Biomass in the sky with diamonds?
I wanted some sort of fancy title for my blog, like Lucy-in-the-Sky with-Diamonds for LSD, maybe BSD could mean something else too.
Well, below is a fun compentary published in Saturday's Strib.
Let's see if I can offer an inline commentary, in italics....
Overall, it is too vague, without any evidence success is possible. It seems unrealistic to believe corn-based ethanol can at all be made carbon neutral, or that burning biomass could reduce the nonrenewable energy consumed. There's too much "conversion" going on to get "liquid" fuels. If we're going to use electricity for transportation, I'm sure using it directly is better than using it to create a liquid fuel.
My perhaps wrong conclusions are:
(1) There's no reasonable renewable energy solutions without reducing consumption.
(2) There's no reasonable solutions to produce liquid fuels from biomass.
That said, I have no objections to experiments in closing the energy and carbon loop in production. I'd say we ought to be looking how to make our agricultural production independent of fossil fuels first, at least experimentally. Energy produced on a farm and used on a farm stands that best chance to be economic. Converting and transporting energy further just seems to decrease my hope for viability.
I just can't offer much hope for transportion as we know it to be at all based on agriculture.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1060375.html
Last update: March 17, 2007 – 4:52 PM
Jason Hill And G. David Tilman: There's a new phrase that should be on the lips of all Minnesotans, and that phrase is ... CELLULOSIC BIOMASS!
Sensational? Perhaps. But this is the fuel of the future, and Minnesota is in a position to produce it -- if we do it right. Today, two U scientists show us the way.
Jason Hill And G. David Tilman
A little more than a century ago our personal transportation in this country (horses) was fueled by the products of agriculture (hay and oats). When automobiles came along, we tried fueling them with corn ethanol, but gasoline has always been the cheaper alternative.
• Today, however, we know that fossil fuels are finite and that burning them contributes to destructive global warming. And so it is back to the future: Corn ethanol and, to a lesser extent, soybean biodiesel have emerged as leading candidates to reduce our nation's use of oil.
What about "back" to 10mph and traveling 1/10th of what we do today?
• There are serious concerns, however, about how these biofuels will impact the environment -- and about the wisdom of trying to use our corn and soybean crops to meet both the food and energy needs of the world's growing population. Global population, which has quadrupled since 1900, is expected to increase by 3 billion over the next 50 years. Energy and food consumption will at least double as those in China, India and other developing countries seek to emulate our lifestyle.
So we're going to use less energy, right?
• Research that we have conducted at the University of Minnesota shows that there might be even better alternatives to corn- and soybean-based fuels, and it puts us in a better position to make decisions about energy use that will affect future generations.
In July 2006, we published a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the costs and benefits of corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel. Soybean biodiesel has significant advantages over corn ethanol, yielding 93 percent more energy than the fossil fuel energy that is used to produce it, compared with 25 percent for corn ethanol. Soybean biodiesel produces 41 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than diesel, while corn ethanol produces only 12 percent less emissions than gasoline.
Soybean biodiesel is also a better choice for the environment because soybeans require less fertilizers and pesticides, both of which pollute groundwater, streams, rivers and oceans.
That's bad news.
Worse, using food for fuel raises the price of food and makes crop markets more volatile. In the past two years, the price of corn has doubled. As demand continues to rise, farmers both here and abroad will plant more of their acres to corn, which will reduce the number of acres planted with less environmentally damaging crops and acres set aside for conservation.
That's bad news.
Prairie plants' benefits
But our research did not end there. In a recent issue of Science, we published research showing that mixtures of native prairie plants grown on marginal land are a good source of biomass for biofuel. Our study, based on 10 years of biodiversity experiments at Cedar Creek Natural History Area near East Bethel, demonstrated that ethanol made from mixed prairie plants can provide more usable energy per acre than either corn ethanol or soybean biodiesel.
So that's CELLULOSIC BIOMASS right? We know how to use some amount of ENERGY to convert cellulose from biomass and create more ethanol per acre than corn. How much energy does this take?
In addition, mixed prairie plants are highly productive and easy to grow. As they are perennial, they don't need to be replanted each year. Certain species in these mixtures, such as legumes, interact with soil bacteria to "fix" their own nitrogen from the atmosphere just as soybeans do. These diverse mixtures also prevent soil erosion and don't require pesticides, herbicides or irrigation. They remove carbon dioxide from the air, storing carbon in their massive root systems as organic matter and in the soil itself. This actually adds fertility to degraded lands.
Okay, so we can NOT do it in a cost effective way, and perhaps never can!
