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I agree, its amazing how little thought has been put into biofuels. Hopefully, the tide will soon be turned back.
And this is just the "solution" we come up with before the energy crisis gets truly serious. Imagine what hair-brained schemes we'll come up with in a few years.
by chapter1 on Thu Feb 07, 2008 at 05:40:53 PM PDT
[ Parent ]
A lot of science takes place in the rubble of failed experiments. The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 did not find a "satisfactory" velocity for the "luminferous aether", but inadvertently laid some groundwork for Special Relativity. From alchemism we got chemistry and from astrology we got astronomy.
Most of us are typing from personal computers. In the early 1980s, two flavors of Atari, two flavors of Commodore, TI-99/4A, Apple and Sinclair crowded the shelves. In the 1980s and 1990s, multiple flavors of Unix were rife. This resolved itself by fair means and foul to the current Windows/Mac/Linux paradigm.
While it is important to know how to do something, it is also important to know how NOT to do it. It looks like ethanol from grain is heading toward failure, but cellulosic ethanol shows more promise and less competition with corn. If ethanol must be processed and consumed near its place of origin, that means more oil for the rest of us.
Dems in 2008: An embarassment of riches. Repubs in 2008: Embarassments.
by Yamaneko2 on Thu Feb 07, 2008 at 06:47:14 PM PDT
was two guys spending a few months walking around a tub of mercury looking for changing interferometry patterns. It probably cost a few hundred thousand in today's dollars, and caused no particular ill effects.
Corn-based ethanol has cost tens of billions of dollars and several years. The opportunity cost was huge. Not to mention the extra CO2 in the air, and the additional kids who went to bed hungry.
We can afford mistakes on the scale of michaelson-morley or commodore. We can not afford them on the scale of biofuels.
by chapter1 on Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 05:28:44 AM PDT
-7.88 -8,77 Just a wine sipping, brie eating, $6 coffee drinking, Prius driving, over educated, liberal, white, activist, male New Englander for Barack Obama.
by EquationDoc on Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 09:47:06 PM PDT
Secondly, sure, 56 pounds of corn only yields 2.7 gallons of ethanol. But it also yields 17.4 pounds of dried distillers grain, which is basically a nutrient concentrate. This is fed to livestock and significantly decreases the amount food that would otherwise have to be fed to them. Remember, if you want an industry to attack, it's the meat industry; check out the New York Times article, "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler". Among the more sobering statistics: about a third of the Earth's non-ice-covered land is involved, directly or indirectly, in raising livestock.
The CO2 emission studies aren't very clear cut. Check out the comments on the autobloggreen article on the subject for details. Basically, they make a lot of simplifying assumptions to arrive at the conclusions that they do.
As for cassava, let's take a look at the economics. A cassava farmer can grow cassava and eat it. So they're not going hungry. Or, they can sell it and buy other food (even if imported). And the net loss is? If the "other food" prices are high due to ethanol, then the cassava sale prices for ethanol production will be similarly high. One ton of cassava will produce ~60 gallons of ethanol if it has 25% starch. Assuming an open market price of $1.50/gal, that's $90/ton. Cassava sells for about $25/ton (http://www.sciencedirect.com/...), so that's a huge markup, even after processing costs.
Anyways, I think it's important to keep the focus on the most destructive biofuels -- palm oil probably being the worst. Palm oil biodiesel essentially guarantees rainforest destruction, and unlike sugarcane ethanol, it's not incredibly efficient -- about the same as from soybean oil, if I recall correctly.
Finally, one has to face the fact that we are burning fuels, and they have to come from somewhere. A sale of offshore oil gets blocked, and we cheer. ANWR drilling gets blocked, and we cheer. Some biofuel development contract gets blocked, and we cheer. And then we all hop in our cars and drive to work on good ol' dirty Canadian bitumen-derived gasoline that involves strip-mining thousands of square miles of Albertan countryside, taking solice that our car gets 30-50 mpg, and ignoring how even that is still consuming large quantities of the product that we're denouncing. It's always coming from somewhere, so let's not pretend otherwise. It's not someone else's problem; it's our problem, and that problem is our consumption.
by Rei on Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 10:51:46 PM PDT
that it's the farmer yanking the cassavas out of the soil who gets the money for them. Also, that his farming operation is sufficiently modern for him to be able to supply the demand for cassava-based fuel.
We need to be very clear about this: It is not the sellers of biofuel cassavas who are starving. It is the farmers who labor for the sellers -- and, more to the point, the former farmers who were cleared off the land by the technological improvements the owners implemented in order to increase their yields to meet demand. A low-tech subsistence farmer gains little access to this market, and what money he does earn doesn't go very far, because he is no longer growing his own food nor acquiring it from local sources. The real money will go to the middlemen who buy up and commodify the cassavas. They are not the ones who are starving to begin with.
I hate to say it, but we're actually better off biding our time and continuing to burn oil while the Overton window on fuel consumption moves rather than embrace this gruesomely misbegotten idea. Which is not to say that oil consumption is any less destructive than it was yesterday, only that people don't fully fathom how much more destructive biofuels are.
One last point: Anyone who lives in Illinois and likes to eat corn is grimly aware of how genes from corn grown for feed and fuel are getting into corn grown for the dinner plate and making it starchy and tasteless. Even at the farmers' market, trying to buy good fresh corn is a crapshoot. We are ruining one of our finest agricultural products.
"The great lie of democracy, its essential paradox, is that democracy is first to be sacrificed when its security is at risk." --Ian McDonald
by Geenius at Wrok on Sat Feb 09, 2008 at 06:18:12 AM PDT
It amazes me no end that people who believe that we can radically increase the efficiency of automobiles that already use computer-controlled engines to drive computer activated transmissions insist that biofuels must forever be mired in the status quo.
Biofuel can come from a lot of places, not just corn. Let's see -- Brazil gets a third of it's fuel from sugar cane.
People are even working on using thermal depolymerization to turn turkey guts into fuel.
Fuel v. food, in the absence of a glut is a bad trade. Slash and burn clearing of forests is a bad deal from any perspective.
Making fuel out of unwanted or undervalued things that would rot or burn carbon back into the atmosphere anyway beats the heck out of digging dead dinosaur goo out of the ground and belching its by-products up into the air.
Free speech? Yeah, I've heard of that. Have you?
by dinotrac on Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 10:28:48 PM PDT
wide narrow
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