Lowering the Cost of Biofuel Production 56
sciencehabit writes: 2014 was a banner year for making automotive fuel from nonfood crops, with a series of major new production plants opening in the United States. However, producing this so-called cellulosic ethanol remains considerably more expensive than gasoline. So researchers are always on the lookout for new ways to trim costs. Now they have a new lead: a microbe that can use abundant nitrogen gas as the fertilizer it needs to produce ethanol from plants. The discovery (abstract) is "a major commercial accomplishment for biofuel production," says microbiologist Steven Ricke.
One more promising lead.... (Score:2)
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Biofuel is dead! Didn't they hear the news?
http://www.wri.org/tags/biofue... [wri.org]
According to the World Resources Institute report just released within the last week (!):
- Claims for biofuel potential have been exaggerated
- Their production is costly and inefficient
- There are better alternatives to fossil fuels already available for achieving lower carbon
- Research funding has led to little progress compared to alternatives, and that is unlikely to change
- And biofuel production has caused unintended disruption
Alcohol is not the answer (Score:5, Funny)
Sad to see that yet another person, when faced with the problem of our reliance on fossil fuels, turns to alcohol.
I'd tell them to get off my lawn, but if there's a chance they can turn my grass into fuel for my car, I guess I'll let them stay.
not in my tank! (Score:5, Insightful)
That stuff is nasty! It'll mess up your engine, hurt your gas mileage and do little if anything to clear the atmosphere.
If we accept it's about cleaner air. And we assume that it burns X% cleaner. And we assume that we will burn X% more fuel over the same distance ... What have we gained? I have seen good arguments for using biodiesel but not ethanol.
It's all about corporate welfare. Big corporations and well funded universities make a show of looking for clean, efficient alternative fuels while sucking up taxpayer dollars. Where is MY lobbyist? Who will pay to overhaul my engine when it corrodes internally?
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You loeft it under yhe couch but that is the last place you will look for it.
Anyways, i'll let you use mine. I take the bus.
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Sure, it'll mess up your existing engine in your existing vehicle. Theoretically, if an advance such as the one discussed here were to actually reduce the cost of producing ethanol-based fuel to the point where it could compete against gasoline, then that would create a market for new vehicles and new fuels. Car manufacturers already certify their newer vehicles to tolerate the currently-available corn crap that's out there.
As far as the politics, here in Illinois, it's all about propping up the megafarm co
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What I want to know is why is it so goddamn hard for those farms to just switch to growing soybeans instead? And why is the existing soybean lobby apparently asleep at the wheel? If we grew soybeans instead of corn then we could make biodiesel -- which actuall
Please provide evidence (Score:2)
What I want to know is why is it so goddamn hard for those farms to just switch to growing soybeans instead?
Chicken and egg. There has to be a market for their product before it makes sense to grow soybeans.
If we grew soybeans instead of corn then we could make biodiesel -- which actually is efficient to produce -- and get rid of the "ethanol is stupid because it costs more fossil fuels than it saves" problem once and for all!
Citation please. Specifically please prove the following:
1) That either ethanol or biodiesel result in a net energy gain since both require expenditures of fossil fuels to grow the crops and bring them to market.
2) That there is sufficient available arable land to make a meaningful impact on energy needs without impacting food production.
3) Explain how any use of bio-fuels will solve or meaningfully mitigate
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soybeans are legumes, and thus do not require the fertilizers used to grow corn.
This radically reduces the energy overhead of the crop. In order to be net energy positive though, a field of soybeans must produce more oil than is used to grow the crop (after all calculated expenses for processing into biodiesel are included)
It's possible this could work with special cultivars I suppose.
Re:not in my tank! (Score:4, Interesting)
There's only one rationale I can think of for ethanol - that we produce more food than is needed so that if there were a problem with food production we'd still have enough.
A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests that even if we threw away 90% of our food, it still wouldn't be enough to fuel our cars. Actually, I lied. I didn't use a napkin.
But growing corn explicitly for ethanol seems pretty retarded.
Virtually all fuel feedstock corn is grown continuously, meaning without crop rotation or even letting fields lie fallow. It is beyond retarded.
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In the 1980's, a think tank with access to classified information and all the data they could put their hands on about oil and food calculated that when US oil access decreased to a certain threshold there would be a cycle of problems ending in wide spread starvation. They also realized that it would be possible to minimize the starvation deaths if enough land and equipment were dedicated to corn production, but at the same time realized that there was no way the market profit margins would entice anyone to
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They also realized that it would be possible to minimize the starvation deaths if enough land and equipment were dedicated to corn production,
This is a great plot for a movie, which doesn't have to make sense, like real life does.
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It helps if you're humming A-Team theme music while you read it.
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If we accept it's about cleaner air. And we assume that it burns X% cleaner. And we assume that we will burn X% more fuel over the same distance ... What have we gained? I have seen good arguments for using biodiesel but not ethanol.
