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."
Nature's solar panel (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's less the effectiveness than the cost and regional limitations.
Video link in summary (Score:5, Informative)
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Wow, you must read REALLY quickly. A newspaper article is usually MUCH longer/more detailed than what is contained in a TV news segment. (I say that, even though I 'consume' the nightly news every day. It's a good way to get a summary of the day's stories. Though I usually listen to the audio podcast at 2x or sometimes watch the video podcast at 2x.... and record the show as a backup since they frequently cut out any vaguely pop culture related segments from the podcast.)
Re:Video link in summary (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Video link in summary (Score:4, Interesting)
Really?!? People can easily understand conversation up to 150 - 160 [wikipedia.org] words per minute.
For comparison, the world champion of typing speeds obtained an average rate of 150 wpm [wikipedia.org] in 2005.
So if you are outputting information, speech tends to win hands down.
However if you are receiving information, people can read [wikipedia.org] at 250-300 wpm....
Which is why I also hate video posts. That and:
1) Basically impossible to skim
2) Harder to "re-read" items that may require a second viewing
3) Harder to reference / quote specific points in the video
4) Accents and/or poor audio setups can make video difficult to understand
5) Bandwidth limitations (e.g. mobile devices)
6) Ugly people
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how does your solar panel work on cloudy days, rainy days, snow days and at night?
Re:Nature's solar panel (Score:5, Interesting)
how does your solar panel work on cloudy days, rainy days, snow days and at night?
In sunny places, electricity demand is strongly correlated with hot, sunny days when the AC is running. Solar is not good for base load, but that really isn't an issue as it currently generates less than 0.2% of the electric power. This is something to worry about when it gets to about 10%. If that ever happens, we can deal with it by energy storage, long distance transmission, and/or load shifting.
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so how much of the energy is lost in the transmission and storage? how many toxic chemicals do you need for all these batteries?
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Transmission losses on copper wire over a few thousand km is between 5% and 10%, AKA relatively insignificant.
You need 0 toxic chemicals for the molten salt heat reservoirs used by large solar thermal installations. Such heat reservoirs can hold enough energy to spin turbines for days.
You need 0 toxic chemicals for electricity to be used to crack water and store hydrogen. Which can then be used to heat the same water that the solar thermal boiler normally would, and run the same turbines. This isn't particu
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> Transmission losses on copper wire over a few thousand km is between 5% and 10%, AKA relatively insignificant.
And the loss from transporting liquids is 0. but that is the insignificant part for both. 20% of the cost of my electricity is generation, IE 80% of the cost is getting it to my house. And we still haven't gotten it into and out of a battery for transportation. With Natural gas, to my house, it is more like 20% of the cost is transportation. For fuel picked up on the road (where I need it
Re:Nature's solar panel (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it isn't that terrible on cloudy/rainy days. We have a solar panel installed on our house in the pacific northwest of the US, which is 100% cloud/rain in the winter months. Energy generated is 100-300 kWh per month in the winter, 500-700 kWh per month in the sunny summers. Obviously nothing in the nights. Excess production in the summer pays for the shortfall in the winter (paid by utility company), so it works out.
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It's not just energy conversion that needs to compete, it's storage and transport.
For a solar panel to compete, you would need some efficient way to turn electricity into liquid hydrocarbons - or you would need tremendously improved battery/capacitor technology. You would also need to replace the existing infrastructure for moving around liquid fuels.
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Current batteries are more than good enough. A car full of Li-Ion batteries can get better range than a conventional ICE car, and charging is getting very fast now, so charging might be faster than your current stops to eat.
We have a replacement for the oil infrastructure, it's called the electrical grid, and it goes
immediately if cost was not a factor (Score:5, Informative)
However when you include the costs of the entire system- the startup capital, intermediate fuel type and distribution- the current cost-efficiency of both become more comparable.
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)
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.
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Hydrogen Fuel Cells/Modern Batteries
Portability - HFC's are Better than Petrol/Gas, Batteries are not ....
High Energy - HFC's Better than Petrol/Gas, Batteries are gaining
Low Tech - One moving part in an engine, as opposed to modern fossil fuel engines which are hugely complex
Out of Sight - Depends where they are put, like fossil plants they can be put out of the way but often are not
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But with two critical flaws:
- Expensive. Making hydrogen from water costs a fortune, and making it from fossil fuels defeats the objective.
