UN rapporteur calls for biofuel moratorium

Originally posted by uberarcanist
Let the market decide what balance of biofuels and food grains we should have.

As a bit of a tangent, your comment here underlines why allowing the free market to guide social development is a really bad idea.

Ya see... right now the masses think that Biofuel is this fantastic magical cure to all the big oil problems. We knowledgeable people know better. We know it's an utter waste of resources. That it is nothing short of a scam and a potentially destructive one at that.

So why do people think it's so great?
Because they've been victims of marketing. "Marketing" is the politically correct term for mental manipulation. When Big Money gets together to market something, you'd better believe it's going to sound golden.

A real free market can't abide marketing. For a free market to be effective, it must be guided by informed consumers, not mind controlled happiness engines.

As long as there's greedy bastages that want to manipulate the facts in oder to increase their profit, a truly free market can never really exist.

[edit on 28-10-2007 by BitRaiser]

Lest we all forget... Ethanol is not as efficient so, an average car engine will consume 60% +- more. That's a huge difference folks. I never hear much mentioned about that. I'd bet the public at large is not aware of that. I wonder what their reaction will be on the first tank of E85?

I ran across an interesting article this morning about a bacteria that may contribute greatly to ethanol production.

Scientists say a new bacteria species discovered in Yellowstone's thermal pools could improve the use of bacteria to produce ethanol.

The discovery is rare because the bacterium is photosynthesizing, meaning it produces energy from sunlight. Scientists have discovered just three similar bacteria species within the past century, according to Don Bryant, a professor of biotechnology, biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University and leader of the research team.

He speculated that the bacteria could be used by researchers who are looking for new ways to use bacteria to produce ethanol, which can be burned like gasoline.

The bacteria, he said, likely obtain carbon not from the atmosphere, but by removing the waste of other bacteria. That could help other types of bacteria grow much more quickly.

source

Anybody more learned then I about these matters care to comment on this discovery and its significance?

reply to post by Icarus Rising


The wheat straw is burned just to get it out of the way. About 25 lbs. of burned wheat straw has the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.

With wheat production at about 46,000,000 acres with a straw yield of 2 tons/acre would be the energy equivalent of over 7 billion gallons of gasoline. It will not solve the energy problem, but it will help out.

If you take into consideration corn stover at a yield of 4 tons/acre for 80,000,000 acres would give the energy equivalent of about 25 billion gallons of gasoline.

Wasted resources can add up in a hurry.

Those are incredible numbers. Would the straw and stover be coverted to ethanol or burned to create electricity? With all the advances we have made on emissions control, maybe locating clean burning power plants near large farms would be a good way to plug this resource into the existing grid.

I am in way over my head here. I couldn't even manage to use "than" instead of "then" in my last post. Help me out with this.

[edit on 28-10-2007 by Icarus Rising]

reply to post by Icarus Rising


The figures that I used is for burning. It would be very easy to build power plants to use wheat straw for fuel. The straw could be made into large bales. About 30-40 years ago there were hay balers that made hay bales this size, but they didn't catch on because of the problem transporting the bales. This is no problem now because we have cotton module trucks that are designed to do this and they are only used for 2-3 months out of the year and it would not be the time of the year that the wheat straw would need to be moved. This would be a more efficient use of the trucks.

I feel that the emissions controls in place now would more than adequate to handle the emissions produced form the burning of the straw. In fact it would be better because when the wheat straw is burned in the fields, the conditions are not always ideal for combustion. If they can clean up the emissions from burning coal, straw burning should be a piece of cake.

Those waste products could also be used in composting to produce non-petrochemical fertilizer and thus also reduce agriculture's reliance on oil.

Cuba has been making amazing strides in "green farming", since they've been forced into a situation where they simply cannot afford to waste resources.

Of course, the big chemical companies don't want this sort of thing... it would cut into their profits.

Now this seems like a truly viable alternative energy source to me. It would come on line in the fall just in time to help with the winter heating energy demand, too. Maybe spring wheat harvests could be used to help with the peak summer demand, as well. Again, I don't have enough specific knowledge to speak definitively about it, nor do I have the resources and connections to the energy industry to make it happen.

But I like the idea a lot. Thanks for bringing it to the table. Maybe someone will see this discussion and pick the idea up and run with it. You never know.

wonderful CON....lets burn the food...brilliant if ur trying to kill people....what about the suppressed WATER/Hydrogen tech. stolen from Stan Meyers?...& his car that got 100 miles to one gallon of water?....safely & cheaply...what other clean/cheap/free techs. have been suppressed also?

[edit on 28-10-2007 by dave7]

reply to post by Icarus Rising


The problem is any time you take something out of a system, you aren't getting it for free... you are removing it from something else.

Returning waste (like wheat straw) to the soil from which it came is much more efficient than burning it for heat, then later using oil based fertilizers to enrich the depleted soil.

The ONLY renewable source of energy is from the sun. It's the only energy source for the whole friggen planet. Everything else is stored solar energy. Wind, wave, and hydro energy is all caused by solar output.

We would all be better served if we focused on keeping the agricultural system as closed and efficient as possible (recycling waste products back into it) and looking to harness the Sun and it's Solar driven earthly systems for our energy consumption.

Meanwhile, it certainly wouldn't hurt to start looking at ways to stop consuming so much energy!

What about complimentary crop rotation and letting fields lie fallow to weed up and burn or plow under once in the cycle? Is there a balance we can attain that still allows us to use by-products from food farming like wheat straw and corn stover for energy production without having to resort to petroleum based fertilizers?

