Looking Beyond Corn and Sugarcane For Cost-Effective Biofuels 242
carmendrahl writes "The abundance of shale gas in the U.S. is expected to lower the cost of petrochemicals for fuel and other applications, making it harder for plant-based, renewable feedstocks to compete in terms of price. In the search for cost-competitive crops, companies are testing plants other than traditional biofuel sources such as corn and sugarcane. In this video, you can see how a company is test-growing a relative of sugarcane, which is expected to yield 5 times the ethanol per acre compared to corn."
Other people want to wet their beaks now? (Score:5, Insightful)
But corn ethanol is already the perfect way to enrich campaign donors in Iowa and the other farm states. Why should the guys getting rich off corn ethanol agree to share the government loot with other biofuel producers?
Re:Sugar Beet (Score:2, Insightful)
tell that to the red staters who can only grow corn in the USA passing legislation to only support corn
Re:Nature's solar panel (Score:5, Insightful)
So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?
I suspect that the break-even point varies depending on what you want to do. If you want electricity, photovoltaics get a substantial boost (plants may still turn out to be cheaper, for sufficiently large installations, if you can grow a zillion acres of generic combustables with minimal human intervention and then shovel them into a slightly converted coal plant or something; but the poor efficiency of the conversion from thermal energy to electrical energy will hobble you, and it will cripple you in small-scale installs). If you want a hydrocarbon-fuel substitute, the ability of organisms to synthesize all kinds of neat organic compounds is going to be quite a trick to replicate, even if you have unlimited electricity.
Also depends on location: given suitably robust solar cell packages(ideally with some fancy catalytic autocleaning coating), you could convert surface area on large structures into PV sites with just an occasional visit by the installers-with-climbing-gear. You wouldn't want to try crops under those conditions. A desert area, with plenty of sun but next to no water, would also be decent PV territory but bad planting ground. A large patch of arable land would have the opposite conditions(though it might also have competing food producers; but luckily, while it's illegal to use poor people for biofuel, it's legal to use food for biofuel and let poor people starve.)
Re:Nature's solar panel (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole issue of sugar to ethanol suffers from several false economies including the usefulness in this case of water from the Colorado river which is not exactly surplus, and from the energy to distill and etc. Damage to the soil is a problem as is the whole issue of fertilizers etc. The USA is barking up the wrong tree with ethanol. It is a bad bad idea.
In the issue of a parent post regards competing with solar vs plants. Plants are at best thermally 1.5 to 2 percent efficient of sunlight. Solar cells are currently about 21%. The whole issue revolves around trading energy for which we currently have no effective use for energy that we can use. Biomass doesn't work well in cars so we only see it as a plus in the equation assuming we in our segmented economy fail to look at the total lifecycle costs.
Solar is already competitive and on price with standard generation means by fossil fuels.
Re:Nature's solar panel (Score:5, Insightful)
Fossil Fuels have some key advantages.
1. Portability. You can take it, put it in container and ship it anywhere, or store it when you need it.
2. High Energy. You can get a good bang for 1 kilo of Fuel. Vs. batteries, or other forms of portable energy
3. Low tech maintenance. Fixing a problem in a fossil fuel engine is much easier then fixing a power turbine or a solar sell, we can use alternate parts if needed to.
4. Out of Sight or of Mind. Large Windmills covering the landscape, acres of solar panels, large dams... A lot of big infrastructure projects
It isn't that we couldn't go, however you need to know the tradeoffs and find ways of dealing with them.
Re:Small economics (Score:2, Insightful)
With an oil pump (*if* the farmer can cheaply get the mineral rights for it, which is a big if), this whole scenario makes sense. That's because, generally speaking, oil is always worth it. Oil is such a dense and easily-accessible energy source (accounting for untold thousands or millions of years of solar input) that if you can get it flowing odds are you're net positive. An old well that's not flowing *much* may not be worth it to a large oil company, but could be substantial for a small farmer. I get that.
However, the biofuel stuff hasn't worked out at *any scale, ever*. It's not just that you can do something else more economically-viable with the land (if subsidies weren't present to prop it up...), it's that it quite literally costs more in real energy terms to grow and process the biofuel plant than the fuel you get out of the process. When you add up the real energy costs of the fertilizer, the manufacture and transport of the fertilizer, the fuels to run the machines to till the earth, plant the crops, harvest the crops, running the machines and chemical processes by which the biofuel is extracted, etc... you come out net-negative.
To put that in a simpler form: suppose you're even given all the necessary machinery (for farming and fuel refining) for free (which is bullshit, because we should include an energy cost for some fraction of the manufacturing effort, but anyways). And you start with a giant 10,000 gallon silo full of fuel with which to run your equipment and create feritilizer and all that jazz, and whatever fuel you create from the crops goes back into the tank after processing is done. If you run this operation in isolation for years (which assumes no equipment breakdown/replacement, again overly-idealistic), your silo of fuel just keeps getting smaller and smaller until you run out of energy and give up.
Biofuels are simply not worth it. Not with the crops and methods we have today, anyways. Until then, confine the experiments to the lab instead of fucking around with our economy and our fuel blends at the pumps!
Re:Nature's solar panel (Score:5, Insightful)
One advantage of solar power is that it is distributed, which helps with redundancy on the grid.
Plus, there are multiple ways of using solar power. Grid tie is one way. However, with the fact sometimes it is more expensive to pay a utility company to string a wire to a remote property than it is to set up an off-grid solar panel array, charge controllers, battery bank, and inverters, it isn't too far-fetched for people to just go with a bunch of panels and not bother with the electric grid whatsoever.
Solar is getting cheaper, mainly because China now has the critical mass of technology and willpower to stand behind it. It is only a matter of time before we start seeing each cell having a small MPPT controller so partial shading's impact is minimized, and perhaps even having the charge controllers or inverters built into each panel, so adding more usable watts might just consist of dropping another row of panels, plugging two power cables and a CANBUS cable, and letting the electronics do the rest. China wants this technology because it means that they don't have to deploy as many coal plants, thus less pollution.
Solar is coming to a point where it is less of a matter of "why", but a matter of "why not"?
To boot, solar panels have a long life. In 20-30 years, where most energy plants need to have a complete overhaul, solar panels might need to be washed every so often. An investment now may seem foolish, but given a steady return over the years, it may be wise over the long run. This is something that Germany understands, and is allowing them to wean completely off of both nuclear energy and Russian gas.
Re:Do these take up areas that food crops grow? (Score:4, Insightful)
The great thing about CO2 emissions for plant-derived biofuels is that they won't modify the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Think about it for a moment: what you're doing is extracting carbon from the atmosphere, turning it into complex hydrocarbons using energy from the sun, and then burning it to release that energy. Any CO2 released was *already in the atmosphere* to begin with, so biofuels net zero greenhouse emissions (to first order at least, maybe there's some weird combustion products or whatever). Hard to get much lower than that.
Well, yes and no. Biofuel will only be carbon neutral if all the production, transportation and fertilization was done with biofuels as well. A great goal, but I don't think it's been realized anywhere yet.
And of course, that still leaves the whole fuel vs. food issue open. Now if we could manage to come up a biofuel production process that includes the net fixation of atmospheric CO2 (net reduced or zero carbon footprint), with close to zero ecological impact that is not using precious agricultural land then I'd be all over it. But at the moment it's a bit of a pipe dream.