- Difficult to store. Doing so safely (As in 'Can survive traffic accidents without cratering the road') requires exotic and even more expensive alloys.
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Unfortunately, it appear
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Why do you want fuel cells, when batteries are more efficient at the purpose you described? For stationary use, the weight of cheap batteries shouldn't be an issue, and neither is the slow charging time with 24-hour cycle times.
Non-hydrogen fuel cells are interesting as a replacement for traditional conversion of fossil fuels to
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Well, solid oxide fuel cells don't have the "materials needed to build them" problem, but you're still using natural gas as the fuel.
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Hydrogen fuel is much lighter than air. An exploding hydrogen storage unit won't crater the road. it will most likely produce a jet of flame that rises rapidly into the sky. Its unlikely to even cause significant burning to the vehicle.
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Worse than that. It's not just impure hydrogen that kills them - it's impure oxygen too. Nitrogen in the air is harmless, but carbon monoxide will trash a PEM cell. And if you are driving on a road next to old petrol-burners, there is going to be plenty of that around.
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There are only two ways to store hydrogen: Pressurised, and using the exotic foamy method. I don't know how the exotic foamy method works, but I understand it involves very expensive alloys of very rare metals. And pressurised will explode, twice. First when the high-pressure tank ruptures, and again if the resulting cloud of hydrogen ignites in the confined space of the vehicle.
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A fuel cell also practically never NEEDS to be repaired, because it isn't under the stresses of an ICE. You might as well complain that you can't repair your car battery...
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That's kind of the whole point of biofuels as well. They have the portability and the high energy, acting as "batteries" for solar energy collected.
But biodiesel is a far more efficient biofuel than ethanol is. The US and the rest of the world need to spend more investing in biodiesel.
Oh yeah. Americans don't like diesel engines for some reason. Too bad the fascination with gasoline and ethanol override economics and good sense.
Hell, even Henry Ford was a supporter and developer of biodiesel.
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You're confusing energy with fuel.
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)
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.
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Though isn't it true that a large proportion of solar installs (I want to say 'most' but I have no stats) are grid tied? So when the grid goes down, so does your power?
That's certainly the way I'll do it, so that I don't have the even greater cost of batteries.
I think you can have a solar system that is grid tied that can temporarily be pulled off-grid, but then you either ALSO need backup batteries or only get
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Sadly the AC is right. Sad because of the AC, not the right.
The issue with the US (and any other nation with cars and therefore a fuel problem) is that the solution being sought is to keep the vehicles we have running, or make vehicles of the future run the same way. There's some benefit to this, to be sure, considering the infrastructure, expertise, and experience around vehicles as we know them today. It seems like a shoo-in to find an alternative fuel that would let everyone use the cars just like they h
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I have a brother that works at a car lot his biggest complaint is the large truck/suv worshiping crowd. Mostly young couples with no kids and an urban lifestyle but still want a F150 to get groceries. Many of them cannot afford the payments on a new truck/suv and won't consider a car they end up buying 10yr old trucks with no warranty and little to no value on a trade in after they have paid them off.
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they end up buying 10yr old trucks with no warranty and little to no value on a trade in after they have paid them off.
That is why lots of people can't really afford a good vehicle. I have been the last owner of every vehicle I have ever bought and just kept fixing them until they have the catastrophic failure or were hit as it is the cheapest thing to do. I will admit I own an SUV but I haven't driven it since I got my current daily driver after I blew the tyranny in my previous daily driver. Before that the last time I drove my SUV was about 2 months ago when I helped my sister move into her new house. I do drive it spari
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I have no problem driving a 15k-20k economy car with a warranty. Then again I don't hunt, fish, or have a boat so not really a problem. I think a big truck or suv would actually be a pain considering. {I can squeeze my little car into parking places an F150 just won't go}
Not that I wouldn't mind having a small truck and a boat for it to hall...
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blew the tyranny .
Ah! The ruthless dictator that is the beater.
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Flux capacitor retrofits are already common: http://kalecoauto.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=21 [kalecoauto.com]
No need to stay in the hydrocarbon age.
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Watchout!
In the US, that kind of talk is blasphemy.
But what about corn prices? (Score:2)
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?
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But corn ethanol is already the perfect way to enrich campaign donors in Iowa and the other farm states.
Before we can reform farming, we need to move the first presidential caucuses out of Iowa.
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That's something I don't understand either.