Those old school methods of maintaining usable soil defiantly should be looked at for re-implementation, but they did also rely on much of the waste product being left in the fields to decompose.

The do not stop soil depletion either. There is no way to stop soil from being depleted if you are harvesting crops from it. Again, you cannot take something out of a system without depleting that system. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Even medieval farms had to use fertilizers to supplement the crop management techniques they developed.

The bottom line is that growing biological based energy resources is very inefficient.
There are better solutions.

My concern about most solar based energy technologies is, apart from passive systems like water heating and Trombe walls and such, they are by and large "hard" technologies, requiring the same high energy inputs to manufacture, maintain, and utilize that make ethanol from corn a bad deal. Unless a complete paradigm shift is made to de-centralized, off the grid "soft" solar tech, we still end up in the same boat.

passive solar

Originally posted by dave7
wonderful CON....lets burn the food...brilliant if ur trying to kill people....what about the suppressed WATER/Hydrogen tech. stolen from Stan Meyers?...& his car that got 100 miles to one gallon of water?....safely & cheaply...what other clean/cheap/free techs. have been suppressed also?

[edit on 28-10-2007 by dave7]

Nobody ever said to burn the food. Wheat straw is already burned so why not use it for energy.

Every year millions of acres of wheat straw are burned. When land is cleared, limbs, brush, stumps and useless trees are just piled and burned. Look at the fires in California, if the underbrush was cleared out ever so often that problem would not exist. You would not have the destruction of property and lost lives not to mention the cost of fighting the fires and increased insurance rates. Instead you would create new jobs and help to relieve the energy problem and decrease insurance rates. This is a very viable solution to the energy problem because this is just lost energy already. We need to use it.

reply to post by Icarus Rising


If we invest out current energy into building up our "hard" solar energy production now, while we still have energy to burn, we would be much better off in the long run. If we can get enough of a renewable energy production base up and running while we've still got oil in the bank, maybe we can come out of this thing without taking too much of a hit to our lifestyles.

Incedently, when I say renewable energy, I'm referring to hydro, geothermal, ground exchange, tidal pumps, wind, AND solar.



reply to post by MBF


Wouldn't it make more scene to return the wheat straw to the soil via composting? It seems to me that since the straw makes up the majority of the plant, that it should contain most of the nutrients needed to grow new plants. Not everything, of course... we do eat part of the plant and thus remove that part from the system, but... it just seems more practical to keep as much of the system self contained as possible.

I fully agree that these waste products should be used. Just burning this stuff in the field is abjectly stupid.
I'm just thinking about the best ways to use them.

I'd be interested in your thoughts as a farmer.

Originally posted by BitRaiser
reply to post by Icarus Rising

 

If we invest out current energy into building up our "hard" solar energy production now, while we still have energy to burn, we would be much better off in the long run. If we can get enough of a renewable energy production base up and running while we've still got oil in the bank, maybe we can come out of this thing without taking too much of a hit to our lifestyles.

Incedently, when I say renewable energy, I'm referring to hydro, geothermal, ground exchange, tidal pumps, wind, AND solar.



reply to post by MBF

 

Wouldn't it make more scene to return the wheat straw to the soil via composting? It seems to me that since the straw makes up the majority of the plant, that it should contain most of the nutrients needed to grow new plants. Not everything, of course... we do eat part of the plant and thus remove that part from the system, but... it just seems more practical to keep as much of the system self contained as possible.

I fully agree that these waste products should be used. Just burning this stuff in the field is abjectly stupid.
I'm just thinking about the best ways to use them.

I'd be interested in your thoughts as a farmer.

I agree that in most cases it is better to return the fodder to the soil, but in the case of wheat straw and some other plants, sometimes you have to burn the plant residue because if you have to plant another crop behind the wheat, the wheat straw doesn't have time to decompose to the point that you can till the soil before you have to plant the next crop. I personally have had problems with cotton stalks even after they were under the dirt all winter. They didn't decompose and they gave me severe problems when I planted my corn the next spring.

As for your views on solar, I agree with you 100%. Now is the time we need to be investing in our future. I have had some ideas concerning this issue, but I haven't had time to run the figures yet.

I don't think that there will be one solution to the energy problem, but a lot of different ones.

reply to post by MBF


Could it not be carted off to be composted/processed then? Maybe ground up via a wind powered mill?

I'm not an agricultural expert (in fact, I've got a decidedly brown thumb), but I do have a firm grasp on system dynamics and everything I know about that subject says that keeping a system as self contained as possible is the best way to maintain stability while minimizing it's consumption of outside resources.

reply to post by BitRaiser


Yes you could do that , but it would not be feasible from a standpoint of the cost involved. You would have to
1 Remove it from the field.
2 Transport it to another area.
3 Provide an area for storage.
4 If you compost it, you have labor involved in turning it ever so often.
5 Return it to the field.
6 Spread it back on the field.

It would be a lot cheaper to just fertilize the field.

That's why I rotate my crops. When I planted wheat and would have to burn the fields, I would plant a crop(usually corn as soon as I could) to put organic matter back into the soil.

Yeah, I was thinking about labor issues. The "cheaper" part is the key. Right now, while we have inexpensive oil to use for making fertilizer, it's simply not cost effective to even bother to pursue other methods. We know the cheap oil (and thus cheap fertilizer) is becoming a problem, tho. Have you noticed price increases yet? I'm sure you will...

So with cost in mind, what about on-site mulching?

Or

Feeding it to livestock while keeping them on the field?
that would give you an added bonus... if there's livestock that can process that nasty stuff.

Hehe, ya got me going now... presenting me with a problem is usually a good way to do that.