Read here: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/studies-say-bio.html


And discuss! :)

I think its not about environment now days but more about what fuel we can use before gasoline runs out

Say you grow Soybean. From Soybean you make

Biodiesel
Feed for the Chickens and Fish for human food
Glycerol for cosmetics
Some protein powder for baby food

Soybean plant uses CO2 from air. In good soils minimal organic fertilizer is needed. Then how is it worse than Gasoline?

Best interim solution is to use plug-in hybrids for small automobiles and hydrogen for large trucks and buses. Get hydrogen from thermolysis in nuclear power plants.

The only people this will come as a shock to are the ones who burn E85 in their cars and get shittier fuel economy so they can pat themselves on the back for "being green", even though they're not.

isnt there another thread on the same topic going?

Corn-based ethanol is the most poluting and is highly inefficient. What has been proposed outside of the US is cellutose and sugar cane based ethanol. Both of which can be up to twice as efficient as corn ethanol. Cellutose alone has 85% fewer CO2 emmitions than corn ethanol.

Doesn't suprise me really, in fact a friend of mine that tried making biofuel even found it was more expensive to produce than gas! Well, using whatever method he was using anyway, I'm sure the economics can work out with scale and such. I'd be willing to have a plug-in electric car with a modular generator to charge the car during, say, a long road trip. I say modular because since this generator wouldn't be hooked straight to the drivetrain like in the currently-produced hybrids, they could be swapped out relatively easily, so you could choose to have a gas generator, a diesel/biodiesel generator, a hydrogen fuel-cell, another rack of batteries, whatever will fit the generator and gas-tank "slots" and generate some power for the car. While I'm at it, I'd slap a solar panel on the roof to let it get a little charge during the day, so if it's parked at the company parking lot for 8 hours on a sunny day, you get a little bit of free power.

Dunno, an idea, maybe not the right thread for it, but meh.

Say you grow Soybean. From Soybean you make

Biodiesel
Feed for the Chickens and Fish for human food
Glycerol for cosmetics
Some protein powder for baby food

Soybean plant uses CO2 from air. In good soils minimal organic fertilizer is needed. Then how is it worse than Gasoline?

Best interim solution is to use plug-in hybrids for small automobiles and hydrogen for large trucks and buses. Get hydrogen from thermolysis in nuclear power plants.

You didn't actually read the link, did you?
Biofuels aren't as bad as gasoline, they're worse. And depending on the estimates, they can be a lot worse.

I think biodiesel is probably better than ethanol. On the environmental side, It doesn't require as much chemical engineering, just physically squeeze the oil out of the plant tissue and use the rest for food. On the consumption side, diesel engines get more passenger-miles out of a gallon of fuel than gasoline engines. They also have a longer operational life so the vehicles don't end up in the scrap yard so soon. I'm driving a 27-year-old diesel car with 230,000 miles on it and it runs like new. And it could run on oil salvaged and filtered from McDonald's fryers without (AFAIK) any modification.

I did not think these factors would amount to such negative returns.

Growing the corn or whatever takes more gasoline to actually grow than we get out of it. Too many energy conversions. Furthermore, with the horrible agricultural policies in America, American farmers don't have any incentives to actually learn how to farm, which just leads to more inefficiently produced corn. If they actually had to compete with 3rd world farmers, maybe we'd see an biofuel product that didn't take more energy to grow and convert than what's recovered.

You didn't actually read the link, did you?
Biofuels aren't as bad as gasoline, they're worse. And depending on the estimates, they can be a lot worse.

And you did? Show me where growing Soybean is worse than producing and burning gasoline?

It's really too bad. Now we have to find another source, I guess...:shrug:

The simple fact is that the enviro-whackos can't stop whining to save their lives. To hell with them.

kmguru:

Roman is quite right about his statement that biofuels are worse than gasoline.

I did a study last year of energy densities of crops for biodiesel where we had a choice of canola, cane, soybean, switchgrass, and about a dozen other less efficient oil crops. To meet the current requirements for fossil fuel energy consumption in the U.S. required conversion of ALL current agricultural land to fuel crops. Which meant that we either had to import all our food, or bring into production poorer land. Of course to produce the new agricultural food lands required destruction of abotu 450 million acres of other habitat and a release of the carbon sequestered in those forests and grasslands. And the use of fuel crops mandates a monoculture crop - which has the twin problems of killing biodiversity, and being vulnerable to catastrophic loss due to various pathogens and parasites. Wish I could find a copy and load it up here.

On the other hand, there was a more promising article by a guy over at UNH about the use of algae for oil production. Supposely only required 15,000 square miles (a bit less than 10 million acres) converted to pondland for production. Of course the WATER use for that is a bit of a problem, but still had much less environmental impact than dryland fuel crops.

oh wow...kmguru is indeed correct, in the cycle of this biofuel production, the net CO2 released is much less than gasoline...plants take in by photosynthesis the CO2 and that CO2 goes through complex system to be biofuel.