In this day in age, to make things fair between the states, shouldn't we have either a random drawing or round robin type situation to have the initial polls and caucuses rotate between the different states as to the order they go?
Seems it would keep the pols on their toes more, and we wouldn't have the same group of folks each go around, set the tone of the campaign. Is I
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More importantly, WTF is this corn subsidy doing for anybody?
Green jobs man. If politicians can't transfer money from the people who earned it to their cronies and financial backers, the terrorists win.
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AC, Archer-Daniels-Midland.
ADM, Anonymous Coward.
Small economics (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you go third world where access to cash is an even bigger problem so again removing fuel from the expenses would be a huge help.
A good variation of this would be that many Texas farmers have abandoned oil wells on their land. The farmer stakes a claim to the wells and then using wind or solar pumps a few barrels a day. These wells are dead as far as the big companies are concerned but for the farmers can add up to a pretty good living. So according to macro economics as viewed by the oil company accountants these wells are worthless; when the farmers show that they clearly aren't.
So I often read about technology X not being better than oil when you add up all the costs but often those costs don't apply.
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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 ge
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The reason for this disconnect is that macroeconomics also factors in a strong premium for reliability and availability (and de-risking). A trucking company needs to guarantee its customers that it can consistently deliver the goods within a fixed window and hence requires its fuel supply to be likewise guaranteed. The same applies in IT -- business critical service require that the storage backend works 100% to deliver their promises, so even though a home-built storage server can do the same job as $10k (
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That seems highly unlikely.
If this stuff (sugarcane) will grow, then some type of food crops will surely grow, too. You'll have a lot of money and effort invested in keeping it free of bugs, diseases and being overgrown by weeds.
Modern farmers generally irrigate their crops, and pumping all that water won't be cheap, and sugarcane is
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..which is why you need to prepare it with mentioned methods for eating.
there's this documentary about these two guys who start a corn field for a year, it's pretty much just about the whole subsidy and how unhealthy the syrup is.
well, one of the scenes is the guys taking corn straight from the field and saying blechh and using that to portray how the modern corn isn't even good for eating.. well doh, don't need to even live near where corn grows to know that it ain't good for eating straight from the p
Do these take up areas that food crops grow? (Score:4, Interesting)
My question: Is ground for growing food crops affected by this? If farmers all grow switchgrass/hemp/$whatever and make more money selling that for fuel, then it will spike food prices, which can cause major problems down the line (people can put up with a lot of injustice, but if they are starving, all bets are off.)
Ethically, I can't support a fuel that takes food out of people's mouths, even though ethanol has a number of decent advantages.
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Glad I read this before I posted....I have the same concern.
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My question: Is ground for growing food crops affected by this? If farmers all grow switchgrass/hemp/$whatever and make more money selling that for fuel, then it will spike food prices, which can cause major problems down the line (people can put up with a lot of injustice, but if they are starving, all bets are off.)
Ethically, I can't support a fuel that takes food out of people's mouths, even though ethanol has a number of decent advantages.
Excellent question, this is already subject to debate [wikipedia.org].
There are three major areas of concern here, food vs. fuel, CO2 emissions/footprint and the ecological cost of production.
In my opinion CO2 emissions [wikipedia.org] is the elephant in the room for biofuels. Extensive production and consumption of biofuels may ween us off fossil fuels but it does nothing to address just how stupid it is for us to be modifying the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Note that the process of biofuel production does not exist in a vacuu
Re:Do these take up areas that food crops grow? (Score:4, Informative)
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You don't have to worry about the CO2 emissions. One of the benefits of bio-fuel is that the carbon in the plants was taken out of the air. With bio-fuels you only add as much CO2 to the air as you take out.
Only if the means of production is also carbon neutral. Fertilizer, machinery, transportion etc.
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Just that being able to make fuel out of crops wouldn't mean that petroleum would stop being used in fertilizer, so that may be a small concern.
In terms of efficiency, it's insane to turn petroleum into fertilizer to grow crops to great a biofuel, you might as well just burn the damn fuel in the first place.
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.
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And if it spikes food prices then the farmers will not be making more growing stuff to sell for fuel. So the problem fixes itself.
Of course it sucks for the transition period especially for those who can't afford the spiked food prices and starve to death. Hopefully one of those huge corporations that run the farming industry will have an economist on staff to point the basics of supply and demand from high school economics to them so they can make more money by sticking with growing food.
