Biomass for fuel?
Interesting article on use of switchgrass for ethanol production at:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/3/7/03949/82426
Basically it matches previous conclusions I've heard - generally NO crop can be price-competitive as a source for generating a fuel alone, and only "coproducts" offer the door to viability. Ethanol from corn is a net energy loser, except for a useful coproduct of animal feed. Fast-growing popular trees and burned for electricity generation failed. Using chicken droppings was valuable , but only as a waste product.
I just think of the lumber industry as well. It works because trees require no input and are given decades to grow. However if you simply were harvesting trees purely for burning, I'm betting they'd also be too expensive.
If it wasn't for hydroelectric and wind turbines, I'd be completely hopeless for renewable energy. Overall I accept that if you properly account for depletion and recovery for growing things that nearly all farming is pretty much unsustainable. Farming for food at least provides more than just energy, but it just seems a crime to ever consider using biomass for burning, except for purely local uses which require minimal transportation.
The costs of transporting, drying, processing biomass for fuel will NEVER compete with how we use energy now.
When growing crops for food, it is NECESSARY and therefore you can justify depletion, but crops for fuel opens a dangerous place where short term profits can exist and demand can be unlimited.
I don't know if it is a SERIOUS concern for food and fuel to compete. Lester Brown, author of Plan B 2.0, thinks so. Perhaps rich countries can pay more for FUEL from poor countries than the same crop land could produce local food. CERTAINLY this is true in the illegal drug trade. But because machinery can need so much fuel, and people individually eat less it seems food will be affordable. On the reverse view I accept we're now making CHEAP FOOD via CHEAP FUELS, and food MUST get more expensive as our fossil fuels do.
In the SciFi series "Rama", A.C. Clarke and Gentry Lee envisioned spaceships full of bio-engineered plants (and animals) to keep the system running. Of course the humans that joined promply exploited the systems and risked destroying it. It is nice to imagine wise-beings might follow Nature's lead, and speeding up evolution into new environments. I suppose the thing to realize is that evolution itself is based on a lot of failure however well designed and WE would be vulnerable to these trials as well. Well, I mean for instance, if a huge meteorite hit the earth and darkened the sky, humans would die as fast as any higher animal perhaps, but perhaps some "quick planning" might allow for some sort of food production for a subset of our existing population.
Anyway, I can be just a little hopeful that if closed-systems are considered, that humans can do good with the environment, but as-is, I don't believe there's biological solutions to our energy demands now, and we're better off powering down and needing less than to try to recreate our needs within renewable sources.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/3/7/03949/82426
Basically it matches previous conclusions I've heard - generally NO crop can be price-competitive as a source for generating a fuel alone, and only "coproducts" offer the door to viability. Ethanol from corn is a net energy loser, except for a useful coproduct of animal feed. Fast-growing popular trees and burned for electricity generation failed. Using chicken droppings was valuable , but only as a waste product.
I just think of the lumber industry as well. It works because trees require no input and are given decades to grow. However if you simply were harvesting trees purely for burning, I'm betting they'd also be too expensive.
If it wasn't for hydroelectric and wind turbines, I'd be completely hopeless for renewable energy. Overall I accept that if you properly account for depletion and recovery for growing things that nearly all farming is pretty much unsustainable. Farming for food at least provides more than just energy, but it just seems a crime to ever consider using biomass for burning, except for purely local uses which require minimal transportation.
The costs of transporting, drying, processing biomass for fuel will NEVER compete with how we use energy now.
When growing crops for food, it is NECESSARY and therefore you can justify depletion, but crops for fuel opens a dangerous place where short term profits can exist and demand can be unlimited.
I don't know if it is a SERIOUS concern for food and fuel to compete. Lester Brown, author of Plan B 2.0, thinks so. Perhaps rich countries can pay more for FUEL from poor countries than the same crop land could produce local food. CERTAINLY this is true in the illegal drug trade. But because machinery can need so much fuel, and people individually eat less it seems food will be affordable. On the reverse view I accept we're now making CHEAP FOOD via CHEAP FUELS, and food MUST get more expensive as our fossil fuels do.
In the SciFi series "Rama", A.C. Clarke and Gentry Lee envisioned spaceships full of bio-engineered plants (and animals) to keep the system running. Of course the humans that joined promply exploited the systems and risked destroying it. It is nice to imagine wise-beings might follow Nature's lead, and speeding up evolution into new environments. I suppose the thing to realize is that evolution itself is based on a lot of failure however well designed and WE would be vulnerable to these trials as well. Well, I mean for instance, if a huge meteorite hit the earth and darkened the sky, humans would die as fast as any higher animal perhaps, but perhaps some "quick planning" might allow for some sort of food production for a subset of our existing population.
Anyway, I can be just a little hopeful that if closed-systems are considered, that humans can do good with the environment, but as-is, I don't believe there's biological solutions to our energy demands now, and we're better off powering down and needing less than to try to recreate our needs within renewable sources.
posted by Ares Olympus at 4:02 PM
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