Scientists Create New Gasoline Substitute Out of Plants 419
destinyland writes "California scientists have just created a new biofuel using plants that burns just as well as a petroleum-based fuel. 'The discovery, published in the journal Nature, means corn, sugar cane, grasses and other fast-growing plants or trees, like eucalyptus, could be used to make the propellant, replacing oil,' writes the San Francisco Chronicle, and the researchers predict mass marketing of their product within 5 to 10 years. They created their fuel using a fermentation process that was first discovered in 1914, but which was then discontinued in 1965 when petroleum became the dominant source of fuel. The new fuel actually contains more energy per gallon than is currently contained in ethanol, and its potency can even be adjusted for summer or winter driving."
potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Funny)
but can you use it as an excuse to invade?
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Insightful)
but can you use it as an excuse to invade?
You've got it backwards man, oil is the reason to invade. Evil dictators and terrorists are the excuse.
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There is a major difficulty between the US and countries like Brazil for extracting oil: in the US, all the oil countries are private, so politicians have no problem restricting them for environmental reasons. Politicians in California complain when a new oil reserve is found.
When the politicians have a major stake in the oil company, like Petrobras or Gazprom, they are more than happy to ignore environmental concerns to fund their projects. Politicians there celebrate when a new oil reserve is fo
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you serious? Are you trying to make us believe for a moment that US millionaire politicians have nothing to do with the oil industry? Like, the Bushes? And that the oil lobby has not thoroughly permeated and the senate?
Not saying that Gazprom has not corrupted the Russian government, but your government is quite corrupt.
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I see the US government really making things difficult for Exxon all the time. They are always so worried about the environment! Thankfully, because the US government never, ever gives in to big corporations, and always has them in check, the environment is preserved.
Of course, if American oil fields were a property of the State, THEN there would be trouble, because all those environmentalist politicians would have no way to control them, and would have no other choice but to open the taps and let the oil spill onto the tundras and the seas.
Your truth is blinding! Can't see how wasn't I aware of that before. Anyway, you should learn the difference between politicians and the Government. Politicians, as individuals, may have stakes in private companies where the Government might not participate (or might do). Though either way, you make no sense.
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:4)
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you think it would be easier to get it in your backyard, considering that the US has tons of it?
Growing fuel crops on US soil just creates a new problem when agricultural production is boosted and aquifers become massively overused. They already are overused but making fuel from plants would aggrivate the problem enormously. Then the free market bullshotters would crawl from under every rock preaching how that is nothing to worry about bcause the invisible hand will fix that problem sooner or later and Fox News goes into overdrive with discussion panels full of useful idiots explaining to an eager public how aquifers are an inexhaustible resource and that god will provide. Meanwhile lobbying groups in congress will get busy ensuring that efforts to fix the aquifer exhaustion problem will only get underway when it is way too late to fix the problem anyway.
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, in this case the free marketers are probably right.
If there was a free market, no one (outside of Brazil) would grow plants for fuel-ethanol. It's just too expensive at the moment.
Also, in a proper free market, producers would have to pay for the externalities. Use of common resources - e.g. aquifers - must be paid for properly.
Re:potential for warmongering? (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean an alternate solution has trade offs!!! My GOD MAN, lets start a global panic, and preemptive make this illegal, because there is a different set of trade offs for a different solution!
Nearly Every solution to a problem has some sort of trade off. In terms of Energy that is normally the case (Stupid Thermal Dynamics).
This helps (Not solves) the problem of carbon in the atmosphere because in order to grow these plants to create energy the growth process these plants pulls carbon out of the air to grow, then we burn it and put it back in the air. But agriculture isn't easy, it takes a lot of resources to keep it running smoothly, if we are producing more agriculture, then we are going to use a lot of land that we can use for something else, there will be more need for constant water.
But the real question is, is Global Warming and using fossil fuels trade offs worse then the trade offs from "agri-power" Or perhaps a balance is needed 50% "Agri-Power" and 50% fossil Fuel, where we could cut our carbon in half, and not overwhelm our other resources.
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
You mean like electrolytes?
