Cheaper Fuel From Self-Destructing Trees 112
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Wood is great for building and heating homes, but it's the bane of biofuels. When converting plants to fuels, engineers must remove a key component of wood, known as lignin, to get to the sugary cellulose that's fermented into alcohols and other energy-rich compounds. That's costly because it normally requires high temperatures and caustic chemicals. Now, researchers in the United States and Canada have modified the lignin in poplar trees to self-destruct under mild processing conditions—a trick that could slash the cost of turning plant biomass into biofuels."
Wood fuel (Score:5, Funny)
Got wood, eh?
Just when the American trees are under attack ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Trees in America and Europe are dying in large number due to infestation from foreign bugs / diseases / viruses
Examples of the diseases / bugs / viruses are Chestnut Bright, Emerald Ash Borer, Asian long-horned beetle, Spruce Needle Cast Disease, and so on.
And those boffins are tinkering with even more American trees so that they become self-destructive more easily??
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Wow, you have no understanding of science.
Sounds more like you're the one who has no understanding of science.
Taco Cowboy is expressing skepticism about this, a core tenant of science.
Meanwhile, you're making an assertion without providing any evidence to back up your reasoning, a core tenant not of science, but of religion.
Personally, I'm a little skeptical too. How does it work? How bad would it be if it got out into the wild? Can it even get out into the wild? If it can, and if it would be bad, what could we do to contain the problem?
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Taco Cowboy is expressing skepticism about this, a core tenant of science.
Meanwhile, you're making an assertion without providing any evidence to back up your reasoning, a core tenant not of science, but of religion.
You keep using that word. [merriam-webster.com] I don't think it means what you think it means. [merriam-webster.com]
I'll give a pass on voila/viola, and rogue/rouge, since those might just be typos, but I gotta draw the line somewhere. It really detaches from your argument when you use the wrong word.
-- A tenant of a tenement who knows the difference between "tenant" and "tenet".
Re:Just when the American trees are under attack . (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just when the American trees are under attack . (Score:5, Funny)
2nd Amendment Rights
Well armed forest, take that treehuggers.
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Interesting that a majority of species of trees in the US are also of foreign origin.
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Poplar trees are basicaly weeds, they grow fast, are invasive, die quickly and are easily pushed out by more stable trees; don't worry about them.
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They also 'like' to destroy foundations. Kill them.
Lets do it the Old Testament way! (Score:2)
Except for hoping for God to give us a burning bush that doesn't get consumed in flames, we genetically make our own!
bio fuel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wood is biofuel. There is a device http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/20/0549231/carbon-negative-energy-machines-catching-on which when paired with a dense wood like Robinia pseudoacacia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinia_pseudoacacia which has as much energy as anthacite coal and when harvested dumps nitrogen into the soil so that other plants grow faster and it grows back faster than it did the first time. So why can't all our power sources be food producing, fertilzer producing, erosion stopping, medicine producing, ecology improving, and sustainable?
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You are aware just how many companies would suffer from that? There are jobs at stake, to hell with the planet!
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You are aware just how many companies would suffer from that? There are jobs at stake, to hell with the planet!
Funny, I thought that the environmentalists would be the ones throwing a hissy fit over it. After all, in the US you import the majority of your wood from Canada...because of insane EPA regulations, while here in Canada we have a good policy of select harvest, select clear cutting, and replanting policies.
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Who cares about jobs? There are profits at stake!
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Yes, sure, but you don't actually say it like that. That's something someone could object to. But dare to object to protecting jobs!
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Probably would be but the company that owns the patents either aren't licensing to others or isn't able to interest companies with pockets deep enough to buy licences. I believe the key patents will run out in about 5 or 6 years now.
Wood IS fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wood IS fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
But not a very good one. The energy to weight ratio sucks, it leaves large amounts of ash, and, being solid, can't be used in any of the myriad applications that require liquid or gaseous fuel. The problems with energy to weight and ash are large enough that as soon as coal mining was developed, coal almost completely replaced wood in people's fireplaces and stoves (until coal itself was replaced by gas and electricty and fireplaces by central heating). It's also quite polluting, as a matter of fact.
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being solid, can't be used in any of the myriad applications that require liquid or gaseous fuel
That's not a significant problem for use, it's much more of an issue for transport. Gas and oil can be transported long distances through pipes, with just the occasional pump along the way to give it a boost. Wood has to be stacked onto trucks and then transported along roads or railways. You can't just turn on a tap in a house and have wood come out, so everyone needs a wood shed or equivalent to store it, taking up a lot of space.
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That sounds horribly inefficient.
You're using heat from somewhere to make the oil and gas, but not convert all of the carbon in the wood.
Then you take a subset of the carbon and burn it in the form of oil and gas.
