Requesting Feedback on Renewable Diesel Essay
Posted by Robert Rapier on July 14, 2007 - 10:10am
As some of you may know, I am writing the renewable diesel chapter for a book on renewable energy. My submission is due at the end of July. The chapter is well underway, but I have a nagging feeling that I am forgetting to address something. So, I wanted to share the outline I have, and see if anyone has any comments. If you know of a substantial feedstock that I have missed, or can think of some things you think should be covered in a specific section, let me know.
For instance, in the section on environmental considerations, I am going to point out that tropical forest is being cut down to produce palm plantations for palm oil. On the other hand, biodiesel, unlike petroleum diesel, is non-toxic. What else? Are there specific, little known facts about rapeseed oil that I should include? Just things like that. Basically, if you were reading a comprehensive story about renewable diesel, what specifically would you hope to see covered? To my knowledge, what I am writing has not been comprehensively covered before. I don't know of any other work that has an extensive compare/contrast between biodiesel, SVO, green diesel, etc. I think many people hear "biodiesel", and think it's all the same.
The intent here is to provide a completely objective view of renewable diesel as an option in the future. I will cover pros and cons. As I said, the chapter is well underway, and I have portions of all sections done. But I just want to make sure I haven't overlooked anything major. I can't share any of the actual writing, as one stipulation is that this material may not have been published elsewhere. But here is the outline I have at the moment:
Renewable Diesel
Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO)
Biodiesel
- Definition/Production Process
- Fuel Characteristics
- Energy Return
- Glycerin Byproduct
Green Diesel
- Definition/Production
- Hydroprocessing
- Gasification/Fischer-Tropsch
Feedstocks
- Soybean Oil
- Palm Oil
- Rapeseed Oil
- Jatropha
- Algae
- Animal Fats
Environmental Considerations
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Is worth mentioning considerations of mixing any of the types with each other and standard diesel. The article on wikipedia is very good for bio diesel and well worth reading if you havent already.
Also practical considerations such as viscosity and freezing points are worth mentioning and how they can be over come *cough* white spirit.
Also the effects on engines and fuel lines, it will degrade some types of plastic usually on much older engines, it is also a better engine lubricant and when used for the first few times will clog the filter as the engine gets cleaned.
Mentioning a bit about the various crops would be good too, how difficult they are to grow what their yields are that sort of thing.
Hope this helps there is lots of information out there but lots of people are doing different things in different ways so is hard to find reliable data.
Best of luck
This could be reduced by switching to high quality synthetic lubricating oil beforehand to clean things out and further reduce friction. Not to mention the 25000 mile oil changes or eliminating oil changes with a low micron bypass filter, and the associated reduction in oil use and disposal, increased engine life, etc.
"You get what you pay for. $4/gallon pays for an awful lot of terror."
An excellent, and very comprehensive book on biodiesel is "Biodiesel, Basics & Beyond" by William Kemp. He's Canadian and focuses on using used cooking oil to produce a highly refined, commercial grade biodiesel. He differentiates this high-quality product from other more "down and dirty" products produced on a small scale. He covers alot of issues relating to processing and reusing catalysts, by-products.
Great subject
How about some discussion on scale.
How much space required to harvest enough fuel to drive a car/truck x miles/klm/s and extrapolate that for a much larger global car fleet.
You could even calculate what area would be requited to be cultivated to offset global oil declines of say 3% 5% 8% 12% etc
I agree with you Concerned – the scaling issue is THE Alfa and Omega in understanding biofuels and ethanol, today and for the future. Obviously alongside the reality of EROEI.
I recall the essay titled “That Cubic mile…”, depicting the annual world wide crude oil consumption to be approximately 1 cubic mile. And if we agree that oil is virtually gone in 100 years for all practical uses – the frenetic chase taking place today to substitute this must be done with renewable crops ….
And if memory serves – hardwood (threes) may render 25% of it’s volume/mass to be converted into ethanol – I think ….
Now from my metric part of the world I reached for my calculator – and defined my standard three to be ½ cubic meters (that’s a square trunk 0.25mX0.25mX 8.0m height- a realistic three-volume …)
And the cubic mile is equals 4096000000 m3, and some math on this give me 8192000000 threes, and for that size of threes I need 5 meters between them in a grid pattern. Making a square patch from this I’m getting 453 km X 453 km.