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I was listening to NPR on the way home today and the article mentioned that if we took all the biomass from all of the farmland both producing and fallow and were able to convert it all directly to ethanol that it would STILL only account for 14% of the US energy budget. So if we all stopped eating, and stopped exporting food, we'd still only scratch the surface of the energy we use. Converting crops/crop waste is a dead end track, it's simply not in the right order of magnitude to solve our problem, we need to focus on increased efficiency on the consumption end of thing if we want to get a handle on the problem and then we can start looking at non-plant solutions like solar, wind, and possibly large scale algae farming (much higher production per acre and it doesn't have to compete with food production)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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or invent god-like batteries
We have, it's called pumped hydro storage. It requires construction - just like a coal or nuclear plant - but once operating and fed by sources such as wind and solar it provides a very low pollution on-demand power supply.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
I think that's exactly what the parent poster said: Without storage capabilities or the means to redistribute the energy across the world from anywhere to anywhere at any time, base load is still the most important factor. And in this, I absolutely agree.
Not that we shouldn't use wind and solar, mind you. We should just stop fantasizing about it replacing nuclear anytime soon.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
We should just stop fantasizing about it replacing nuclear anytime soon.
That is more about politics than it is about capability. You don't even need storage if you are prepared to oversupply enough. 180% covers 90% of the time, and a 270% oversupply will give you 99.9%. Figures based on the US continent I believe, so does not assume a world grid. The later oversupply figure is expected to be cost effective by 2030 as green tech becomes more cost efficient.
A breakthrough in energy storage technology in the next 17 years would short circuit that time frame.
In other words we can start the process of phasing out dirty energy right now.
Source: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-about-99.9-percent-renewables [greentechmedia.com].
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1. They price in externalities when comparing against fossil fuels. How to price those in is highly subjective. And, recall, they're not currently priced in and don't look to be any time soon.
2. Pretty sure they extrapolate future price decreases in green tech and price increases in fossil fuels. This is by nature somewhat speculative. Past doesn't always predict future. The prices could shift faster than expected or slower than expected.
So basically their premise is
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed that for you. The problem with nuclear is that it's expensive to run safely (in this case, 'run safely' being defined as 'using newer, safer technology' or 'not cutting corners in the name of profits'). And in the USA nothing happens if someone can't make a buck.
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Re:hmm (Score:4, Funny)
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And that's why what we're looking for is a water-borne algee that can be converted into fuel. Blanket the oceans with it and watch it soak up the CO2 from the water (where it's doing the most damage) then turn it into fuel. Easy to raise, self reproducing, needs little to no care.
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And if nobody ever eats seafood again, that's a small price to pay. I mean the great white has survived the K2 event and that wiped out the dinosaurs so I'm SURE it will survive your algae blanket !
Not whole energy budget, just stuff like vehicles. (Score:5, Interesting)
... article mentioned that if we took all the biomass from all of the farmland both producing and fallow and were able to convert it all directly to ethanol that it would STILL only account for 14% of the US energy budget.
(Ignoring for the moment whether the claim is accurate ...)
The idea is not to replace the whole energy needs of the country with biomass fuels. Smelting steel or refining aluminum with it, for instance, would be downright silly. Ditto running power plants: (Even if you wanted to use biomass there'd be no reason to waste part of its energy liquifying it - just burn it directly. But there are lots of cheaper alternatives.)
But there's a small-but-substantial fraction of the load for which liquid fuels is ideal: Vehicles. Liquid fuels provide enormous power-to-weight ratios, which is what you want there. Keeping a vehicle light pays dividends in fuel savings, as does providing energy using easy-to-handle liquid with high energy content.
The base process ferments cellulose into butanol, acetone, and ethanol. Even without this new post-processing hack, butanol is a drop-in replacement for gasoline, ethanol works in otto-cycle engines with a little tweaking and acetone with more tweaking. This new post-process turns the mix into something akin to fuel oil, which is a similar drop-in for diesel cycle engines. So it covers both major types of portable engines.
Even if you can't come up with enough fuel to run the whole economy, or even the whole transportation industry, from locally-grown biomass, there's a LOT of low-value byproducts grown in the process of growing crops. Turning it into high-value portable liquid fuel could make a substantial dent in oil requirements while improving the financial picture both for vehicle users and farmers.