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Grow food on good soil, damn it (Score:2)
And make the fuel grade ethanol / whatever using GM algae. That would just as "green" and "renewable" without sacrificing land where one could produce vegetables and fruits already so bloody expensive.
Two for one? (Score:2)
Can we measure two benefits?
1) Create Biofuel
2) Clean the environment
Example 1: Cattails remove toxins & pollution from wetlands, stormwater. http://www.scer.rpi.edu/bwe/?p=369 [rpi.edu]
Example 2: Sunflowers decontaminate radioactive soil. http://www.ecaa.ntu.edu.tw/weifang/cea/sunflowers.htm [ntu.edu.tw]
Example 3: Algae blooms http://www.npr.org/2013/08/11/211130501/the-algae-is-coming-but-its-impact-is-felt-far-from-water [npr.org]
5x better - wooow! (Score:2)
... so 5x better than corn.... that means it's still 20x worse than oil, meaning that it's still an environmentally *hostile* source of fuel compared to oil. when will people understand and accept that the way to use less fuel is to build vehicles that use... less fuel??
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I think the goal here is to have something which recycles CO2 from the environment rather than releasing more CO2 into our already overheated climate. From this standpoint gas and oil are a complete fail and most anything else is better.
shouldn't be bio (Score:2)
RuBisCO as a carbon capture catalyst is less efficient than current inorganic catalysts and fundamentally prevents the complete scale up of biofuels. There are economic reasons to start with biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels (anyone can make the raw materials for biofuel), but at some point we're either going to have to be ok with drastically altering the genetics of plants or we'll have to move to a more traditional chemical manufacturing model.
Wouldn't it be easier to adapt palm oil trees? (Score:3)
Unless something has changed, palm oil still has the best net energy return compared to any other organic fuel source. If we're not going to eat the stuff, GM palm oil trees may be the way to go here.
Regardless, plants are still just inefficient solar panels whose only advantage is that their energy output is chemical, not electrical, thereby minimizing transmission and storage energy loss.
From a net energy/price standpoint, biofuels still can't compete with petroleum, though that will change as petroleum gets more expensive and yields less net energy over time, however, the ecological effects of trying to replace the 160 exajoules of energy provided by oil each year would be an unmitigated disaster.
Nice idea, but we're still going to have to reduce our energy consumption worldwide, long before the end of this century.
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Regardless, plants are still just inefficient solar panels whose only advantage is that their energy output is chemical, not electrical, thereby minimizing transmission and storage energy loss.
I'd imagine the materials, installation and maintenance costs are a bit lower.
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Batteries are rather efficient at storing electricity, as is pumped-hydro for grid-scale needs. Grid transmission losses are in the single-digit percentages, which is better than you'd ever hope to get from loading-up liquid fuel on a tanker trunk. And finally, electric motors are nearly 100% efficient at converting electricity
They're just thinking of this? (Score:2)
Years ago, people were talking about switchgrass. Or how about kudzu? What's wrong with WEEDS that will grow anywhere... oh, that's right, those nice folks in the petrochemical industry can't sell you fertilizers for that....
mark "or maybe hemp?"
Biodiesel, not ethanol (Score:2)
The energy density of ethanol is just not high enough and the alcohol isn't particularly friendly to plastic material often used in auto parts.
They are just trying too hard to push their endless uses for government (tax payer) subsidized corn. I'm surprised they haven't found a ridiculous and wasteful way to make paper out of corn yet.
There are a whole lot better things they can do to improve matters. Among them are to focus as much on efficiency as they do on sources. I want DC wiring for my light fixtu
Sorghum (Score:3, Interesting)
Ethanol is not what it's claimed to be (Score:2)
P.S.. Because I'm burning more gas, it costs more.
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Screw Ethenol, use Butanol (Score:2, Interesting)
way better than ethonal. If has an air:fuel ratio close enough to petrol that you can mix it in any ratio and not need to mod the engine.
Butanol fuel [wikipedia.org]
Maybe someone can explain (Score:2)
Why are we not pushing hard towards bacteria based production of biofuels instead of these huge complex pants? Seems to be that bacteria given the right conditions could convert a lot more CO2 into O2, eat a lot more waste, and produce a lot more complex fuels then corn, sugarcane, or other big plants...
Heck I think a few are going this direction, but to me it is the only way it makes sense at all..