Dr_Zinj

No offence, but why is people always think in terms of Left and Right, Black and White, in two extreme scenarios? No one is saying that we should get ALL our energy enitrely from Nuclear or Oil or Wind or Coal or Plants.

There is plenty of lands in Africa vs. the amount of people. Why can not those that do not have oil in their land but enough land grow plants that provide energy?

BTW: I am a proponent of compulsory planting of say 5 trees per quarter acre of land where the land is cleared to build a house. People are cutting massive quantity of trees world wide. Let us put a stop and reverse the trend first before anything else!

Why no one ...even Al Gore...is talking about that? How many trees Al Gore has planted or caused to be planted?...Nobel Prize...my @ss!

Why no one ...even Al Gore...is talking about that? How many trees Al Gore has planted or caused to be planted?...Nobel Prize...my @ss!

don't tread on Al Gore, he was the one who made Kyoto protocol a reality

he also buys carbon offset each time he travels by aircraft, as well as drive hybrid vehicle

he also buys carbon offset each time he travels by aircraft, as well as drive hybrid vehicle

How much Carbon offset? Total Cabon released divided by number of passengers?

Is his hybrid car plug-in?

I am a proponent of compulsory planting of say 5 trees per quarter acre of land where the land is cleared to build a house. People are cutting massive quantity of trees world wide. Let us put a stop and reverse the trend first before anything else!Last I'd heard, we had already turned that around in the USA and possibly throughout the entire "First World." Our forest land increases every year. It's the tropical rain forests that are in trouble. Much of that of course is our fault because we love furniture made of tropical hardwoods. But much of it is just population growth as they turn forest into farmland. We need a better international economy. The sparsely populated, efficiently farmed Western Hemisphere could feed the entire world several times over--at a profit. We just can't get the food over there. Planting five more dogwoods in Maryland or date palms in California is not going to solve the biodiversity and climate problems caused by the demise of the tropical rainforest.

I heard over radio that we in USA consume paper that is equivalent to 850 million trees per year. Not to mention lumber for furniture and in construction industry. Do you think we plant a billion trees a year? with all the forest fires and all?

You didn't actually read the link, did you?
Biofuels aren't as bad as gasoline, they're worse. And depending on the estimates, they can be a lot worse.

Your hateful attitude toward alternative fuels makes BioWillie cry. Don't do that.

http://www.biowillieusa.com/images/bio_masthead10.jpg

Corn-based ethanol is the most poluting and is highly inefficient. What has been proposed outside of the US is cellutose and sugar cane based ethanol. Both of which can be up to twice as efficient as corn ethanol. Cellutose alone has 85% fewer CO2 emmitions than corn ethanol.


Ethanol is ethanol, it doesn't matter where it comes form it all produces the same amounts of GHG's and its efficiency as a fuel sucks.

I heard over radio that we in USA consume paper that is equivalent to 850 million trees per year. Not to mention lumber for furniture and in construction industry. Do you think we plant a billion trees a year? with all the forest fires and all?

Actually yes, we do replant the trees we cut down.

BIOTECHNOLOGY: Forest Biotech Edges Out of the Lab -- Mann and ...
In this way, he says, Potlatch can grow 20-meter trees in just 6 years, ... plantations with genetically altered trees that scientists say will grow faster, ...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/295/5560/1626?ijkey=fCFMfXtYfXM8s&keytype=ref&siteid=sci

A study came out last week that showed a range of alcohol concentration that produced better mileage per gallon than straight petrol - it was around 30%, IIRC - in field tests with a couple different cars brands and models.

The claim was that regular ethanol was too low, and E85 too high, a concentration.

http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/?p=2669

E30 offered better fuel economy than gasoline (a 1% increase) in both the Toyota and the Ford.

E20 offered better fuel economy than gasoline (a 15% increase) in the flex-fuel Chevrolet.

The non-flex-fuel Chevrolet more closely followed the Btu-calculated trend for fuel economy, but did experience a significant improvement over the trend line with E40 (40% ethanol, 60% gasoline), indicating that this may be the optimal ethanol blend level for this vehicle.

That said, corn based ethanol is a bad idea as anything but a transition into something less damaging. We don't need to be burning topsoil and food in our SUVs.

Actually yes, we do replant the trees we cut down.

I checked with my friend at the forest department. He said that they plant 5-10 trees for everyone cut down. If we add commercial thinning, that can reduce to 3-5 planted for every one harvested.

At the same time, when we clear land to build houses in the city, then those trees are not replaced unless you are counting the extra plants. In our land, we let some new growth and now we have about 100 trees growing that need to be thinned for land scaping and better growth.

In paper making, since there is a surplus of trees, I do not understand why some people are crying about...we are cutting down trees to make paper?