Solar and wind aren't well suited for the enormous energy and energy-density needs of land vehicles (though we're getting closer with modern electric vehicles for limited ranges). But they can make a similar dent in the energy needs of stationary loads.
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Combustion has pretty much reached a dead end in efficiency, we need to find a better way to use our liquid hydrocarbons.
Electric cars are great to drive. They're smooth, quiet, have very few moving parts and are "energy agnostic". They don't care where the electricity comes from, as long as it's there. But they also have issues with energy storage, current battery tech just isn't ready yet.
What I propose is to use fuel cells to provide the electricity. Not hydrogen fuel cells, as hydrogen has way too many
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Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretend for a moment that our current energy needs are met 100% through non-renewable sources:
gas, coal, oil, fission
What would make you think that there is one solution which replaces these? What makes you think it is biomass?
In reality, we will probably meet these needs through another combination of 'renewable' energy sources:
wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass sources (algae, sugar beets), space-based sources (collection/transmission)
Additionally, our energy issues, like financial issues, are related to spending as well as creating. A more complete solution involves:
more (or less) efficient electronics, 'offer' off states, more efficient heating/cooling/lighting, better reuse of 'waste' heating/cooling, increased storage and storage time for batteries, more conductive transmission of power, quicker start up and cool down of generation facilities, repurposing (or double-purposing) existing land/roof space for generation/storage, and many more incremental improvements.
We have quite a bit of biomass, and we would like to use it for power in addition to all our other supply. This is part of a larger solution, and should not be criticized with the point of "This can only be PART of the solution". Take joy in the advancements when they come.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
From this website [tradingeconomics.com] I've got a figure of just over 4 million sq. kilometers of arable land in the United States. This website [uoregon.edu] gives daily cross-year average sunlight falling on a square meter of ground as about 160 W. That's 640 x 10^12 W-days of power falling on the land, per day. Wikipedia cites that plants have a metabolic conversion efficiency of six per cent [wikipedia.org]. This website [uoregon.edu] cites a biomass-to-energy conversion efficiency of 20 per cent. So, if we assume that only 1 per cent of arable land was actually covered with plant, and then turned into electricity, total daily production would be 77 x10^9 W-days of power. This sounds like a lot; obviously there will be some more production and transport inefficiencies in there.
For comparison, the US consumes 1.39 x10^9 [eia.gov] litres of fuel per day. According to Wikipedia, the energy density of petrol is 49.2 x 10^6 J/L [wikipedia.org], so that's 684 x10^12 J of energy per day... or, expressed in Watt-days (86400 seconds in a day), that's 7.91 x10^9 W-days of energy.
There are a lot of real world factors not being included in these estimates, but the 10-to-1 ratio here indicates to me that the energies involved are of a comparable scale; if we devoted 10 per cent of arable land to agriculture, we could (with highly efficient processes), conceivably put a sizable dent in our energy usage.
Re:hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:formatting (Score:5, Insightful)
It's offtopic, and all that, but... a friendly note to say that if you took some time to format your posts into paragraphs, it's much more likely that someone would read it.
A quick glance shows that you've put some time time and thought into your post, which everyone can appreciate. But at the present time, its composition looks a lot like the emails I get from my mother: one long stream of consciousness with no breaks or separation of thoughts/ideas.
Don't be hating, mods. Just trying to help a fellow out.
We USED TO burn biofuels and look what happened (Score:5, Informative)
That sounds like a load of bullshit to me. .... .. which is indicative of an estimate, not a fact
- How was the total US energy 'budget' calculated? Note the word 'budget' not 'usage'
Up to the industrial revolution, our main source of fuel used to be biomass: wood (charcoal). Keep in mind that this was when the population size and total energy use of western civilization were tiny by today's standards. Nevertheless, we managed to run out of wood.
Britain and Ireland were almost completely stripped of trees. Even today, the only trees you'll find older than the industrial revolution are in places that were some noble family's private hunting ground at the time. The eastern mediterranean was stripped of trees as far back as ancient times, and still hasn't recovered. In the low countries, after they ran out of wood, they started burning the soil (peat), turning their land into lakes, which they later had to drain to turn it back into land, which is why they now live below sea level. They did however make a fortune importing timber from the sparsely populated Baltic. Yes, wood had to come from as far as Russia and Finland, because western Europe had run out.
