Stories tagged biofuel
Most ethanol is currently made from corn. Scientists in Europe are worried that increasing production for ethanol will increase the demand for the crop, thus leading cut down forests to plant more corn. This would have a greater negative impact on the global climate than any positive impact from using ethanol instead of gasoline.
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Minnesota and some place called "Princeton" have learned that converting forests and prairies into farmlands to grow corn actually releases carbon into the atmosphere, far more than is saved by replacing gas with ethanol.
OTOH, this author claims there is no evidence that forests and prairies are being converted to farm land. Rather, the demand for corn is being met by more efficient farming. He also argues that ethanol is cost-efficient and does not lead to higher food prices.
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The fuel of the future?: Termite guts break down cellulose into a form that could be used for fuel.
Courtesy Velo Steve
Scientists for the US Department of Energy are studying termites in hopes of developing new sources of fuel.
Termites eat wood. Wood is made of a tough material called cellulose. There’s an awful lot of cellulose in the world, and its easy to grow, making it an ideal raw material for making ethanol. Except – it’s really, really hard to turn cellulose into ethane (natural gas). It’s much easier to make ethanol out of food crops like corn – but that creates problems of its own.
Termites, however, have microbes in their stomachs which break down cellulose quickly and efficiently, as anyone who’s ever had a termite infestation in their house knows. Scientists hope to figure out how the microbes do their job, and then duplicate the process to help fill the nation’s energy needs.
The incomparable Cecil Adams weighs in with his thoughts on cellulose-based ethanol.
The author personally investigates Indonesian flora: Photo by Ranti Junus
And Borneo. And Bali. And Banjarmasin. The southeast Asian country of Indonesia plans to plant 79 million trees on a single day -- November 28. The event will take place ahead of a UN climate change meeting on Bali the following month.
Indonesia has cut down more tropical forests since 2000 than any other country. It is also the world's third-largest producer of greenhouse gases. It is hoped that this massive planting project will reverse these trends.
Many of the rainforests have been cut down to make room for palm oil plantations, which are expanding to produce raw material for biofuel -- another example of how everything is interconnected, and trying to solve a problem in one area can create a problem in another.
(Indonesia's entry into the biofuel market strikes me as odd, since they are a major oil-producing nation and a member of OPEC.)
Corn, the real enemy: The demand for corn to make ethanol is pushing up the price of many food items, including ice cream. Photo by frascelly at flickr.com
Most ethanol is made from corn.
As the demand for corn goes up, the price goes up, too.
Dairies buy corn to feed their milk cows.
As the price of corn goes up, dairies must raise the price of milk to keep even.
And what essential, life-sustaining product is made from milk?
ICE CREAM, PEOPLE!
The demand for ethanol is forcing up the cost of ice cream!
The terrible irony of all this is that ethanol is promoted as a renewable, alternative fuel, one that will reduce pollution and carbon emissions and thus help combat global warming. Yet, its production is harming the one known proven antidote to blazing temperatures – ice cream!
Our way of life, our very existence is at stake here.
Fortunately, science comes to the rescue. Researchers in Georgia are building the first cellulosic ethanol plant, which will make ethanol from plant waste (like lawn clippings and switch grass) rather than from food crops.
It may not save the planet, but if it saves ice cream, that will be a good first step.
Dear Readers,
Now, please raise a hand or two if I’m getting ahead of you, but I think it’s time we get down to business.
You’ve all heard of “the future,” correct? Flying cars, artificial intelligence, iPhones, and excremental fuel sources? I thought so. Or is there anything here that you are, as of yet, unfamiliar with?
Do your part to solve the energy crisis: A local man prepares to save the future, the only way he knows how. (photo by Mimi K)
Ever since the release of Back to the Future Part II, flying cars have been, more or less, old news, and Tamagotchi has put to rest all fears of A.I. iPones will remain a mystery to all of us for another few hours, at least, but are we all clear on the matter of turning excrement, or “poop,” into sweet diesel fuel?
Oh. I see. We haven’t all been doing our assigned reading, have we?
Well, if the responsible among you would like to put your heads down on your desks for a few minutes, I’ll refresh the rest of the Science Buzz readers.
Chemists around the globe have been hard at work on various processes to convert organic, carbon-based waste products into something very much like crude oil. Examples of organic, carbon-based waste products include, but are not limited to, chicken and turkey guts, old tractor tires, Sega Genesis cartridges (in part), lawn compost, cookie dough, defective jewel cases, ramen noodle wrappers, my fingernail clippings, old magazines, new magazines, tennis shoes (right and left), twine, super glue, baseball hats, worn out VHS copies of “Biodome,” and, naturally, human fecal matter.
The method for turning carbon products back into something like petroleum is relatively new, although certainly not unheard of. By applying the right conditions (heat, pressure, and, uh, other stuff) to the contents of, say, a couple tons of landfill, you can end up with a crude oil like substance, and some left over minerals and metals. The trick is in refining this process so that the energy needed for the transformation is less than the potential energy of the fuel output. As scientists come closer to a workable method, government and industry have been taking a closer look at large-scale applications. This article mentions Britain’s interest in the technology needed to turn their organic waste – of all sorts – into transportation fuel.
As something that produces carbon-based fuels, this process wouldn’t exactly halt the output of global-warming CO2, but it’s not quite so harmful as burning fossil fuels because, as the article puts it, “the carbon produced when the fuel is burnt was absorbed from the atmosphere by the plants or trees used to make it.” That is to say, it wouldn’t create new CO2, because the organic components of the fuel had just been taking in carbon that was already in the atmosphere.