The new U.S. farm bill, which is the first in this nation's history to consider fuel as well as food crops, provides an excellent opportunity for promoting prairie biomass. We would like to see this legislation include incentives for farmers to begin shifting our biofuel industry from food to perennial plants as its main input.
For example, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) now pays farmers to leave pieces of their land uncultivated for reasons such as erosion control. The increase in corn prices created by ethanol production is causing many farmers to consider taking their land out of this program and planting it back into corn. As an alternative, we propose a pilot program for using this land to restore diverse native prairie in a way that achieves the environmental benefits this ecosystem offers while providing us with a valuable energy source.
To reduce CO2 emissions
Until the technology to convert cellulose into ethanol is economically viable, we suggest that current corn ethanol plants burn this prairie biomass instead of natural gas or coal to provide them with the steam and electricity they require. This practice would actually greatly reduce net carbon dioxide emissions both by reducing fossil fuel use and by storing carbon in prairie soils (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere).
From what I've read growing and collecting biomass for burning costs much more than traditional energy sources. If we need electricity wind power seems much more cost effective than biomass.
Indeed, our calculations suggest that corn ethanol produced using prairie biomass to power ethanol plants would, in effect, result in a zero net release of carbon dioxide to the air. By blending this type of ethanol with gasoline, instead of our current corn ethanol, Minnesota could lead the nation in providing its citizens with a much more climate-friendly fuel.
So you want to take corn ethanol which already "takes too much land", and "costs too much to produce without subsidies" and make it take MORE land and cost MORE to produce?
Ultimately, federal policy should favor those biofuels that offer the greatest environmental benefits to society. Rather than choosing to promote the biofuels that may look the best to us today, we should decide which energy and environmental benefits we want our biofuels to deliver, and allow the best to rise to the top. We would also like to emphasize that biofuels are only one part of the overall solution. Other sources of renewable energy such as wind, solar and hydrogen are equally important. Setting new standards for energy efficiency in buildings and transportation could produce even more significant effects.
The Minnesota Legislature and Gov. Tim Pawlenty recently set an ambitious new requirement that our state's utilities obtain 25 percent of their electricity from a variety of renewable sources by 2025. We commend them for setting what is now the highest standard in the nation. We hope our proposal will contribute to similar high standards for our transportation biofuel production.
I've not seen your proposal, but sounds fishy to me.
Jason Hill is a research associate in the University of Minnesota's College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources and the College of Biological Sciences. G. David Tilman is Regents professor of ecology in the university's College of Biological Sciences.
©2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
Found 24 page report. (see page 24)
http://www.cbs.umn.edu/main/aboutcbs/bio/winter2006/BIOwinter06.pdf
A new study led by David Tilman, Regents Professor of Ecology in the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences, shows that mixtures of native perennial grasses and other flowering plants provide more usable energy per acre than corn-grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel, and are far better for the environment. “Biofuels made from diverse mixtures of prairie plants can reduce global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, meet a substantial portion of global energy needs, and leave fertile land for food production,” Tilman said. The findings were published in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Science and featured on the cover. Based on 10 years of research at Cedar Creek Natural History Area, the study shows that land planted with highly diverse mixtures of prairie grasses and other flowering plants produces more than twice the amount of bioenergy than the same land planted with any single prairie plant species, including switchgrass. Tilman and two colleagues, postdoctoral researcher Jason Hill and research associate Clarence Lehman, estimate that fuel made from prairie biomass would yield 51 percent more energy per acre than ethanol from corn grown on fertile land.
This is because prairie plants, which are perennials, require little energy to grow and all parts of the plant above ground are usable. Fuels made from prairie biomass are “carbon negative,” which means that they reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere. This is because perennials store more carbon dioxide in roots and soil than is released when fuels made from them are burned. Using prairie biomass to make fuel would remove and store from 1.2 to 1.8 U.S. tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year. In contrast, corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel are “carbon positive,”meaning they add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, although less than fossil fuels.
The researchers estimate that growing mixed prairie grasses on all of the world’s degraded
land could produce enough bioenergy to replace 13 percent of global petroleum consumption and
19 percent of global electricity consumption. The research was supported by the University of
Minnesota Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment and by the National Science
Foundation (NSF). Cedar Creek Natural History Area has been an NSF Long-Term Ecological
Research (www.lter.umn.edu) since 1982.
Well, below is a fun compentary published in Saturday's Strib.
Let's see if I can offer an inline commentary, in italics....
Overall, it is too vague, without any evidence success is possible. It seems unrealistic to believe corn-based ethanol can at all be made carbon neutral, or that burning biomass could reduce the nonrenewable energy consumed. There's too much "conversion" going on to get "liquid" fuels. If we're going to use electricity for transportation, I'm sure using it directly is better than using it to create a liquid fuel.