Believe it or not, burning biofuels was an environmental disaster, and switching to coal allowed forests and wildlife to recover.
Now, turning agricultural waste into fuel sounds like a good idea to me (that's what they do in Brazil with the leftovers from the sugar production), but when you're thinking of growing crops with the express purpose of making fuel, you have to consider the fact that modern, high-yield agriculture is effectively our way of using land to turn fossil fuel and sunlight into food. Tilling, sowing, fertilizing, pest control, harvesting, processing and transport together have to use substantially less energy than the fuel you are making will yield.
Clearly, land + fuel + sunlight -> food -> fuel -> energy is an inefficient process. Why not eliminate a couple of conversion steps from the process, and use solar cells to generate electricity? The process land + sunlight -> energy has fewer inefficient conversion steps.
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You're comparing burning old growth forests that take decades or centuries to grow to burning grasses that can grow 10 ft tall in a single season?
Re:We USED TO burn biofuels and look what happened (Score:4, Insightful)
You're comparing burning old growth forests that take decades or centuries to grow to burning grasses that can grow 10 ft tall in a single season?
I'm saying you are either underestimating how much energy we use today, or overestimating how much net energy you can grow per area unit of land. Switchgrass may be a way of making areas productive that are now too dry for agriculture other than low intensity cattle farming. This means turning land that is now essentially wilderness into mono culture farmland, which is just another form of the same ecological disaster I described earlier.
Bio fuels should not be mistaken for the green, organic, nature lover's wet dream. It will require an awful lot of land to cover the energy needs of our current standard of living. As we will still want to eat food as well, this extra land will have to come from wilderness or forests, rather than from existing farm land. This is not a happy solution for bears, deer and buffalo. The only ones cheering will be people who bought prairie land wilderness for a dollar per acre.
Re:hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
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How much energy does it take to create given a requirement of infinite sustainability? i.e. you have to replenish the soil in which the trees grow with fertilizer, etc.
TFA says grasses might be via source material - "anything fast growing" - perhaps clippings from cutting all our lawns?
Re:hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
How is this different from bio-diesel? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know bio-diesel requires oil-producing crops vs. sugar producing crops, but other than that I'm curious how this fuel might be "better" than bio-diesel. Given that bio-diesel can be produced using hemp seed oil (a plant that literally grows like a weed in the worst of conditions), I'd think the hemp alternative would be better.
The milled hemp kernels left behind by the oil extraction provide a high-protein animal feed, and the stalks produce fiber that can replace a wide number of products.
I'd guess the remaining hemp stalk material after the fiber has been extracted could still be put through this fermentation process.
So enlighten me.
Why aren't we pursuing hemp-based bio-diesel instead?
Aerial surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
Why aren't we pursuing hemp-based bio-diesel instead?
Because aerial surveillance can't tell the low-THC strains of C. sativa grown for hemp from the higher-THC strains grown for a psychoactive substance. Perhaps one of the U.S. states that has legalized pot on a state level (with President Obama's announced lack of enforcement priority) can experiment with a hemp industry.
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Anyway, growing hemp might just be an interesting niche in a state where you can get away with it. It is kind of versatile (even if we discount the recreational uses of certain strains).
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Oops, messed that up. This--> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/03/pelosi-condemns-obamas-continued-raids-on-marijuana-dispensaries/ [rawstory.com]
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The article calls the resulting fuel "diesel" a couple of times. This apparently is bio diesel, using an old industrial process and then a new catalyst (I'm betting that the ip for the catalyst will be owned by bp) to convert the output of the old process into the fuel.
Re:How is this different from bio-diesel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because hemp is being vastly oversold by people who want to get high on pot and figure that promoting hemp growing is a way to legalization.
Growing hemp is legal pretty much everywhere in Europe. If hemp was as much a wonder material as its promoters claimed it was, Europe would be using it for bio-diesel anyway.
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Something to do with replacing the half-a-billion existing vehicles that can't run on bio-diesel perhaps?