Wowww….
And for ease I round up to 500 km X 500 km – NOW these threes are PURE OIL THREES (from my original cubic) – so I have to make real threes from it by multiplying this amount with 4…
The energy needed to convert this square patch into actual fuel is coming on top of this, and should hopefully NOT overshoot the initial energy content contained in it….
If it takes say 50years to grow one of these sample trees, we WOULD CONSTANTLY HAVE THE WHOLE OF THE AREA OF AFRICA GOING AS A PERMANENT FUEL-GENERATING-AREA FOR THE WORLD –
I’m sighting U-t-o-p-i-a all over the place here …
I'm afraid simular utopian issues apply for all other crops as well ...
THE singlemost constraints of scaling stuff is - mass,volume,seasons,timelines and the boogeyman EROEI.
We obviously cannot produce enough biofuels to keep everything running at present levels. Just as obviously, not everything we presently run is of equal importance.
The world can probably live without fast sports cars. the truth of the matter is that the number of private passenger vehicles and the amount to which they are used could be reduced to a small fraction of present levels with the implementation of a serious electrified mass transit program in places that don't yet have it.
Agricultual equipment, ambulances, fire trucks, shuttle buses, ships, heavy equipment, etc. - that is a different matter. It is truly a matter of life or death that we keep these high priority devices running.
We undoubtedly CAN produce enough biodiesel to at least keep the high-priority equipment running. That is why RR's article is so important.
The great virtue of vegetable oil is that is now available in bulk at warehouse stores at prices only slightly higher than toxic fossil fuels. It can be stored for long periods (until you open it) and can also be eaten.
If you take out the Ponzi schemes of a constantly growing world population and world energy use, saving becomes a very different matter than on the rising side of the Hubbert curve. Imagine one is willing and able to work for 40 years and plans to live 20 more years in retirement. One needs to save 1/3rd of one's lifetime income - in some durable form - in order to retire.
Along with the stockpiled wheelbarrows and bicycles, some cans of vegetable oil would be worth saving in the cellar.
Not only can it be stored safely and for long times, and not only can it be used as food, it is also local - that is, rapeseed oil does not have a lot of overhead in areas where it is grown, such as southern Germany. The containers used are the same used for vineyards, adding another aspect to the idea of 'renewable'.
As a matter of fact, I can buy a thousand liters of rapeseed oil a couple of miles down the road, and have it delivered - no permits, no safety concerns, and as for taxes - well, that is complicated.
To be honest, I expect such solutions to be very far down on the list tried, since such simple changes to lifestyle will require a select group of people to lose their accustomed lifestyle - those in the production and distribution of petroleum products, and those involved in manufacturing, maintaining, and driving IC driven vehicles for personal transport. Which describes a lot of people, doesn't it?
In terms of keeping farm machinery, fire fighting equipment, and necessary construction machinery going (repairing water mains, for example), towns in this region could probably manage without any major problems in terms of infrastructure - what would suffer, hugely, would be the local economy if such a shift was actually carried out.
I think any attempt to describe the proper place of renewable fuels requires describing a properly functioning social structure around them - and what we have today most certainly isn't the proper structure.
I think you ought to comment on the pollution effects of the types of fuel. Standard diesel has a high level of particulates which cause respiratory problems in urban areas. Do the other fuels do that as well? In NY, for example, the buses have changed from Diesel to Electric to cut urban pollution (probably cheaper to run too!)
CapeCodGreen
Bio-fuel articles seldom deal with soil depletion. Removing all of the vegetable matter from our fields means fewer nutrients and poorer soils. How tough is this choice: Maintain productive (but maybe not so healthy) soils by covering our fields with fossil fuel based fertilizers, or maintain productive and healthy soils by returning vegetable matter to our fields?
Some oil seeds work well in crop rotation schemes, and can thus help to maintain soil fertility.