Engineered Bacteria Make Fuel from Sunlight [sciencedaily.com]
Electrofuels: Charged Microbes May "Poop Out" a Gasoline Alternati [nationalgeographic.com]
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tell that to the red staters who can only grow corn in the USA passing legislation to only support corn
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lol, because no democrats signed the farm bill right? Isn't that supposed to be the most bipartisan pork barrel in American politics? If you think the democrats give any more of a rats ass about the environment than the republicans do you're a damned fool. They tell you what you want to hear, and then do whatever their corporate sponsors paid them to do. Nothing's going to change if you keep voting for either of the 2 parties in power. Nothing.
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Beet beet, sugar beet
Beet, sugar beet
Sugar beet beeeet!
Re:Sugar Beet (Score:5, Funny)
Beets are perfect for fuel. Nasty vegetable! Yech! When I see beets I say "beat it, beet."
Now, buttered corn, yum. Corn fed beef? Even better! Corn is for eating, beets are best used as fuel.
Re:Sugar Beet (Score:4, Informative)
I think beets get a bad name due to everyone using canned beets. I haven't prepared fresh beets myself, but I've had beet coleslaw made from fresh beets that was fantastic. Julienned beets, red cabbage, shallots, oil & vinegar, IIRC. Really pretty too.
Re:Sugar Beet (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, there's a world of difference between fresh beets and the canned garbage you buy. And there is another world of difference between 5-day-old beets you get in the produce section and beets you just picked from your own garden. Fresh beet juice isn't half bad, also.
Beets are easy to grow, and since they are in the brassica family (along with broccoli, collards, kale, etc..) the leaves are quite healthy for you (yes, broccoli leaves are good eating), and good in a salad, or cooked form. I didn't find out any of this until I started growing my own garden.
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Obligatory Michael Jackson (Score:4, Funny)
When I see beets I say "beat it, beet."
They told us don't you ever try to make new fuel
Don't want a lower price, you better like your gruel
The law is on their side, and their policies are cruel
So beet it, just beet it!
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I don't think sugar cane can be grown in sugar beet country and vice versa, so the two are complimentary. In addition, harvest times are totally different between sugar beets and sugar cane.
Re:Sugar Beet (Score:5, Informative)
Corn and sugarcane got nothing on the sugar beet.
Acre for acre, sugar beets get more subsidies [cato.org] than corn, if you include the protective tariffs on sugar imports. There is no way that beets can compete with cane in a free market.
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That's OK, because there isn't a free market on the planet, and never has been.
A free market has a large number of sellers, a large number of buyers, low barriers to entry, and full information. There are plenty of real markets that meet those criteria, including farm commodity markets in most countries. Of course, if you are pedantic ass, you will insist that the number of buyers and sellers must be infinite to qualify as "free" and therefore nothing is free and any sort of subsidy or corruption is fully justified. Whatever.
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Nor has anyone ever achieved immortality, so let's close down all the hospitals?
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Corn and sugarcane got nothing on the sugar beet.
Yeah, but the only way the sugar beet may be harvested is by coating the roads of the midwest with mud during the rainy part of Autumn.
"slide, Casey, slide!" ... bdee-bdee-bdee Mud."
"my name isn't bdee-bdee-bdee Casey, it's
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Corn and sugarcane got nothing on the sugar beet.
As a Michigan native, I have always thought that sugar came from beets. This part of the state is the heart of sugar beet country. Growing more beets would solve several problems at once. It's time to plow under most of Detroit and plant beets. This would reclaim more of the city for productive use, create a tax base and possibly produce bio-fuels. At the same time, we can lower unemployment and empty the jails by teaching young people to farm. Imagine the hi
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Bulldoze Detroit after we get a good movie from it using Fallout IP.
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"A lot of people don't understand that carbohydrates are one of the densest forms of energy [wikipedia.org] on the face of the earth, losing only to fossil fuels, pure hydrogen and nuclear power.
For my Smart Diesel, I just use whatever vegetable oil is cheapest from my oil-mill.
Re: Why food? (Score:2)
Pure hydrogen? At what pressure? Definitely not at atmospheric pressure.
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Made me think:
Why don't we harvest the results of liposuction.... Make the fat nations of the world thinner, let people eat all they want, and generate fuels from their blubber.
Horrible I know. Sorry.
On the other hand, it might just work in this infinite consumption society.... O_o