President Bush thinks weeds can supplant oil from the Middle East. Is he out in left field?
Our dependence on foreign oil has researchers and policymakers taking another hard look at weeds and corn stalks as sources of home-grown fuel.
President Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative, announced last month, calls for research into biofuels from "cellulosic" plant waste, "to displace up to 30 percent of the nation's current fuel use." Indeed, in his State of the Union address, the president suggested that one solution to the nation's "addiction" to oil could be fuel derived from switchgrass, a tall plant native to U.S. prairies. Reinforcing that vision, more than one recent study has suggested that biomass could eventually play a significant role in U.S. transportation energy needs, and do so without adding to the carbon in the atmosphere.
But are these realistic scenarios -- or just wishful thinking? The idea of using biomass for energy isn't new of course. Already, about four billion gallons of ethanol are produced yearly in the United States by fermenting corn and distilling out its energy-rich alcohol. But the amount that can be produced is limited by the land required to grow the corn. What's more, the process for producing ethanol is inefficient, requiring nearly as much energy to make as is available in the final product.
Advances in genetic engineering, however, now have many experts feeling optimistic about dramatically increasing the amount of biomass that can be harvested from an acre of land, by using microbes to convert leaves and stalks, not just corn, into liquid fuels. They believe this can be done efficiently, too, without exhausting available land and water, and also predict that production costs could be competitive with gasoline.
A recent report by the National Resources Defense Council and researchers at Dartmouth and Princeton projects that by 2050, in part through harvesting both protein and cellulose from corn and switchgrass, existing agricultural land could both supply our food needs and replace gasoline with ethanol.
Unless it's done carefully, however, deriving fuels from biomass could destroy crop lands through erosion, increase air pollution -- and even increase our dependence on fossil fuels. For example, one of the steps in processing biomass, distillation, requires heat. In the short term, inexpensive coal may appear to be a good energy source for this, says John Reilly, associate director for research at MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. But this would cancel out one of the primary benefits of biomass: carbon released by burning biofuels is offset by the carbon captured by growing crops, leading to near-zero total carbon emissions. Using coal for distillation would destroy this balance. In one scenario, Reilly says that "68 percent of the carbon you think you're saving is actually being emitted through other processes." Likewise, using gasoline or diesel to transport biomass from widespread farms and other agricultural facilities to processing centers would change the overall carbon equation.
Guest (Harmon Everett)
An entirely overlooked biomass source is developing in creating oil from algae. Fossil Petroleum is probably the byproduct of ancient algae in the first place. As such oil from algae can replace fossil petroleum on a one to one basis with no new technology needed. It can be grown on land not otherwise suitable for land crops, and can reduce CO2. But millions of barrels of it each year is probably a long long way off.
Guest (Stan)
Guest (SirLanse)
We have runoff from phosphate mines that are causing algea blooms. Change that
to an oily algea and turn the
Gulf of Mexico into oil farm.
Guest (Jessey)
The back track to Fossile Fules
Zero Emission Coal powerplats are suppose to be used for the bio mass distillation process if every thing goes the right way. "Zero emissions" is a catch phrase however, the emissions are compressed and sold as co2 to others. Including Canadian Oil companies who pump it into their wells to make their oil yeilds more efficient. Thus increasing not decreasing the fossil fule market. Does anyone have more detailed insight into how these zero emmisions coal plants work.
Guest (Anonymous)
Why is there so much talk about ethanol? Why not develop methane into a viable fuel? It's created naturally anytime something biodegrades which when I last checked is happening constantly in a wide variety of forms. Every landfill and waste treatment plant could be converted into a fuel producing station. And what about those millions of chickens and cows? They all produce waste that could be used to make methane.
Don’t let anyone fool you there are plenty of ways to produce viable renewable energy. It’s my belief that ethanol is being proposed only because it’ll encourage American agriculture and will line the pockets of our Presidents friends.
Guest (Jim Demers)
Corn growers are the principal political force pushing for ethanol as a fuel. But generating any fuel (methane, methanol, or ethanol) from "junk" plants or from a bio-waste stream makes a whole lot more sense than using corn.
If one adds in the energy costs associated with plowing, planting, growing, harvesting, and transporting corn, and factors in the CO2 generated as the necessary ammonia-based fertilizer is produced and distributed, I have serious doubts that corn-derived ethanol gains us anything at all.
Guest (Harminder)
Developing countries as source of corn ethanol?