There is no choice to do so in the long run. The nutrients in the soil come from microorganisms that break down the surrounding rock and dust and make nutrient forms that are available to plants. Long term monocropping sterilizes the soil, especially when the feed for the organisms that live there is depleted. The lack of organic material makes the ground harder to till and plow. ('no-till' alternatives are designed for leaving more material on top of the ground than conventional tillage, but the point is that you always need to add organic matter to the soil or it loses productivity, no matter how much conventional fertilizer is used).
Other comparative uses of the land and plants should be considered. The problem with all energy/agriculture discussions is that they treat themselves as specialized, isolated functions, like a factory built on concrete. Agriculture requires synergistic thought, or it fails. Instead of growing biodiesel, the fields would be better off getting covered by solar panels and growing mushrooms underneath. All this tilling, hauling, conversion, processing and hauling is the biggest scam the banks have come up with yet to loan money to people to build processing facilities, buy trucks, buy advertising, and sell their cows which used to do it all themselves.
http://www.acresusa.com is a good place to find more earthy discussions of the effects of soil abuse.
AS for corn, rapeseed, etc; I would like to see comparisons between the use of these crops as home heating and greenhouse heating on the farm itself (look at http://www.growingformarket.com for past articles on greenhouse heating with corn and wood) instead of all the processing and hauling off-farm.
We need to start over with the energy equations from the standpoint of what is necessary for people to survive, then add the luxury of more consumption as we evaluate available excess natural productivity, instead of starting with what people are demanding, which is fed by what they are marketing, which is fed by what they are demanding.
Back to basics.
I would also like to see some comparison between the advantages of diesel in general over gasoline/ethanol in terms of working efficiency. There are several reasons that hard working engines are mostly diesels and recreational engines are spark-ignition.
"If you want Change, keep it in your pocket. You vote for a faux president every four years, but you vote for real corporations thousands of times each month. Your money is your only real vote."
The nutrients in the soil come from microorganisms that break down the surrounding rock and dust and make nutrient forms that are available to plants.
One attempt to address part of that problem:
http://www.remineralize.org/
"We need to start over with the energy equations from the standpoint of what is necessary for people to survive".
Having read all the comments so far I think "auntiegrav" has said it best. Forget about all of the luxury consumption currently taking place and calculate what is really needed to maintain foodstocks, critical infrastructure, etc. Sustainability must be the determining factor when weighing the different biofuel options for the PO world. In the days before synthetic fertilizers, crop rotations, animal manure and plowdown crops (green manure) provided soil fertility, and going forward this will once again have to be considered.
Biofuels produced on the farm will first be used to power farm equipment and provide electrical generation for the farm. The fact that bio-diesel can be stored for long periods will allow the farmer to save some fuel for a rainy day much like what is done with on farm grain storage. The first priority for the farm is the survival and viability of the farm, any excess biofuel may be sold to the open market. This is much like the predictions for the oil exporting countries, take care of your own needs first, there will always be a market for any excess.
Why, Thank You.;-)
Yes, think about this aspect as we look at using the biodiesel on the farm. Small scale extruders are available to produce the oil locally (farm or village level), and we have to ask how many people are going to survive the coming crisis.
If you could get humans to look ahead and follow this advice above, then we wouldn't be so locked into a crisis. The majority of petroleum use is unnecessary as far as survival is concerned. We are burning up fuels mostly so people can drive for the sake of driving, not so they can get anywhere useful. Most people, with a little planning, can drastically reduce transportation, food, and home energy costs. The fact that the major players have a name like "Demand Destruction" for it illustrates the seriousness of our insanity.
We don't have to destroy demand going back to the Stone Age, we only have to go back to the mid-20th century consumption level (WWII period without the war) to greatly improve our prognosis while we look for alternatives.
"I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!" -"Network", c.1976
Two farm based energies intrigue me, one is pelletized warm season grasses, this is being used in Canada in greenhouses to replace propane and natural gas. I produce native grass seed (organically managed) and prior to the growing season the grassland must be burned or the dried native grass harvested. At 2 ton per acre and 16 million btu per ton my 60 acre rotation (120 acres total grassland) would yield just under 1 billion btu's or 9,600 therms and this is a byproduct. This is 13 times the natural gas my house uses in one heating season in Minneapolis. See http://www.reap-canada.com for pelletized grass info.