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It is horribly inefficient, but the point is because it results in large quantities of biochar which is a really fantastic soil ammendment, the rabid warmistas will keep their mouths shut. The carbon in biochar will stay in the ground for thousands of years so the eco-loons love it because it sequesters eeeevvvilll CO2 from the atmosphere. I'm actually tempted to make a pyrolysis unit just to make biochar for the garden.
Re:Methanol (Score:2)
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.
Th
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But not a very good one. The energy to weight ratio sucks, it leaves large amounts of ash, and, being solid, can't be used in any of the myriad applications that require liquid or gaseous fuel.
The cost to heat ratio is what I am concerned about. The electric/gas company tells me every year it costs more and more to keep my house at barely acceptable levels. Wood, on the other hand costs me almost exactly the same as it did the first year I started harvesting (I've gotten better at it, so it's actually cheaper).
I require no "specialized" tools or licenses to obtain, transport, refine, or consume it. A cord of wood will produce about 4 buckets of ash (about 1% of the total weight), which i will d
Re:Wood IS fuel (Score:4, Funny)
Apply heat and O2 to complete fire triangle.
Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course. When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.
Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?
If you're so clever, you tell us what color fire should be.
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So is crude oil. So why not throw it straight into your car engine?
Gasification (Score:5, Interesting)
People will just complain (Score:2)
So why use trees? (Score:3, Insightful)
If all you want is the cellulose and fiber, hemp produces paper-quality fiber at nearly 4 times the rate per acre/year as even poplar trees do.
Oh, right. Gotta keep all those woodchippers employed. :(
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And hemp's baaaad, mmmkay?
Re:So why use trees? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you actually read TFA you will find that they have succeeded in a trial using poplar trees, but they are now working on corn that has the modified lignin.
And while you wonder about hemp, I wonder about algae. Algae doesn't bother to produce support structures and you can grow a "crop" in ten days rather than a year. We need to improve our technologies for "bioreactors" (I think they tend to get plugged up) and we need to improve the process for converting algae to fuel (algae is wet and it has a high energy cost to remove the water as part of making a fuel).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel [wikipedia.org]
I wonder if thermal depolymerization can be used to convert algae to fuel?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization [wikipedia.org]
Alas, TDP doesn't seem to have worked out as well as hoped. I remember reading excited news stories about offal being turned into clean diesel, but the company that tried it lost money and shut down.
Re:So why use trees? (Score:4, Insightful)
algae has many great aspect. It's achilles heels are 1) separation is very expensive 2) it's hard to get enough C02 into the water to do this at scale 3) it can get infected easily 3) inhomgenous growth requires active stiring or other tricks to bring a pond to harvest all at the same time 4) it's not that fast to grow-- poplars and switch grass are more efficient bio mass producers. Ethanol can be made from waste products too.
The upside of algae is that were starting to learn how to use some of it's byproducts and this offsets the costs. and incremental progress is being made on all these aspects. We haven't been growing algae as long as plants so there's potential headroom to grow. It can grow in seawater. lipids are better fuel than alchohol. And finally it's potentially less energetically expensive to sperarate lipids from water than alchohol from water. That step accounts for something like 1/3 of the cost of ethanol.
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Once you have separated the lipids from the algea, there still should be a fair amount of cellulose, starch and sugars for ethanol production although methanol is easier to use for biodiesel produntion.
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And while you wonder about hemp, I wonder about algae. Algae doesn't bother to produce support structures and you can grow a "crop" in ten days rather than a year.
And while you wonder about algae I recognize that burning things is bad, and wonder about improving the efficiency of extracting energy directly from the sunlight itself.
Re:So why use trees? (Score:4, Interesting)
Storage is a problem with sunlight. Burnable fuels do not have that problem.
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Biofuels *ARE* the storage medium for sunlight.
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Yest, but they are a rather cheap, easy and high density storage medium. Solar panels and batteries have neither of those traits. They are more efficient, but the cost per joule is far above that of plants.
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Burning isn't always bad.
Burning carbon sources that are the accumulation of millions of years of photosynthesis is bad, because you are net-adding carbon to the atmosphere.
Efficiently burning renewable carbon sources (while controlling other embedded pollutants) is not so bad, because over a reasonable timeframe you are merely putting carbon into the atmosphere that your fuel sources took out several years before; rinse & repeat, with little effect on long-term atmospheric carbon pollution.
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Hibiscus cannabinus ? Maybe you can slip it by the hppies that way..
Because publicly funded science must be open acces (Score:2)
Misleading title (Score:1)
The article isn't really about making biofuel from self-destructing trees. It's about introducing the mechanism through which the lignin (in the trees) destructs to other crops that grow much faster and leave a lot of waste, like corn.
Personally, I think that sourcing energy from biofuel will never really scale, anyway...
Evolving parasites. (Score:4, Insightful)
My gut says the reason it's so hard to deal with the current form of ligin is parasites would have evolved to eat anything simpler. Do they have any strategy for preventing parasites from finding the trick to breaking down the ligin in these modified trees?