If someone can figure out how to manufacture a 'drop-in' replacement for normal petrol / gasolene then you can jump start the entire process without waiting the 20-30 years for passenger diesel engines to become the bulk of the market.
Re:How is this different from bio-diesel? (Score:5, Interesting)
If biodiesel was 30% less expensive than gasoline, I would expect to see a market shift within 5 years.
The technology is available now, but diesel cars don't seem to be popular in the US - probably because diesel is 20% more expensive than gasoline in the US. In Europe, where gasoline and diesel fuel prices are much closer to even, diesel cars are far more common.
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There are NO compact or sub-compacts sold with a diesel in the US, except for the Volkswagen Jetta (which I didn't want with any powerplant). When American's complained about getting a joke SMART car that got about half the fuel economy the Canadian diesel version got, they stopped selling the diesel versions in
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But modern common rail injectors will foul on pure biodiesel (I know the Volkswagen group specifically allows only a certain percentage for EU warranty coverage and excludes any biodiesel for US spec vehicles)
Re:How is this different from bio-diesel? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know the Volkswagen group specifically allows only a certain percentage for EU warranty coverage and excludes any biodiesel for US spec vehicles
They actually allow B5 - presumably because quite a few states require the stations to serve it.
The majority consensus on VW community forums seems to be that B20 works great in practice, but anything above that is potentially risky. B100 will definitely make a mess (some people have posted pictures of what it makes out of the engine eventually).
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... and end up getting Christmas cards from the DEA ...
Wouldn't it be nice if you could actually buy and send such cards to your friends? A heading like "interesting 'tree' you got there" comes to mind. What about other agencies like the CIA ("We know what you'll get for Christmas"), the IRS ("You're not planning to file this as a business expense, are you?"), the NSA ("The wrapping is pointless"), the ATF (well, the name is already a shopping list), and many more.
If you plan to use this idea and make money I'm cool with it, but then you'll have to write me a
Another pie-in-the-sky plan (Score:4, Insightful)
What is with these people that think we can meet any reasonable amount of our energy needs, nationally or globally, with alcohol? It takes literally seconds to look up the maximum arable land in a country, determine how much fuel you could make if you used all of it at 100% efficiency, and then see that this is nowhere near enough fuel to replace gasoline. During this exercise you're allowed to ignore the impact this would have when that land is no longer available for current purposes.
Until there are major advances in where this stuff can be grown, to get the energy produced per acre much higher than it actually is, and prevent "simple" natural disasters from ruining entire crops for the season, this stuff is never going to take off no matter the hype.
Cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass (Score:2)
Until there are major advances in where this stuff can be grown
Advances like the ability to process switchgrass, which can grow on marginal farmland, and other sources of cellulose such as waste wood? They're working on that.
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1. Switchgrass average production: 14.6 tons / hectare
2. Ethanol 100 gallons/ton
3. Total land area (not arable, total for CONUS, period) 766 million hectares
Total fuel production per year: 1.1 trillion gallons
Gasoline and diesel consumption in 2011: 200 billion gallons.
So you tell me. Do you think it's realistic to convert 20% of the total land area of the country to switchgrass production? It would certainly make sense to use it to replace corn, once the technology matures, but it's never going to repla
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Unfortunately, electric car batteries are a lot bigger than most people realize. The Tesla Model S? It's the entire bottom ~4 inches of the car's body. Aside from a little but of room to account for very minor collisions and such, the battery bank is literally the size of the horizontal cross-section of a sedan. It also weighs well over a ton (the Model S is shockingly heavy, and over half of it is the battery bank).
Now, could you build a "battery station" designed to remove and replace such batteries, in a
Gald to see it is still getting coverage (Score:2)
Let the fuel wars begin (Score:2)
Re:Let the fuel wars begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let the fuel wars begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to shatter your conspiratorial fantasy, but this research was actually funded by BP. A lot of big oil companies are investing in alternate energy these days as a hedge for when oil is no longer needed. They say, "We're not in the oil business, we're in the energy business."
Correction: A lot of big oil companies are interested in patenting alternate energy sources these days, because patents can stifle innovation...
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Correction: A lot of big oil companies are interested in patenting alternate energy sources these days, because patents can stifle innovation...