The other is biodiesel, we will need some type of fuel to continue producing food in large quantities. The fact that most all large farm equipment burns diesel makes this attractive. I like the idea of farm scale biodiesel processing equipment, growing your own fuel so to speak. When the fossil fuels run out the highways could be a bit lonely as I tool along in my biodiesel powered Maserrati?
While the majority of people on this blog agree with "wasteful" energy usage, those wastes supply people with hundred of millions of jobs worldwide. Those jobs to supply the world with iPods, sports cars, gaming LANs, and plastic everything.
How many different programming languages, cereals, shoe brands, and cosmetics do we need as a society?
And who makes the call? And what happens to the suppliers and consumers of the obviated options?
And we still haven't addressed our seeming need to grow. Because if we calculate the minimum necessary to maintain foodstocks, infrastructure, etc., and implement a suitable plan but we keep growing, then we are at this point again in 10 to 30 years, and left with no more efficiencies to find, no more slack to take up, no more fat to trim from the system.
And then what will we do?
There used to be hundreds of thousands of people employed making horse carriages, saddles, tack, and buggy whips. There used to be stables in every town and city, each employing lots of people. Everyone forgets what a huge business ice used to be before refrigeration; hundreds of thousands were employed in the harvesting of ice each winter and in the transport, storage and delivery of ice year round.
Maybe all those jobs will be re-created - who knows?
Times change. Nobody gets a guaranteed lifetime job (except maybe tenured academics, and even then only if their institution and program continues to exist).
I am not the first one to think that perhaps if energy will from here on out become increasingly expensive, then the long-term trend of substitution of energy-powered mechanization for human labor might unwind, and the demand for human labor increase. There could be a demand for plenty of workers in the future for jobs that don't even exist now. Unfortunately, most of these are not likely to be well-paying jobs.
And we still haven't addressed our seeming need to grow. Because if we calculate the minimum necessary to maintain foodstocks, infrastructure, etc., and implement a suitable plan but we keep growing, then we are at this point again in 10 to 30 years, and left with no more efficiencies to find, no more slack to take up, no more fat to trim from the system.
Oh! YES! YES! YES!
This is the point which is ABSOLUTELY, CONSTANTLY OVERLOOKED.
Even if we could get out of the current predicament this would be of no use and even DETRIMENTAL if we don't find a cure for the general problem of decreasing marginal returns (and population growth too).
Deep lack of understanding of Tainter's ideas (or plain ignorance).
Jobs don't matter. What matters is basic needs, and long term survival of the species. What's the point in making a lot of people fat, dumb and stupid just for the sake of having a lot of people?
I make the call. Or I can tell you how to make the call. It's called "Net Creativity", or "Good and Evil" or "For the Children". Nature decides which species survive based upon their Net usefulness to the future after subtracting the resources they consume. Good and Evil is determined by what benefits the most people FOR THE LONGEST TIME. Our Children will need resources to survive. They don't need 6.5 billion people in order to preserve the future capabilities of our species.
Whether we figure out how to live cooperatively and rationally as a species will be determined by our forethought and planning. It is already too late to preserve the 6.5 billion numbers that we have spawned. Nature will see to that. However, we have to decide how to preserve as many as we need to ensure genetic diversity and adaptability for whatever disasters may come, or to be able to prevent such disasters to our planet. In other words, we can't throw away all of our knowledge and technology and live in caves, but we need to live in the caves that are available, and minimize our impact so that we have a possible future to save for at least some of the species.
Cooperation, trumps competition. Wisdom trumps blind faith, conservation trumps consumption, Scientific caution trumps corporate profits, needs trump wants, and especially; future needs trump present demands.
Except we have several historical examples of societies that would much rather die trying to hang on to their current mode of existence than convert to something more workable, and very few of the opposite case.
It seems highly unlikely that Western societies, accustomed as we are to an abundance of food, comfort and luxury are going to willingly give it up.