My perhaps wrong conclusions are:
(1) There's no reasonable renewable energy solutions without reducing consumption.
(2) There's no reasonable solutions to produce liquid fuels from biomass.
That said, I have no objections to experiments in closing the energy and carbon loop in production. I'd say we ought to be looking how to make our agricultural production independent of fossil fuels first, at least experimentally. Energy produced on a farm and used on a farm stands that best chance to be economic. Converting and transporting energy further just seems to decrease my hope for viability.
I just can't offer much hope for transportion as we know it to be at all based on agriculture.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1060375.html
Last update: March 17, 2007 – 4:52 PM
Jason Hill And G. David Tilman: There's a new phrase that should be on the lips of all Minnesotans, and that phrase is ... CELLULOSIC BIOMASS!
Sensational? Perhaps. But this is the fuel of the future, and Minnesota is in a position to produce it -- if we do it right. Today, two U scientists show us the way.
Jason Hill And G. David Tilman
A little more than a century ago our personal transportation in this country (horses) was fueled by the products of agriculture (hay and oats). When automobiles came along, we tried fueling them with corn ethanol, but gasoline has always been the cheaper alternative.
• Today, however, we know that fossil fuels are finite and that burning them contributes to destructive global warming. And so it is back to the future: Corn ethanol and, to a lesser extent, soybean biodiesel have emerged as leading candidates to reduce our nation's use of oil.
What about "back" to 10mph and traveling 1/10th of what we do today?
• There are serious concerns, however, about how these biofuels will impact the environment -- and about the wisdom of trying to use our corn and soybean crops to meet both the food and energy needs of the world's growing population. Global population, which has quadrupled since 1900, is expected to increase by 3 billion over the next 50 years. Energy and food consumption will at least double as those in China, India and other developing countries seek to emulate our lifestyle.
So we're going to use less energy, right?
• Research that we have conducted at the University of Minnesota shows that there might be even better alternatives to corn- and soybean-based fuels, and it puts us in a better position to make decisions about energy use that will affect future generations.
In July 2006, we published a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the costs and benefits of corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel. Soybean biodiesel has significant advantages over corn ethanol, yielding 93 percent more energy than the fossil fuel energy that is used to produce it, compared with 25 percent for corn ethanol. Soybean biodiesel produces 41 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than diesel, while corn ethanol produces only 12 percent less emissions than gasoline.
Soybean biodiesel is also a better choice for the environment because soybeans require less fertilizers and pesticides, both of which pollute groundwater, streams, rivers and oceans.
Soybeans better than ethanol. Okay.
We also showed in our study that neither corn ethanol nor soybean biodiesel can come close to weaning us from our addiction to oil. Dedicating all of our nation's current corn and soybean production to biofuels would meet only 12 percent of our gasoline demand and 6 percent of our diesel demand. Plus, once we subtract the fossil fuel energy needed to produce these biofuels, our true energy gain from each would only be about 3 percent.That's bad news.
Worse, using food for fuel raises the price of food and makes crop markets more volatile. In the past two years, the price of corn has doubled. As demand continues to rise, farmers both here and abroad will plant more of their acres to corn, which will reduce the number of acres planted with less environmentally damaging crops and acres set aside for conservation.
That's bad news.
Prairie plants' benefits
But our research did not end there. In a recent issue of Science, we published research showing that mixtures of native prairie plants grown on marginal land are a good source of biomass for biofuel. Our study, based on 10 years of biodiversity experiments at Cedar Creek Natural History Area near East Bethel, demonstrated that ethanol made from mixed prairie plants can provide more usable energy per acre than either corn ethanol or soybean biodiesel.
So that's CELLULOSIC BIOMASS right? We know how to use some amount of ENERGY to convert cellulose from biomass and create more ethanol per acre than corn. How much energy does this take?
In addition, mixed prairie plants are highly productive and easy to grow. As they are perennial, they don't need to be replanted each year. Certain species in these mixtures, such as legumes, interact with soil bacteria to "fix" their own nitrogen from the atmosphere just as soybeans do. These diverse mixtures also prevent soil erosion and don't require pesticides, herbicides or irrigation. They remove carbon dioxide from the air, storing carbon in their massive root systems as organic matter and in the soil itself. This actually adds fertility to degraded lands.
Okay, but how much energy input?!
Less than 2 percent of Minnesota's precious native prairie ecosystem remains, and planting more land to diverse prairie would restore valuable wildlife habitat if it is managed and harvested properly. How can we use this diverse prairie biomass to produce biofuels? The cellulose in the leaves and stems can be converted into ethanol much as we make ethanol from the starch in corn. However, breaking down cellulose is a more complex and currently more expensive process than breaking down starch. Many private entities and public research groups are pursuing cost-effective technologies for producing ethanol from cellulose, and although it is unlikely to be available for five or more years, we should begin establishing the infrastructure of this new industry today.Okay, so we can NOT do it in a cost effective way, and perhaps never can!