Either way it does sounds pretty cool.
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That is one of the things that is safe to test in the field. Maybe it isn't a problem at all, and if it is then the problem solves itself.
Why corn? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ralph says his team is already working to insert zip-lignins into corn plants.
I know we grow a lot of corn, but why not insert the gene into kudzu or some other fast growing weed that thrives on marginal land with low fertilizer inputs?
It's not like we don't already have a use for every part of the corn plant.
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I like that plan, it also means you don't have to worry about any potential impact if the strain enters the food supply.
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Re:Why corn? ... and not dandelions (Score:2)
Lord knows there are tons of those buggers in this god-forsaken neighbourhood !! If only they were useful for something more than wine.
Your mission Jim, should you choose to accept it. (Score:4, Funny)
Use trees as carbon sinks (Score:2)
A giant saquioa can sequester over 2000 tons of carbon from the air and live for 2500 years.
If you planted 1 million of these trees you could sequester 2,000,000,000 tons of carbon for 2500 years! If you plant enough of these sequoias you could literally sequester all the United States's excess CO2 for 2500 years.
2500 years is a hell of a long time for us to design and perfect new technologies that can better solve are carbon crisis.
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Which means that in just a century, we can lower atmospheric CO2 from today's level to last week's level....
Mother of all wildfires (Score:2, Interesting)
So, once this genetic defect - I mean modification - crosses the line and goes wild (although Monsanto tells us it never happens), how fast and hot will those forests burn?
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Use pot/weed marajuana, the reason the feds have a cry baby fit over moonshine and pot, they are also a Damn good fuel.
It might make people actually WANT a power plant in their neighborhood.
Wood for biofuels? Slow and wasteful. (Score:4, Interesting)
Using wood to create BioFuels is extremely wasteful of both time and material.
Use hemp instead. You'll get two huge crops per year. And it's a crop made of easy-to-process plant material. No lignin involved. Just process the green matter.
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Hemp is pretty low in recoverable energy compared to many other... oh wait... nevermind...
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It has the benefit of being able to outproduce any wood product and you can get two crops per year in much of the US. Also, the recovery methods for hemp don't require any acids, unlike trees.
Re:... why not bamboo ? (Score:2)
MOD UP PARENT!
Exactly the right question: why frikkin' trees? It's not like there's an overabundance of poplar (or any other tree). If you have to use a challenging material, why not bamboo ?
Save the trees? (Score:3, Interesting)
Erm, wasn't there something the greenies used to say? Like save the trees? Protect the forests? Leave room for nature?
Well, obviously I must have been hallucinating all the ways through the 90ies. And don't worry, I'll see a psychiatrist about this decade-long delusion at once. But let's pretend there had been an environmental movement in the second half of the last century, when people said that there is some inherent value in nature itself. Wouldn't you think that people in this movement would have been somewhat upset about the prospect of converting huge tracts of land that used be called "forests" into industrial fuel plantations? Well, I for one would imagine they'd be, but they are not.
Hence my suspicion that I was merely hallucinating. If I don't respond, I guess I stuck in comfy happy white room.
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You are muddling together millions of people with a bunch of different motivations and ideas.
He's almost ready to run for office.
Tough part (Score:3)
Re:Tough part (Score:5, Funny)
The toughest part is to make sure they don't scream as they destruct; the licensing fees would be too expensive.
Not to worry, there will probably be no one there to hear it, so it won't make any noise.
With a plastic bag for a helmet (Score:2)
They hoped that by introducing paired building blocks throughout the lignin, they could later “unzip” the lignin’s structure during pretreatment.
You unzipped me, it's all coming BACK!
Termites (Score:2)
Instead of all this creation of new Frankenplants, why not just use termites. They seem to have no problem breaking down lignin at lower temperatures, and it doesn't required monkeying around with plant genes.
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I've tried termites at home. They did more harm than good.
If combustion products discharge at the base only (Score:2)
We could put a pod on top and shoot it into space. [oinc.net]
Not in the US (Score:2)
Related: http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
So what exactly do the US researchers hope to achieve here?
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Didn't the US EPA recently place a total ban on heating homes with wood?
They better not drive down my block then.
Cue the Unintended Consequences (Score:2)
This is not a rant on bioengineering per se. Humans deliberately producing Things with desirable traits is as old as rain. But when I see folks attempting to leverage marginally successful processes into solutions to Big Problems by reducing the margins... I have to take a step backwards to glimpse more of the picture.
If you are going to involve 'new' plants (or animals) in the production of energy, pause to think.
1. Energy required by humans is a monster growing exponentially. This monster EATS. This is i
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"Wood is great for building and heating homes..."
Wood is TERRIBLE for heating homes. It is the absolute most inefficient way to heat.
Moreover, it's illegal in the USA. http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]