Honestly I only see two alternatives: we somehow magically invent and implement enough new technology in time to be able to continue providing the same level of existence without continually degrading the planet (technically feasible, but I wouldn't put any money on it), or we suffer a severe, extended economic depression that is sufficent to forcibly change government, corporate and consumer attitudes. Attitudes towards consumerism were surely very different coming out the 1930's than they are now. The difference next time will be that there will be too many of us, a too-heavily-degraded environment, and a lack of cheap abundant energy with which to allow a return to our current mode of existence.
Congratulations. You just condemned the 90% of the people in America that exist off of luxury consumption to death. Either that, or we are looking at a future america which consists of 350 million serfs and a few thousand lords.
That's only because you presume 350 million people will readily submit to serfdom under the control of a few thousand lords.
Poppycock!
Or should I say: poppyseeds. ;-)
Since it's poppycock, can you explain to me the operational difference, other than vocation, between a serf and a person with no property rights and no habeus corpus? 'Cause Americans happily submitted both those things in the last year or so. Who needs rights, we've got American Idol!
Regardless of whether it has happened already or not, you're both overlooking the third population group, the new middle class: feudal soldiers personally loyal to those few thousand lords, whose job will be to encourage folk to submit to serfdom. Feudalism will be making a comeback, not least because it relieves the masses from the terrifying burden of thinking.
IMO, anyone looking to learn a useful post peak skill should consider learning to make black powder and muzzleloaders.
"Let us wrestle with the ineffable and see if we may not, in fact, eff it after all."
-Dirk Gently, character of the late great Douglas Adams.
No difference. In fact, in a neofeudal world, no one has an assured place if they fall out of favour. Lord Conrad Black is facing a possible 20 years in prison for theft of a mere $60 million. Yet Dov Zackheim, who saw over $2 trillion vanish from the pentagon on his watch is a free man.
Oh, I don't deny that our present arrangement doesn't amount to much more than a form of glorified serfdom.
However, such an arrangement is dependent on a lot of top-down control mechanisms -- political, social, ecological, etc. -- that is increasingly coming apart at the seams precisely because it is all beyond anyone's control. Once this Humpty Dumpty control system starts breaking down for good, it won't be going back together as before.
Nor would I say that "Americans happily submitted" to the losses you mentioned. There has been a surge of push-back against their theft. Whether any of this really matters I would further argue that the true test of such submission has yet to have happened. Despite the lack of mass protests in the streets I do think there is more than enough animosity at the grass roots level and from a thousand and one different angles against the controlling naked emperor interests that could erupt given the right circumstances.
With any luck it could be, like in the Soviet Union breakdown, a mostly non-violent event that pulls the rug out from under our modern serfdom system once enough people recognize how ill-served they are by the controlling interests. We may not be there yet, but we aren't far from it.
While I certainly don't rule out the use of force upon us, such brute control will not long stand in the face of all the other unraveling factors beyond any Powers That Be, not the least of which will be to further shred the legitimacy of those in control.
In any event, a post crash Feudalism may well be forced upon, and/or submitted to in some areas, but it will by no means be complete or unresisted. That is clearly what I was objecting to.
You are setting up a false dichotomy. The present US economy and medieval serfdom are not the only two possible ways in which an economy can be organized. There are many others, including many that haven't been tried yet. Some of them might even look pretty good.
Our most scarce resource right now apparently is not crude oil but imaginative and creative thinking.
I've been trying to make that very point for quite some time now.
I'm not sure I see real lack of imaginative and creative thinking...it's the lack of imaginative and creative doing that's a problem, and it's becoming really hard to see what will force people into taking part into that sort of doing.
Not to mention the fact that ideas are all very well and nice, but until proven to work successfully in reality, they are just that: ideas.
The day we start to genuinely see a lack of imaginative and creating thinking is the day we can be sure the human race is truly in a state of decline.
You can't get people to do something if they think it's useless or counterproductive. They have to think that it will get them somewhere first.
But I don't believe that's the reason people aren't doing enough. You have companies like Exxon explicitly coming out and saying that have no interest in renewables. You have car manufacturers explicitly fighting against proposed CAFE standards even while losing business continuing to build over-sized, inefficient vehicles. And worst of all you have governments explicitly promoting one of the few "oil-substitute" technologies we all know doomed to fail: corn ethanol.