If it's costly to grow corn in the US, since farming is already highly subsidised, wouldn't it be a better idea to grow it in Africa and ship it over in tankers? But that would have to overcome the farming lobby and the big agro-businesses.. :<
Guest (Cash)
I'd love to claim that what President Bush said was original, but he (along with all US scientists) are getting the ethanol idea from what Brazil has had success in doing over the past 20 years. Currently, they can make ethanol at $1 a gallon that can run in cars. This does have its own unique set of problems, but it would break our dependence on oil and the middle east.
Guest (Anonymous)
Something to keep in mind is that ethanol made in Brazil comes from sugar, which is easier (cheaper, more efficient) to turn into ethanol than corn is.
Re: a note on Brazillian ethanol
How much of the Brazilian rain forest would they have to cut down and plant in sugar cane to displace Brazil's consumption of petroleum products?
Guest (Jeff Rosner)
Brazil has strategically chosen biomass production and represents an excellent REAL study case...it is heinous that this article does not even mention their progress...
Guest (CVE)
Today the nonedible stalks of plants are plowed back into the soil for fertilization. If the stalks are also taken out for ethanol production, the soils will quickly become poor.
Guest (Jim Demers)
Soil degradation - not necessarily
Making ethanol only takes C, H, and O out of the plant matter, and those elements aren't needed to keep soil fertile. The process residues, at least in theory, could be returned to the ground with all the phosphate and nitrogen that was originally in the stalks.
Guest (Ron Wagner)
Biomass is a real solution despite naysayers.
1. Much of our petroleum is used for heat. That need is easily and cleanly met by pellets made from biomass, or by grain kernels.
2. Heat is a more basic need than meat eating, but both can be produced plentifully. Meat takes about eight pounds of grain to a pound of meat.
3. Marginal lands ,not presently used for farming, can be used for switchgrass or hemp etc. Genetic engineering will make this even more efficient and feasible.
4. Distributed energy production is the key to a secure energy future. It also cuts the monopolists out of the picture to a great extent. Small entrepreneurs can produce energy in many ways.
Guest (Ecacofonix)
As a gentleman (Mr Harmon) has remarked earlier, I also feel that more research dollars should be put into biodiesel production from algae...if this works, it will take care of most of the bottlenecks - for one, we are not using an edible crop, two, algae can grow in all sorts of areas and need not necessarily be grown on arable land - most algae are grown in ponds - and three, most important, they seem to have yields that are over a 100 hundred times that for traditional oilcrops...this then appears to present a realistic solution to replace most if not all the petro-diesel...
Let's hope that this area gets the attention it deserves...one site I found that focusses on <a href="http://www.oilgae.com">biodiesel from algae is Oilgae.com</a> @ http://www.oilgae.com
Ec @ http://www.eit.in
Unless you're growing bioengineered algae in a greenhouse/aquarium fed with high concentrations of manure, ashes, and carbon dioxide, how do you create millions of acres of biomass that's more effective at photosynthetic capture than, say, a willow coppice, or an acre of sustainably managed rain forest?
My calculation based upon the best available data for Britain
Short Rotation Coppicing of willow
, suggests that it takes 140 square miles to get one gigawatt_year of thermal energy per year.
Obviously your biofuel producing organisms will take at least a third of that
(consider the equation for monosaccharide -> ethanol + CO2)
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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Guest (Jim Demers)
Distillation costs
Gasoline also has to be distilled, with attendant energy costs and CO2 emissions. You need to factor that into your calculations of how much CO2 plant-based fuels would keep out of the atmosphere.
Reply
Guest (Arnold Larsen)
Distillation without heat
Distillation cost nothing when I was young in Iowa. We simply put the product outside on a cold winter night and the water froze, but the alcohol didn't. We crushed the ice and collected the almost pure alcohol.
Reply
Guest (Jim Demers)
Algae
Algal blooms are actually caused by toxins that kill zooplankton. The little buggers would eat up all the algae you could ever hope to grow, however much phosphate you put in the water, if their population is healthy. They feed the whole oceanic food chain, so you really don't want to mess with them.
But there is that superweed, an exotic escapee from home aquariums, that grows like kudzu in warm water. I wonder how much fuel one could extract from an acre of that stuff, vs. an acre of corn or sugar cane.
Reply
Guest (James)
ThermoDePolymerization
I saved an old article from this site a while back and it seems to have been completely forsaken. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/03/06/visualize0603.asp
though this is little more than a blurb, more info can be found on the web and I'm just shocked its fallen by the way side. I mean, garbage into oil? it gives new meaning to the old cliche of killing two birds with one stone
Reply