Where did you get that information? Is that something you made up? Go look at BP's wind farms, and ask yourself why they would actually be building things if they only cared about patents and stifling things.
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It goes back to the ridiculous conspiracy claims that some guy invented a carburetor that makes your engine get 50 mpg, but he was bought out by the oil companies and his invention ended up in the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones.
Never mind that there are carbureted vehicles that get 50mpg - they're called motorcycles.
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Correction: A lot of big oil companies are interested in patenting alternate energy sources these days, because patents can stifle innovation...
Kodak: Invents the digital camera, then sits on it for fear that it would destroy their film industry.
GE: Invents the fluorescent light bulb and markets it to businesses while selling their incandescents to homes.
According to a pie chart on Wikipedia; in 2009, petroleum accounted for only 1% of us power generation in the US. 'Other renewables', which is going to be made up of wind, solar, and geothermal accounted for 3.6%. Oil companies fund research into renewables because they never made it into that mass
And the oil majors will join (Score:2)
I'm wondering how long it will be before Big Oil starts claiming that this substitute damages your car.
Given how far BP and the other big energy companies claim to want to extend themselves "beyond petroleum" (as BP rebranded itself), I'd imagine they'd want to get into the ABE fuel business themselves.
System efficiency? (Score:4)
What about the system efficiency?
"Look!
You only need 20kWh of electricity, 1m**3 of water, 2m**2 of land and 3 liters of fertilizer to get 1 liter of biofuel.
We will revolutionize the world in 10 years!"
People complain all the time about low efficiency of PV Panels, but they're still 5 times better than photosynthesis.
Anyone hungry? (Score:5, Interesting)
With a planet full of starving people I continue to fail to understand how using food crops for fuel makes any kind of rational sense at all.
Food exists, but you can't have it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Food exists, but you can't have it (Score:5, Informative)
According to this site [cnn.com] total global food production is 4.4 billion tonnes per year, so in a world of 7 billion people that's 629 kg per person per year, or 1.7 kg per day. The average (median) American eats 1.03 kg per day, and the 90th percentile eats 1.73 kg per day, according to the EPA [epa.gov].
About 2.4 billion tonnes is cereals [wikipedia.org] (e.g. corn, rice, wheat).
So yeah, if we're producing enough to feed 7 billion 90th percentile Americans, I think it's safe to say it's a distribution problem not a supply problem.
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The problem with food-for-fuel is that it's just not efficient. On top of the damage that ethanol does to vehicles...
Re:Anyone hungry? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now with high percentages (90% for example) of ethanol some trouble does arise. Ethanol is soluble in water. Engines do not like water, so high ethanol percentages could carry to much dissolved water. That can damage an engine.
Now if some chemist could find a way to remove that pesky oxigen, polimerise the resulting ethane (or ethylene) to a bit longer chains with some branching and some double C connections (to get the flammability right) then we'd simply have bio-gasoline and we'd just have the problem that we can't create enough bioethanol to fuel the world.
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People are lobbying to allow 10%. This does not damage engines, but assuming it is done (and with bio-ethanol) it does put a 5 or 10% dent in the CO2 production.
There's quite a lot of debate about that. One thing that 10% ethanol does wreck havoc with is rubber fuel lines on older cars, eventually making them brittle. There's also complaints about it ruining valve seals, again on older cars. Of course these things can be replaced, but it isn't as harmless as the biofuel lobby would suggest, as it seems to dry out and degrade rubber quite quickly.
Biofuels are okay, but we shouldn't be thinking of them as anything more than a bridge from oil burning combustion to wha
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With a planet full of starving people I continue to fail to understand how using food crops for fuel makes any kind of rational sense at all.
This does not seem to be limited to food crops. Sure they mention "corn, sugar cane, molasses" but immediately add that it also works with "woody biomass or plant biomass", "grass" and "Eucalyptus". So as long as we (as a species) are smart enough to apply this technology to the right sources it should be fine on the hunger front (sure, us being smart enough is questionable).
What I really wonder is whether that means they've solved the cellulose conversion issues. Given that the article does not brag about
Re:Anyone hungry? (Score:4, Funny)
Call it Soylent premium.
