Bio-fuels .... good or bad? 16

[jmw]

Does anyone have any idea of the impact of bio-fuels? pros and cons?
We are no longer talking about recycling used chip fat here, but purposeful production.
Even as Bio-fuels begin to atract attention we hear about grain and meat prices rising, as we should expect when there is competition to turn our wheat into either bread or fuel.
We also have concerns about our environment. Indonesia is said to be prepared to plant more palms for the palm oil and that means more destruction of the forrests (more burning and smoke?) and loss of habitat to the already endangered (how seriously?) Orang Outang.
This report suggests Brazilian sugar cane as a source.

http://www.livemint.com/2007/09/24013816/BPCL-looks-to-tie-up-with-Petr.html

We all know that we are already losing rain forest at an alarming rate so how bad will this be? 600 acres doesn't sound like a whole lot of land but:
[ul][li] how much bio-fuel will it produce?[/li]
[li]Should bio-fuel be organic? (seriously, the impact of chemicals etc isn't just on foods but on the local ecosystems... )[/li]
[li]How much land would be required to produce enough bio-fuel to replace petrol/diesel?[/li]
[li]If we replace petrol/diesel with bio-fuel, how cost effective is secondary refining [/li]
[li]what are the impacts on the oil industry? Does crude get more expensive or less?[/li]
[li]what are the economic impacts of such changes on refining and thus on society?[/li]
[li]What are the questions we should be asking?[/li][/ul]


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[electricpete]

Some more discussion in this link confirms very little acreage is used. The challenge/cost seems to be in getting the tiny amount of algae/fuel out of large amount of water.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9765452-7.html

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[electricpete]

One last link on pond scum below.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/01/algae.oil/index.html

Using algae as an alternative fuel is not a new idea. The U.S. Department of Energy studied it for about 18 years, from 1978 to 1996. But according to Al Darzins of the DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab, in 1996 the feds decided that algae oil could never compete economically with fossil fuels.

The price of a barrel of oil in 1996? About 20 bucks!

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[electricpete]

By the way, there's a video link to a CNN piece on algae at the last link above.

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[GonzaloEE]

a colleage said once (translated) "when a 3rd-world farmer chooses to plant seeds for bio-fuel instead of wheat for making bread, things start turning grey there".

 

[KENAT]

Algae's been brought up in previous thread. Both as biomass and some algae produce natural oil which could be harvested (especially if genetically engineered to produce more oil).

One of the biggest problems is apparantly getting light to the algae. Either you need to somehow stir the ponds or whatever so all the algae gets exposure or you use light pipes, mirrors etc to try and get the light more spread out. Otherwise only a fin film on top gets the light. Sadly the algae has a habbit of sticking to things, like the light pipes et.

I can't remember where I read the article or I'd put a link.



KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

 

[Kiljoy]

There's a great independant film they play on PBS called "King Corn". Most of our current grain production isn't for food, but for cattle feed so we can can have cheap "MacBurgerKing" beef.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn/

If we Americans can get off of meat, more farmland will be availible for food or biofuel production. For the record, I think biofuels are a BAD idea. Corn is in everything. The price of it will skyrocket as we currently see in the market. Has anyone discussed Hot Rock Geothermal??

 

[jrhagen]

IMO We should convert everything to electricity. That way we only have to work on mass production of a clear energy source. As technology exsists now, this would most likely result in MORE carbon being released into the air due to the fact that most of the electricty in some areas is generated by burning coal. But if we could work on more clean coal technology, wind, hydro, thermal, nuclear, and any other types of energy I missed, I think we would be heading in the right direction. Personally I think fission/fusion power would be the way to go. If more post processing could be done to fission products to reduce the halflife that could be more feasible. Fusion power speaks for itself if it ever becomes feasible. I also think that a power generator using matter/antimatter annihilation could be a viable power source. Matter/antimatter gives 100% conversion of matter into energy so would give a huge amount of power for a very small amount of fuel.

 

[KENAT]

jrhagen, how do you propose getting an electric airplane in a corresponding time scale?

KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

 

[jrhagen]

Good point. Things like aircraft will still need to burn fossil fuels. Batteries are just too bulky and heavy to use in those applications. We need to save our oil for the things that require it such as plastics, lubricants, and jet fuel.

 

[cranky108]

And I was thinking that after the ethonol making process, the mash could be fed to cattle. In the past it was dried, but they were working on a wet feed.

So exactly why is corn in everything, probally because sugar is to high priced.