I heard over radio that we in USA consume paper that is equivalent to 850 million trees per year. Not to mention lumber for furniture and in construction industry. Do you think we plant a billion trees a year? with all the forest fires and all?Yes we do. We live in an area in the redwood forest of northwestern California that's zoned for timber harvest. There are residential tracts like ours scattered here and there but most of them are 40-acre timber tracts. They come through every seven years and take a certain percentage. They leave the stumps and they send up new shoots. They're not necessarily postcard-beautiful because they'll get three or four trunks coming out of one stump--seven or eight out of the really thick old ones. But we've got trees in our front yard that haven't been harvested in fifty years and they're 250 feet tall. They grow five feet in a year. If they come through every seven years and just take one-third, they're getting 100-foot-tall trees.

So yes, this is quite sustainable. Other species don't revive from stumps like redwoods so they just plant new ones, but the math is the same.

Forest fires make big news but they take less than one percent of our forest land. You're actually supposed to let the fires burn because it's part of the cycle of renewing the soil, not to mention the entire ecosystem by turning woods into meadows and bringing in different species of animals. We do a lot of damage with our policy of preventing forest fires. And of course the reason for that is that we let fools build out in the middle of them. Redwood forests are an exception because they're almost impossible to burn and there's no risk--that's how they got to be 2,000 years old. But redwoods don't comprise a major portion of America's forest land. Most of them are species that burn readily.

Did you see my post #26?

A study came out last week that showed a range of alcohol concentration that produced better mileage per gallon than straight petrol - it was around 30%, IIRC - in field tests with a couple different cars brands and models.

The claim was that regular ethanol was too low, and E85 too high, a concentration.

http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/?p=2669
Interesting results. I'm going to guess that the Toyota and Ford in their test were able to compensate for the BTU density of the fuel because they're tuned to advance ignition timing and injector pulse width in the presence of ethanol, thereby taking advantage of its oxygenated, higher octane nature. A lot of FFVs do this, because while alcohol has inferior energy density, it also offers a host of advantages for an engine properly tuned for it, especially when used as an additive rather than a base fuel. An engine tuned for regular pump gas (the Chevrolet I'm assuming) doesn't do any of this, will not see any tangible benefit, and can run dangerously lean in the presence of anything more than E10 due to ethanol's lower stoichiometric air/fuel ratio.

Also, I tend to agree that most non-FFV autos out there could support higher concentrations than E10 without their fuel systems corroding all to hell, although this is purely through my own anecdotal experience. I see guys at the track fill up at the E85 pump and load up their custom E85 tune files before a day of racing. A gallon of C10 race gas (100 octane) runs about $5.00, while a gallon of E85 (105 octane) is about half that from the pump ten feet away. Ethanol's higher vapor pressure makes it vaporize more quickly in the cylinder while its higher specific heat makes it good for chemical intercooling in engines running under boosted conditions.

Last I'd heard, we had already turned that around in the USA and possibly throughout the entire "First World." Our forest land increases every year. It's the tropical rain forests that are in trouble. Much of that of course is our fault because we love furniture made of tropical hardwoods. But much of it is just population growth as they turn forest into farmland. We need a better international economy. The sparsely populated, efficiently farmed Western Hemisphere could feed the entire world several times over--at a profit. We just can't get the food over there. Planting five more dogwoods in Maryland or date palms in California is not going to solve the biodiversity and climate problems caused by the demise of the tropical rainforest.

It's also, in part, due to our unwillingness to trade with other countries fairly for their tropically produced products. We should be importing cane sugar to make soda and sweeten our foods with, but due to fly-over state corn lobbies, we tariff the hell out of imports and use corn syrup instead. And we don't "efficiently farm", we're extremely, extremely inefficient at it. We put more gasoline into our soil than we can get out! Who the hell waters their plants with oil? Americans who don't have to compete with the rest of the world, that's who. So the 3rd world is stuck cutting down more and more forest for palm oil, sugar, banana and other cash crops to try and sell.

It's also, in part, due to our unwillingness to trade with other countries fairly for their tropically produced products. We should be importing cane sugar to make soda and sweeten our foods with, but due to fly-over state corn lobbies, we tariff the hell out of imports and use corn syrup instead. And we don't "efficiently farm", we're extremely, extremely inefficient at it.Sorry, I shouldn't really have included the USA in that entire characterization of Western Hemisphere farming. We are indeed sparsely populated and we could easily feed ourselves and a billion other people. Even California with 35,000,000 people has so much empty space that agriculture is one of our leading industries. (And timber is another, as is wilderness recreation.) But like every other industry in America farming is petroleum-intensive because the energy industry dominates our economy and our politics. But other countries in the Americas are also sparsely populated by world standards and have more sensible energy policies. In aggregate we Americans, americanos and americains could feed the whole world--profitably--if only there were a way to get that mountain of food into the mouths of the hungry people without having it diverted to the black market.

i wish we could:(

Blood country has turned itself into a desert:(

So right, Fraggle. Tree-huggers don't bother to tell their children that the lumber that we use is farmed.

All that I see anymore of environmentalism is a game that is played to attempt to control what we eat, what we build, what we choose to live with, what we drive, actually, pretty much everything.