Doesn't solve the problem (Score:2)
We just need _so_ much more fuel than plants could produce. Even if we use high efficiency plants like hemp we don't have enough fertile ground to grow enough plants.
Plants are really inefficient when it comes to turning sunlight into carbohydrates. That's simply just a by-product of their life.
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Compare the efficiency of plans turning sunlight into carbohydrates, with that of a planet's geologic processes turning the results of mass-extinction events into fossil fuels over millions of years. Most of Earths oil was produced during two distinct mass-extinction events long ago. We're on track to use every drop of it up over the course of a couple hundred years. The phrase 'burn rate' comes to mind. If the planet can't produce energy that fast, then perhaps, we need to cut back how much we burn, eh
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Absolutely. Or at least we'd have to move to more sustainable forms of energy gathering like wind or solar.
5 to 10 Years Out (Score:5, Funny)
5 years (Score:5, Funny)
Let's see some EROEI figures (Score:5, Informative)
Until cost and EROEI [wikipedia.org] figures come out, this is vaporware. There are lots of ways to make fuel from biomass, but most of them are too expensive. Some consume more energy than they produce (EROEI < 1). Any useful process needs an EROEI over 5, and preferably over 10, to be worth the trouble. Photovoltaic is now up to 7, which is encouraging. Ethanol from corn is listed as 1.3, and some studies put it at less than 1. (Ethanol distillation plants, unlike oil refineries, don't run on their own product; they take in natural gas or some other fuel.)
I see the hemp enthusiasts are out in force again. Hemp isn't a good fuel crop. If you just want biomass for cellulose, you use agricultural waste - corn husks and cobs, straw, bagasse from sugar cane, etc. Hemp seed oil is useful, but only a small part of the biomass comes out as oil. There are better plants for direct oil production.
Re:Let's see some EROEI figures (Score:4, Insightful)
I am usually very concerned with EROEI but there is one instance where and EROEI of less than 1 is not a problem. The is in converting the energy into something much more transportable. For example geothermal heat does not travel well or store well. We currently are very good at converting it into electricity. That travels better but still has limits and storage is very expensive. We can convert the energy into hydrocarbons that store very well and transport very well. It does not matter if we only get half the energy out that we put in if the energy we put in is not usable where it is now.;
Bye bye forests! (Score:2)
Curious the affect on engine seals? (Score:4, Interesting)
CO2? (Score:5, Insightful)
great, but when you burn it does it still spew CO2 into the atmosphere?
when are we going wake up and start using cars powered by hydrogen separated from water in LFTRs?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:CO2? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen while producing "cleaner" emissions at the combustion location, does not have any net advantage in CO2 over biofuel. There may be some difference in the production process, but I have no idea which fuel source comes up better in that category (once optimized).
Top secret! (Score:3)
The discovery, published in the journal Nature, means corn...
If this research was really worthwhile, they'd have published their paper publicly instead of in some elitist magazine. This kind of behavior by scientists is exactly what late Aaron Swartz denounced. Once again important research stays hidden within the confines of paywall-locked information-vaults. Great...
By the way, Berkeley itself already published about this in November.
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/11/08/more-bang-for-the-biofuel-buck/ [lbl.gov]
What? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh come on, Slashdot.
150 comments and not a mention of Triffid oil?
I'm disappointed. What has this site come to?
Plants are just inefficient solar panels (Score:3)
whose output is chemical, and inefficient. As long as we're going to use concentrated sunlight anyway, we'd do better to make more efficient batteries instead of needing more biomass, setting us up for even more ecological disaster.
Re: (Score:3)
Both statements are incorrect, unless you vehicle is pre-1990's by law the components have to be able to handle at least 10% ethanol, and the current ethanol production chains range from 1.5:1 to 3:1 efficiency.
Re: (Score:2)
Electricity to methane is already claimed to be 50% efficient, it's not as ideal as petrol/diesel but we can make do with it for everything but planes (which can run on biofuels). Ideally we will find some high efficiency conversion to convert methane to propane ... but as I said, we can make do with methane.
I see no problem with replacing fossil fuels, other than that as a society we have become completely unable to sacrifice for a communal good and the market is being engineered for a sudden collapse so m