In Australia, we have car manufactures preferring to shed jobs and complain about reducing import tariffs and/or the strong Aussie dollar rather than invest in smaller car sizes and/or new technologies. And we have governments still planning to spend far more on freeways than on public transport, despite a whole host of suggested options for improving public transport in our cities, and strong evidence that increasing petrol prices are already beginning to encourage people to drive less and use P.T. more.
It seems the large corporations and governments that could genuinely make a difference are all singularly determined not to, or to go about it the wrong way. You could blame this on a lot of things, but lack of creative and imaginative ideas doesn't strike me as one of them.
Hard to stop the "business as usual" mindset relative to fossil fuels, what drives the government of any country, follow the money.
I have no problem with a "follow the money" principle, providing it's "Follow the money, without jeapordising the long-term prosperity of the company, and indeed the human race".
Or to put it more simply, "Follow the long-term money".
Currently the attitude seems to be "Increase this year's bottomline at all costs, screw the future".
And among governments "Make it look like you're doing something in order to get elected this/next year, screw the future".
You missed BTU's point. One follows the money to find out why today's political pressures are what they are. This tells you where you have to push to change them.
One source of pressure behind corn ethanol is, not suprisingly, corn farmers. This is one reason why I proposed incentives for non-grain biomass as part of my Sustainability scheme; it would benefit the same farmers for the same crop, without going through the thoroughly wasteful conversion steps for the ethanol product or competing with food consumers.
Here I think are some key issues.
electrification and alternative diesel ...is there a smooth path to grid plugged hybrids with small diesel backup engines? ie phasing in as petrol phases out
biodiesel
nonfood lipids eg jatropha. (BTW I'm experimenting with sedge grass oils) Food complementation such as crop rotation to boost soil nitrogen. Recycling phosphorus and potassium via composts. Biodiesel tractors. Dangers of monoculture eg previously minor bugs taking a liking to canola
Dangers of climate change eg summer frosts. Less cattle acreage but extending meat with soybean meal. Fossil input via methanol catalyst. New uses for glycerol.
gasification diesel
Capital cost of FT equipment..are
mini-reactors viable? FT vs plasma vs microwave. Affordability eg $3/L. The bulk in-out handling problem ie trainloads of sawdust. Recycling charcoal as a soil additive or solid fuel. Using municipal solid waste or woody weeds.
Optimum location.
Writing the jatropha section right now. Need to do some calculations, but after reading about 6 articles on jatropha, I think it has more legitimate potential as a biofuel than anything else I have ever run across. It is non-edible, and can be grown on marginal lands. Trying to work out the yields, though, and the availability of marginal lands.
Keep in mind that jatropha is a tropical plant. Nothing wrong with that, except that countries like the USA and UK will have to import it, not grow it themselves.
Importing jatropha (or finished biodiesel) from the tropics will also entail some energy cost and affect EROEI.
It could be an economic boom for countries like Brazil.
Wikipedia has a nice jatropha page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha
If I'm not mistaken, jatropha is indigeneous to Mexico. The jatropha in Africa originated in Mexico. This crop may be an option for the southwest U.S. (if not elsewhere).
BP have recently announced a joint venture on Jatropha
http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7034453
I remember that announcement, but forgot that it was jatropha. I am going to mention that when I talk about commercial applications.
Strange, I thought BP said we have plenty of oil, lol.
The definition of "marginal" lands will continually shift as a result of global climate change. Also, agriculture has a long-standing history of being periodically unreliable (famines).
Robert,
The other major economic factor that needs to be compared (IMO for ALL biodiesel sources) is growing times - since unlike corn/sugar cane these are not yearly grown and cropped. How long does a jatropha plant take to get to 'economic' production of seeds - and how does this compare to other sources of biodiesel.
Cuchulainn
Boof: great list, thank you! I think you're up there with Engineer-Poet in seeing the big picture...
Be careful with that one. There was a discussion on the Drumbeat a couple of months ago about an African country (Senegal?) dependent upon diesel generators for all of its electricity, and being unable to afford to buy the fuel to keep them running. I suggested that perhaps by utilizing some small scale, appropriate technology oilseed production they could produce enough SVO to at least keep a few generators running for essential services like hospitals. Boy, did I ever get pounded! Apparently these diesel generators use tremendous amounts of fuel. Anything along the lines of what I suggested would be little more than a drop in the bucket.