I have a diesel car and I get excellent economy as well as producing less green house gas than an equivalent petrol engine. My car is able to take 5% bio-diesel (B5) as per manufacturers guidelines however in Sydney Australia I find it almost impossible to get B5 or any bio-diesel for that matter. Of course if I had a petrol car I can get 10% Ethanol (E10) which is normally cheaper (Government/Taxpayer subsidised) than diesel although because I get a better fuel economy the price evens out.
Actually even th
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Solar, wind and nuclear [electricity] are hard to use as transportation fuels (especially for vehicles of the long-range variety). Direct nuclear power (of the 1950s atomic-age [wikipedia.org] variety) would work, but is a no-go for obvious political reasons.
Besides, there are four ways to fuel a solar car:
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Bio has never been about clean air. It's been about not having to dig up hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately as the colossal waste of crops show, the benefits of switching to biofuels are dubious at best, in my opinion, but I welcome some evidence to the contrary from the pro biofuel crowd.
Also it doesn't mess up your engine any more than any other chemical composition change in the fuel has messed up engines over the years. Some engines won't run well and will get messed up, some run just fine on it, some require i
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cleaner air. And we assume that it burns X% cleaner. And we assume that we will burn X% more fuel over the same distance ... What have we gained?
Your presumption is so bad, it's easy to refuse. You're assuming the amount cleaner and the more fuel are equal.
They don't have to be.
What if you burn 115% more fuel, but the amount of pollutants you're concerned about is reduced to 50%?
I have seen good arguments for using biodiesel but not ethanol.
It's all about corporate welfare. Big corporations and well funded universities make a show of looking for clean, efficient alternative fuels while sucking up taxpayer dollars. Where is MY lobbyist? Who will pay
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That and having to replace engine seals frequently.
One of the main problems high-E engines is the Ethanol tends to eat the seals, even on engines designed to handle high-E fuel.
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Don't quote me on this, because I've not read the article............
That being said, the impression I got, is that biofuel is "grown" in pools or things like that, I believe it captures some of the carbon in the air in the process of creating the stuff.
I'm not (in any way!) suggesting this is perfect but it's surely better than pulling huge deposits of carbon out of the deep ground and re-adding that to the air.
So arguably the more biofuel we grow, the more that's taken out of the air. Yes, burning it cr
LPG FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
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Can you make LPG from bio sources ?
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Sure.
You can even make straight-up gasoline [newscientist.com].
Whether or not it's worthwhile depends on how much energy you need to make the desired fuel, and if you can use that energy more effectively or not... that's the key difference between "possible" and "practical."
=Smidge=
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The 'practical' bit was implied.
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Sure. But you ask "Can you (practically) make LPG from bio sources?"
And the answer is "It depends." How desperate are you for LPG? :)
=Smidge=
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LPG is primarily Methane, so you can feed things like cow manure into a digester and compress the resulting mathane into a liquid. Many impoverished places use methane digesters such as the Gobar Gas [michaelyon-online.com] digesters in Nepal.
Ethanol bad, bio-diesel good (Score:1)
Being that it takes two barrels of gasoline to make one barrel of ethanol, growing the corn and turning it into ethanol, than please let it DIE. I beg you all, please separate bio-diesel and ethanol into two separate discussions.
The fix (Score:2)
There are more costs than economic ones (Score:3)
There are more costs than economic ones to consider. Making ethanol uses vast amounts of water -- water that is then not available for other uses. If they could find a way to do it with, say, sea water, that would be one thing, but in the Midwest, where much of the production is, water is becoming a scarce resource.
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Why is water not an economic cost?
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Why is water not an economic cost?
Technically, it is, because it is a resource. But usually when speaking of economic cost, the focus is on lowering the cost of production. In this case, water is a resource for production, but the focus is usually on the price of the water, not on the impact to the surrounding communities that might be impacted by using it for fuel production.
This is not restricted to bio-fuels. We see it all the time, usually, though it is more likely to be an issue of damming some river for tourism purposes at the expense
Biofuel Refinery Process not so pretty (Score:1)
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Biodiesel is relatively easy to make, evey thing you would need to know can be found here [journeytoforever.org]. The stuff is actually a handy non-toxic cleaner-degreaser. I'm surprised that somebody just dumped the glycerin, it's valuable in it's own right, it makes a very desirable soap, and can be used in foods and cosmetic, or even as a fuel.
Bacteria that makes methanol (Score:1)
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Because it's not about finding a more effective means of producing biofuel.
It's about being a subsidy to Big Corn industry.
Oh Boy (Score:3)
Let's take more plant material off of the land which means that we'll have to replace the nutrients. We do that with fertilizer (most of it derived from fossil fuels) that don't completely stay in the fields and contaminate our waterways. Wonderful.