The new U.S. farm bill, which is the first in this nation's history to consider fuel as well as food crops, provides an excellent opportunity for promoting prairie biomass. We would like to see this legislation include incentives for farmers to begin shifting our biofuel industry from food to perennial plants as its main input.
For example, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) now pays farmers to leave pieces of their land uncultivated for reasons such as erosion control. The increase in corn prices created by ethanol production is causing many farmers to consider taking their land out of this program and planting it back into corn. As an alternative, we propose a pilot program for using this land to restore diverse native prairie in a way that achieves the environmental benefits this ecosystem offers while providing us with a valuable energy source.
To reduce CO2 emissions
Until the technology to convert cellulose into ethanol is economically viable, we suggest that current corn ethanol plants burn this prairie biomass instead of natural gas or coal to provide them with the steam and electricity they require. This practice would actually greatly reduce net carbon dioxide emissions both by reducing fossil fuel use and by storing carbon in prairie soils (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere).
From what I've read growing and collecting biomass for burning costs much more than traditional energy sources. If we need electricity wind power seems much more cost effective than biomass.
Indeed, our calculations suggest that corn ethanol produced using prairie biomass to power ethanol plants would, in effect, result in a zero net release of carbon dioxide to the air. By blending this type of ethanol with gasoline, instead of our current corn ethanol, Minnesota could lead the nation in providing its citizens with a much more climate-friendly fuel.
So you want to take corn ethanol which already "takes too much land", and "costs too much to produce without subsidies" and make it take MORE land and cost MORE to produce?
Ultimately, federal policy should favor those biofuels that offer the greatest environmental benefits to society. Rather than choosing to promote the biofuels that may look the best to us today, we should decide which energy and environmental benefits we want our biofuels to deliver, and allow the best to rise to the top. We would also like to emphasize that biofuels are only one part of the overall solution. Other sources of renewable energy such as wind, solar and hydrogen are equally important. Setting new standards for energy efficiency in buildings and transportation could produce even more significant effects.
The Minnesota Legislature and Gov. Tim Pawlenty recently set an ambitious new requirement that our state's utilities obtain 25 percent of their electricity from a variety of renewable sources by 2025. We commend them for setting what is now the highest standard in the nation. We hope our proposal will contribute to similar high standards for our transportation biofuel production.
I've not seen your proposal, but sounds fishy to me.
Jason Hill is a research associate in the University of Minnesota's College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources and the College of Biological Sciences. G. David Tilman is Regents professor of ecology in the university's College of Biological Sciences.
©2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
Found 24 page report. (see page 24)
http://www.cbs.umn.edu/main/aboutcbs/bio/winter2006/BIOwinter06.pdf
A new study led by David Tilman, Regents Professor of Ecology in the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences, shows that mixtures of native perennial grasses and other flowering plants provide more usable energy per acre than corn-grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel, and are far better for the environment. “Biofuels made from diverse mixtures of prairie plants can reduce global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, meet a substantial portion of global energy needs, and leave fertile land for food production,” Tilman said. The findings were published in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Science and featured on the cover. Based on 10 years of research at Cedar Creek Natural History Area, the study shows that land planted with highly diverse mixtures of prairie grasses and other flowering plants produces more than twice the amount of bioenergy than the same land planted with any single prairie plant species, including switchgrass. Tilman and two colleagues, postdoctoral researcher Jason Hill and research associate Clarence Lehman, estimate that fuel made from prairie biomass would yield 51 percent more energy per acre than ethanol from corn grown on fertile land.
This is because prairie plants, which are perennials, require little energy to grow and all parts of the plant above ground are usable. Fuels made from prairie biomass are “carbon negative,” which means that they reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere. This is because perennials store more carbon dioxide in roots and soil than is released when fuels made from them are burned. Using prairie biomass to make fuel would remove and store from 1.2 to 1.8 U.S. tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year. In contrast, corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel are “carbon positive,”meaning they add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, although less than fossil fuels.
The researchers estimate that growing mixed prairie grasses on all of the world’s degraded
land could produce enough bioenergy to replace 13 percent of global petroleum consumption and
19 percent of global electricity consumption. The research was supported by the University of
Minnesota Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment and by the National Science
Foundation (NSF). Cedar Creek Natural History Area has been an NSF Long-Term Ecological
Research (www.lter.umn.edu) since 1982.
posted by Ares Olympus at 6:47 AM
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