So why not import and use molases for ethonol production, after all in the islands they have been doing it for years.
But don't they also use barley also?

 

[Kiljoy]

Corn is in everthing because High Fructose Corn Syrup is cheaper to make than plain sugar. That's why the price of soda dropped so much. HFCS is not good for you in the slightest. Do some google searches.

 

[KENAT]

I believe there's also the element that the US used to import a lot of its sugar from Cuba.

http://books.google.com/books?id=re...X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA130,M1

KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

 

[btrueblood]

"Corn is in everthing because High Fructose Corn Syrup is cheaper to make than plain sugar."

Cane sugar is cheaper to make, but there are tarrifs that prevent importation of sugar to the US, and few cane plantations left in the US (all the land in Florida has been converted to retirement colonies). Corn syrup fills the gap created by the tarrifs.

Corn is in everything because it is cheap. It's cheap because it's subsidized, creating surplus corn that can be converted to (easily stored) syrup. Corn is subsidized because not doing so causes farmers to go broke. Farmers going broke (along with other factors) causes instability in food prices, and some people in the US (who don't know how to save/store food) to go hungry, and call their congresscritters and complain about it.

 

[Kiljoy]

I agree. One of the points of "King Corn" was that we subsidize corn to the point where they have gone for yield over quality. Looking at historical corn breeds, there was so much protein then there is today.
Subsidies are a double edged sword. Give the little guy money to help him survive and you also fund the mega-farmers who push crappy corn to feed livestock who aren't evolved to eat 100% grain. Then they develop acidosis, so they pump them full of antibiotics. Horrible vicious circle.
But, I digress from bio-fuels. I believe current corn prices have jumped to about $8/bushel. Prices pushed up by natural diasters and increased use. Sound like any other fuel we use??

 

[jmw]

Here is an interesting article about the EU's rapid retreat on bio-fuels:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/07/12/eabio112.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[owg]

jmw Thanks for the link from the Telegraph. Very intersting.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[LCruiser]

I'm confused now - Do the ethanol numbers here make sense:

http://www.energyvictory.net/

???

 

[moltenmetal]

LCruiser: he makes a compelling argument for getting the US off imported oil, particularly Middle East oil. I agree completely. Odd that he forgets about China's ability to compete for this oil, but otherwise he does some very effective fear-mongering.

We differ entirely in strategies for dealing with the problem. The way to get off the foreign oil is to stop wasting so damned much of it, not to try to replace it with ethanol! Unless you do the former, the latter, even if it were feasible, would soon reach its limits.

He doesn't even bother to do the calc to show how much land would be needed to get the US off foreign oil via corn ethanol because I'm sure he knows it's impossible as well as anyone else does. He shows one graph which shows how much land is "arable", how much is farmland, how much of that is for corn and how much of that (was, in some unreferenced year) being used to produce ethanol, but that's as far as he goes. You can do a simple order of magnitude energy calc for yourself to ground-truth it. Simply take the entire world's generation of agricultural biomass (given in Wikipedia, with references) and compare it to the US's total petroleum and natural gas consumption annually. I've done it, and there just isn't enough farmland, even if we didn't need any of it for food, to make this feasible- even if we do far better than corn ethanol ever could.

He does have a nice graph from an article in Science- I'd love a copy of the source article if anyone has it. It shows Pazek and Pimentel's (flawed) studies off to the left, and a number of others off to the right (in the region showing that even corn ethanol modestly reduces fossil fuels use). Then it shows "cellulosic- projected" way off to the right. The magic technological fix...

As to cellulosic ethanol: if it's not worth our bother to burn biomass directly to satisfy our stationary energy needs right now, it's not worth it to throw away a very significant portion of the energy content of the biomass to make cellulosic ethanol for transportation fuel use. And despite 20-30 years of research and record-high oil prices, there are no commercial cellulosic ethanol plants yet. There are significant technological and logistical and energetic and economic problems to be solved there, and merely willing them to be solved does not seem to be all that effective at actually solving them.

 

[owg]

I am not an ethanol fan, but I note that Shell just increased their holdings in Iogen from about 25% to about 50%. This should speed up work on the development of a process to make ethanol from cellulosic material. However with the push to plugin hybrids and related arrangements, the "just burn it" lobby could be a winner.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[owg]

I see there is a 38 MW straw burning power generator in Ely in the UK. The link is

http://www.eprl.co.uk/assets/ely/overview.html#

EPR took over operation from the constructor in 2004.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca