetic (Score:5, Informative)
Out of all the examples you could pick you picked rayon? Rayon is produced using cellulose (wood), sodium hydroxide, carbon disulfide and sulfuric acid. It isn't a synthetic fiber, and there isn't any petroleum involved in the process. Rayon is just cellulose that has been dissolved and regenerated as a fiber.
Interesting, Rayon and PVC (Score:5, Interesting)
Time transfer is the problem (Score:2)
Both fossil fuel and biofuel are essentially vehicles for transfering the sun's energy to a tangible, packageable format. Biofuels are great, and we should continue to develop them, and deploy where economically viable. But biofuels cannot solve the basic problem of what fossil fuels provide: in addition to being incredibly convenient (dense portable energy from a hole in the ground), fossil fuels provide stored sun energy from accumulated years past. Millions of years.
Biofuel can deliver only one year'
What I'd like to see (Score:2)
Where do we get fertilizers? (Score:2)
BTW, we are, in a sense, made from gas. The process eventually generates half of our protein and feeds at least 1/3 of humanity. But without it there probably would be no WWI, Revolution, WWII... It was developed by the same guy who created Cyclon-B. http://en.wi [wikipedia.org]
why not make oil instead? (Score:2)
I don't get why they keep fermenting it into alcohol when there exists many species that produce lots of oil and there are micros that will turn cellulose into oil. I don't get it.
Here's a wild and possibly half baked idea... I warned you... do we know of any insects that will eat just about anything and produce an oil? I don't know if that's a commercially viable process but if you gave big colonies of insects all our agro waste... maybe they could turn it into a fuel source?
I'm thinking something like ter
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It's because alcohol is an almost perfect replacement for gasoline and can be used to extend the current supply or replace it if needed.
Replacement fuels are only useful if they actually, you know, replace what we're already using. Or would you have the biofuel companies give everyone a free car that use their special fuel?
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I'm not sure if we're having the same question.
I asked why the biofuel isn't an oil rather then a fermented sugar? Because they can obviously make oils from plants... and if we could get an oil based fuel from them it would fit into our existing industrial paradigm better.
Wait, this is new? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like they jumped into the game a little too early, or just weren't able to find enough venture capital to perfect the system. Certainly as the price of oil continues to rise and the technology improves this is a process that could certainly be brought back. And note that since they're using organic waste the process is carbon neutral.
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I remember that site.
IIRC, they had problems with emission odor complaints which also caused some shutdowns.
I also seem to remember that they had some problems with the turkey processor either raising the price of turkey guts to the point that the plant wasn't economical or they had another buyer and thus cut the supply.
Wasn't the plant net energy positive, too? Although that would be just the process and its hard to know if the larger system (involving delivery) was net energy positive or if it only reall
nutrient cycling (Score:5, Interesting)
As an agricultural scientist, I always feel slightly uncomfortable when biofuel producers start talking about using 'agricultural waste'. Increasingly, this 'waste' is now used by farmers as an integral part in boosting soil carbon and increasing biological activity as it breaks down, improving soils and improving subsequent crop yields.
The value of this, though often difficult to measure is significant and very real. But I worry shortsighted farmers looking for a quick buck may lose these less tangible benefits, leading to further soil degradation and lower yields in the future.
Joule Biotechnology (Score:2)
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Everyone claims, nobody delivers. File it with fusion, practical photoelectric (yeah, yeah, I know, just around the corner), and flying cars. Joule has been making claims since 2009. Remember Changing World Technologies and their oil-from-anything claims? Lots of hype, ending in bankruptcy.
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This is ridiculous (Score:2)
It's absolutely ridiculous that this question is still being debated. It was clear way back during the OPEC oil embargo, where the future was... Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House to make a point.
There is absolutely, positively NO QUESTION that the future of passenger cars is direct storage of electricity, very likely in plain old rechargeable batteries. Electricity which was mostly supplied by solar power. The math worked decades ago, and it works now. It's insane that, now t
When you can produce 160 exajoules a year... (Score:2)
which is about what oil contributes energetically, each year, to the world's economy, and NOT create an ecological catastrophe or starve everyone in the 3rd world, please do get back to me on that. In the meantime, I suggest you review a summary of the numbers regarding the energy situation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil [wikipedia.org].
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Recalling my thermodynamics class over two decades ago, I would say 1:1 if the biofuel is to be manufactured directly for use as fuel.
However if it is recaptured from what is currently considered waste, then it can be assumed to be close to zero.
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I meant to say > 1:1. Oops!
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Now from the articles I've seen on making bio-diesel that take into account the fuel used for farming a crop that's good for making bio-diesel you get only get about 3 units for every 2 units you expend with our current technologies. Ok, it is a net gain, but it's not what most of our industry would consider efficient, unless there were no other realis
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How many barrels of oil does it take to make one barrel of oil? All that drilling, pumping, transporting, and refining isn't free!
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instead of cheaper less destructive technologies.
If there were actually cheaper less destructive technologies, that would be a huge opportunity for profit, and somebody would be stepping up to cash in on the gravy train. The only way any of these alternatives are "cheaper" is in the sense that the government uses money taken from taxpayers to subsidize them. At some point, you run out of other people's money.
The oil industry can do just fine without subsidies and I support taking them off the government teat. However, alternate energy sources require huge
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Oil production peaked in 2004 if I'm reading wikipedia correctly. Oil production per capita peaked in 1979. Peak Oil is a mathematical certainty if there are not an infinite amount of hydrocarbons on Earth. We can easily talk about Peak Oil in the past tense if we focus on the major oilfields; we've pretty much used up all of the oil that's easy to get to. Hubbert actually predicted the timing of the US's peak oil production pretty accurately. Additionally, demand for oil is far outpacing production; there'
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Increased prices have indeed increased the proven reserves by making it economical to spend lots of money developing hard-to-get pockets of oil. This can't really reduce oil prices, though, since the high prices are required to make that production
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2. Probably. Unless they go nuts about growing algae in the desert someplace. The energy costs will make this decentralised, of course. Economically, they won't have much choice.
3. Or, we can get into hydroponic greenhouse gardening in a big way. It'd be the only viable way to farm unfarmable land.
4. Most fertilizers today are made from petroleum. Without petroleum, no fertilizers, no massive produc
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These days, the traditional role played by a discipline (more accurately, the role that people who probably have no actual knowledge of a discipline assume that it has played) means very little. I don't know anything about Forestry, but I know enough about academia to say that if people or departments think they can carve out a new niche for themselves even in a seemingly unrelated area of re