DailyDirt: The Growing Pains Of Biofuels
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
So far, grabbing fossil fuels out of the ground has been an unbeatable way to get cheap energy. Since fossil fuels (presumably) come from decaying dinosaurs (and their contemporaries), it makes some sense that growing biofuels might be a way to generate a more renewable source of energy. Unfortunately, biofuel projects haven’t quite demonstrated an obviously better way to replace fossil fuels. Here are just a few links to some biofuel info that could lead to more environmentally friendly fuels.
- Biofuel derived from corn waste might be no better (or worse) than gasoline for carbon dioxide emissions. A recent study estimates that burning corn waste biofuels releases CO2 faster than if the corn waste was left to rot in the fields. There are some questions about how accurate these estimates are, but it raises the question of how green some biofuels really are. [url]
- Breeding algae for biofuels isn’t easy — especially if you want to extract the a significant amount of algae oil from a large photobioreactor. However, if someone does figure out a cost effective way to grow biodiesel (or any important organic compounds) from algae, it’ll be a real game changer. [url]
- Ideally, biofuels would take more CO2 out of the air than they emit. At least one startup, Cool Planet, thinks it can do this at a decent-sized scale — making 10 million gallons of fuel in a year by the end of 2015. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: algae, biodiesel, biofuel, carbon sequestration, corn waste, energy, fossil fuels, hydrocarbons, renewable energy
Companies: cool planet
Comments on “DailyDirt: The Growing Pains Of Biofuels”
The green part of biofuels is when you regrow the plant since it absorbs the CO2 back from the air so it doesn’t add to the net carbon in the atmosphere over time.
cool planet.
I happen to work for Cool Planet in Colorado. I hate to rain on your parade, but praising them is a little like praising intellectual ventures. Cool planet has no finished technology, and currently produces no products.
Not so much as 1 drop of fuel has exited a Cool Planet project.
Save the praise for when we actually accomplish something. First plant startup should be sometime in 2015.
It’s really easy to carbon with plants and biofuels.
The growing plant captures carbon. Burning the plant or letting it rot releases exactly the same amount of carbon. No more, and no less.
There is no magic. No ‘carbon capture’. No disappearing carbon.
Burning coal is taking solid carbon and releasing it as CO2. Burning oil and gas is taking hydrocarbons and releasing somewhat less CO2 for the same energy. Not tremendously less, just somewhat less. Both are taking carbon previously tucked safely away, and putting it into the atmosphere.
Re: Re:
“Burning coal is taking solid carbon and releasing it as CO2”
Not to mention the other forms of pollution from coal.
I never understood the logic behind corn biofuel. We’re taking our food supply and turning it into gasoline. That means we have less food to eat, which raises food prices.
Growing corn also requires farmers to burn fuel in tractors, in order to plant and harvest corn crops. So all that burnt fuel needs to be subtracted from any net gains of using corn biofuel.
All the while we have this huge unlimited energy source, called the Sun. I suppose it’s hard to charge people for using sunlight, to power their lives. Which is probably why despite all our technological advancements, we can’t seem to build efficient or affordable solar technology.
Humanity’s greed will be this world’s downfall. We’ll even take most species with us to the grave. If we gotta go, everything else is going with us. That’s greed in it’s purest form.
Re: Re:
In addition, corn is not the most efficient raw material for use in making alcohol. But it does have way more lobbyists.
Not worth checking out that site. You can’t even look at it without signing up. Given today’s spying mentality, that’s out. So to me that’s a useless site.
I read about a prototype algae reactor that outperformed the same land area of corn by about 10-1 in every metric except initial startup costs.
Higher yield, lower carbon footprint, multiple crops in a year, the algae produces biofuel rather than an additive, cheaper to run after you have the equipment, and the dry algae powder (after the fuel is pressed out) can be burned to power the whole thing.
Yes, biofuels mostly contribute by not increasing the net amount of carbon at atmosphere. The biggest trouble they bring is that they innevitably take one resource (food) and turn it into another resource (fuel). Even the corn crops remain have an important role as a source either of nutrients for the ground or as usual, being used to feed cattle, whose dejects and other remains are then used in the ground fertilization. At least, we do in most of third world.
The real gamechanger is the incoming new capacitors able to compete with the contemporary battery technologies. The greatest trouble of energy sources alternative to fossil fuels is the easiness of storage of fossil fuels. Now if artificial diamond or graphene production had a better energy ratio, we could end up burning then and removing CO2 from atmosphere without much trouble, just taking advantage of contemporary solar and wind energy technologies.
Ethanol from sugarcane is also an issue. It doesn’t really take carbon away since it uses tons of fossil fertilizers and it increases soil salinity (specially with potassium) due to fertirrigation with the liquid effluent from processing the plant. A total mess.
Nobody listens to Cassandra, but this bears repeating
Castro tossed the mob out of Cuba and closed the casinos.
The US banned sugar from Cuba; that boosted corn syrup.
The corn industry grew big enough to lobby the government.
The refineries repurposed MTBE, a toxic waste, as a smog-reducing gasoline additive; so MTBE got into the groundwater: oops!
Ethanol replaced MTBE in gasoline to reduce smog.
Corn ethanol refinery businesses got big enough to lobby the government.
Corn turned out to be a bad feedstock for ethanol for many reasons.
The refineries, wanting to keep refining, look for other plants to stew up to make ethanol: aha, switchgrass! poplar!
What’s wrong with this picture?
http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/10/fuelish-fantasies.html