The facilities required for the process are, unfortunately, extremely expensive. Once everything is set up, however, the fuel produced could potentially be very cheap. And the ingredients aren’t generally difficult to produce.
Some Science Buzz writers specifically go looking for science stories to write about. Then there are lazy folks like me, who just surf the web as per usual, and when something sciencey crosses our path, we bookmark it.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been running across a lot of stories on energy. None of them seemed big enough to merit its own story, but they are too good to completely ignore. So, here’s a potpourri:
America’s energy needs keep growing. Producing energy by burning coal or oil pollutes the environment. Nuclear energy is much cleaner, but it produces radioactive waste. Now a government-funded project in Tennessee is trying to recycle the waste from nuclear power plants to produce a new type of fuel—one that could produce up to 100 times as much energy, and produce 40% less waste.
One old technology that may be making a comeback is gasification—turning organic material, such as coal, into a gas which can be burned for energy. It’s cleaner than burning coal directly for energy—a lot of the pollutants are captured and re-used. And, you can gasify any organic material, including plants and farm waste.
In other threads on this blog, we’ve discussed some of the downsides of ethanol-- increased demand for corn causes farm prices to shoot up. A report from Brazil outlines some of the other potential problems, from pollution created in its manufacture, to destroying large ecosystems to raise the crops that will be turned into ethanol.
When drillers go looking for oil, they look for large pockets of liquid trapped in the earth, surrounded by non-porous rock. This is sometimes called “easy oil”—ready to refine as soon as it comes out of the ground. But there are vast amounts of oil in porous rock, like sand or shale. Miners have to dig up vast amounts of oil-soaked rock, and then separate the usable oil from the sand. It’s a very expensive process. But, as the price of crude oil keeps climbing, we are getting to the point where shale oil makes sense. And what’s even better, some of the largest deposits in the world are found here in North America.
The article linked above describes a shale oil operation in Canada. There are also operations underway in the
United States. And there’s another project underway in Israel.
Corn field: Corn is used to produce ethanol fuels, such as E85. Photo courtesy killermart, Flickr Creative Commons.Biofuels are fuels that are derived from recently living organisms, such as corn or soybeans, or their byproducts, such as manure from cows. A recent study at the University of Minnesota examined the total life-cycle cost of all of the energy used for growing corn and soybeans and converting these crops into biofuels to determine what biofuel has the highest energy benefit and the least impact on the environment.
Corn grain ethanol vs. soybean biodisel
Two types of biofuels are becoming more visible as we look for alternatives to petroleum because of increasing gas prices: soybean biodisel and corn grain ethanol, such as E85. The study showed that both corn grain ethanol and soybean biodiesel produce more energy than is needed to grow the crops and convert them into biofuels. However, the amount of energy each fuel returns differs greatly. Soybean biodiesel returns 93 percent more energy than is used to produce it, while corn grain ethanol currently provides only 25 percent more energy than is used to produce it.
The study also compared the amount of greenhouse gases each biofuel released into the environment when used. Soybean biodiesel produces 41% less greenhouse gas emissions than diesel fuel while corn grain ethanol produces 12% less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline.
Not a silver bullet
The researchers conducting this study caution that neither biofuel is ready to replace petroleum. Even if all current U.S. corn and soybean production were dedicated to biofuels production, it would still only meet 12 percent of gasoline demand and 6 percent of diesel demand, and we still need to produce these crops for food. Biofuels are steps in the right direction, however, and can be a piece of the overall puzzle needed to be put together to solve our energy needs.
Prairie grasses: This experimental plot contains four species of prairie plants. The nearby plots, going clockwise, contain eight species, four species, and 16 species. (Photo courtesy David Tilman, University of Minnesota)
Ecosystems containing many different plant species are more productive and better able to deal with stresses such as climate extremes, pests, and disease. Those are the findings, published in last week’s issue of Nature, of University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman and colleagues Peter Reich and Johannes Knops.
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The debate about whether or not diversity stabilizes ecosystems has been going on for 50 years! But Tilman’s experiment is the first to collect enough data, over enough time and in a controlled environment, to confirm the hypothesis.
Tilman, Reich, and Knops spent 12 years studying 168 9-meter-by-9-meter experimental plots at the Cedar Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site near Cambridge, Minnesota. Each plot was randomly planted with 1-16 perennial grasses and other prairie plants. Over the 12 years of the study, temperatures and rainfall varied, but the plots with more species and more root mass did better than the others. (Why root mass? Roots store nutrients and provide a buffer against climate variations. And perennial prairie plants have far more root mass than annual plants, such as corn and other crops.)
Experimental plots: This aerial photo shows the individual nine-meter by nine-meter plots. (Photo courtesy David Tilman, University of Minnesota)
So what does it mean?
Two things. First, biodiversity does matter when it comes to healthy ecosystems. Second, biodiversity is decreasing worldwide as human populations increase and forests and prairies have been replaced with farm fields, buildings, and roads. Tilman thinks that increasing diversity may be the key to both restoring ecosystems and meeting the energy needs of people around the world.
In a National Science Foundation press release, Tilman said:
”Diverse prairie grasslands are 240 percent more productive than grasslands with a single prairie species. That’s a huge advantage. Biomass from diverse prairies can, for example, be used to make biofuels without the need for annual tilling, fertilizers, and pesticides, which require energy and pollute the environment. Because they are perennials, you can plant a prairie once and mow it for biomass every fall, essentially forever.”
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