Biodiesel is a good solution to power essential mobile equipment that cannot be electrified. It is apparently not such a good solution for stationary electric generators.
Biodiesel may not be the "salvation" for transportation but it is likely a sustainable source of domestic energy when planning for a very reduced energy consumption (like in the previous post about Electricity in Uganda.
Low tech diesel (slow rotation) can burn almost anything (Google translation).
See Bill Roger's UtterPower for the sustainability of low tech diesel engines.
Do you happen to know (or know where I can find out) what the smallest practical diesel engine might be? Might it be feasible, for example, to power a rotary garden cultivator with a small diesel engine? Anyone done any work on this?
Small model airplanes have been powered by tiny diesels. I think there is no practical minimum size; indeed, because of its simplicity tiny diesels have an advantage over very small engines with spark plugs and ignition wires.
Model airplane diesels do not run on diesel fuel, they run primarily on ether. There are physical reasons why very small diesels (less than 200 cc) are difficult to build; compression heating efficiency falls off with displacement due to surface area to volume ratio, and the precision required for very small injection pumps and injectors (which are a lot more complicated than spark plugs and wires).
Hatz, Yanmar, Kubota, Changfa, and many other engine manufacturers make small single cylinder diesels in the 5 horsepower range (250cc). This seems to be the current lower bound on a practical diesel. They cost $1000+. Thats a lot for a lawmower engine, but they are very efficient and are reputed to be durable as well.
There have been attempts at small 'real' diesels (50 cc or less). They rely on very high compresson ratios (40 or 50:1) and various schemes to improve ignition, such as variable volume cylinders. These have not been successful due to reliability/usability issues.
The first reliable inexpensive 1.5 hp 50cc diesel engine which can run on biodiesel will be a huge hit, if it can be done.
Diesel walk-behind garden tractors have been available for many years. Mostly from Italy, I think. Google can help you find sources.
Ah, so I see BCS does make diesel models - very good!
Furthermore, you can use it not only as a rotary cultivator, but there are attachments for lawn mowing, chipper/shredder, etc. I even found someone that sells a log splitter attachment and lots of other good stuff. Very good indeed!
Every small town & urban neighborhood should have several people with these. A perfect post peak small business, presuming you can get a local farmer to grow enough oilseeds to continue to supply you with fuel.
Looks like it would set me back at least $3-4K for the basic tractor + tiller before even considering other attachments. Have to put that on my wish list for the moment. (Sigh!)
Have you considered purchasing a cultivator with a crapped out ICE and mounting an electric motor?
The thing is, electricity is not an infinite resource either. I am going to make a calculated gamble that for the next 20-25 years or so some combination of petrodiesel and/or biodiesel will be available at least in small quantities, though increasingly expensive. If that isn't the case, electricity probably won't be available either. After 20-25 years I'll probably be too old to continue to operate one of these things, but I'll have no problem selling it -- it will probably be worth its weight in gold by then.
Robert,
I am sure you have checked Google - but have you checked Google Scholar?
Also http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_link.html
I would be dead without Google Scholar. I have been using it almost exclusively. Having a hard time finding a good reference that shows various oil yields for palm, soybean, jatropha, etc.
R,
This is exhaustive - but probably not authoritative
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
Yeah, I had seen that. But I don't trust that site (and need a more scholarly reference anyway). I have seen them publish some highly unrealistic claims on ethanol in the past.
I have been searching for an hour now for an actual observed yield of jatropha oil per acre. I have seen lots of pie in the sky speculations, but an actual yield has been hard to come by.
Dear RR Regarding information for your project
Calculations and comparisons of energy/emission is what you do in Life Cycle Assessment. I've been in that business since 1990.
If you search for biodiesel LCA info on the net you can use the Google scolar, but professionally I prefer the Scirus to find peer rewieved papers. A combination of both will be ideal. Here a simple Scirus search on "biodiesel + LCA"
http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=biodiesel+lca&ds=jnl&ds=nom&ds=web...
As you are probably aware there is an ongoing discussion on some health issues on biodiesel. This discussion can easily be found in scirus- fx this search on biodiesel + health.
http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=biodiesel+health&ds=jnl&g=s&t=all
Now where to search? A lot of reports have been written i germany ! So Grab your dictionary.
The best articles are usually published in the International Journal of LCA at ecomed Publishers.
http://www.scientificjournals.com/sj/lca/startseite
But Google alone gives some nice papers also. Fx this:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/farm/crops/industrial/research/reports/nf0422.pdf
Good hunting :-) regards/And1
Man, that scirus search is a great addition to the arsenal. I was unaware of that. Thanks a bunch.
Another reference:
Author: Nevin, Tom
African Business Date: July 1, 2005
Title: The jatropha miracle: a quiet revolution is spreading through Africa that could have enormous economic consequences and yet is attracting very little attention. It means, in fact, that anyone with a few arid acres can become an oil baron. Tom Nevin unravels the mystery.(services and contracts of D1 Oils)(cultivation of jatropha)
Note: This is how the title is cited in Highbeam...I don't know if it is supposed to be that long!
***I just noticed that I posted this under the wrong message. It is in response to Robert's comment to Jatropha yields.
Have you also tried doing a PubMed search on biodiesel?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
I did a quick one and a bunch of stuff came up besides health-related articles that looked to be of potential interest to you.
Happy hunting!
You might also try a search on the National Agricultural Library's AGRICOLA if you haven't already:
http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/
Here's a reference to Jatropha yield...
Source: South Africa: Biofuels - Setting boundaries, Pensions Management, June 1, 2007
Byline: Glynn Morris
That is way outside of anything I have come up with. Actual measured seed yields I have found are in the 0.5 to 12 tons per hectare range. But if marginal land is to be used then yields in the lower range will probably be typical. The kernel represents 61% of the seed weight, and the lipid concentration represented 53% of the kernel weight. So the very conservative yield on marginal land would be down in the 0.16 ton/oil per hectare range. On an energy equivalent basis, you have to take another 10% off of that. But how much higher can selective breeding push it? I don't know.
I am trying to work from first principles and figure out, realistically, how much energy we could produce from biofuels. I know that when Krassen Dimitrov dissected Greenfuel Technologies, he concluded that at best you could produce 1.2 gallons of biodiesel per square meter per year in the U.S. Southwest. But that was assuming a 10% photosynthetic efficiency. So, I am trying to determine what a realistic number would be for the entire world. I think that will put to rest any notion that biofuels could ever displace petroleum. They can only serve as a supplement, but demand has to go way down.
But I don't trust that site
Ok....
I have seen them publish some highly unrealistic claims on ethanol in the past.
Ahhh, so one set of data is 'wrong' therefore the whole site is unworthy? Much of what is there is others work. Some of it is old (like Sir Howard) some has a mix of older and new work (the wood gassifyers)
Part of research is to figure out what is good info and what is not. Take Alan here - I have no problem with his data on Rail. Its good stuff. The idea of spending other peoples money to keep a city that is below the water table dry - well, its a poor use of others money.
Journey to Forever points out that BioDiesel can be used as wood preservative. (Yup, spray it on that wood fence/deck) Not a common use, but one that exists. In their collection you will also note a comment about the use of methyl alcohol and base, when spilled on the ground will make the heavy metals in the soil bio-aviable. And they have links to plenty of mailing lists that you can go and read.
Frankly I'd like you to see you show what this salt + physical force is doing. And, well debunk the claims.
http://www.survivalunlimited.com/biodiesel.htm
Ahhh, so one set of data is 'wrong' therefore the whole site is unworthy?
Certainly unworthy for scholarly work. If I read something there, it may be true, it may not. And because they don't always reference stuff very well, the site is difficult to use for things like I am working on.
Look at studies by IFEU Heidelberg (November, 2006):
Ökobilanzen zu BTL: Eine ökologische Einschätzung
http://ifeu.org/landwirtschaft/pdf/IFEU-BTL-Studie-FNR.pdf
Engl summary:
http://www.ifeu.org/landwirtschaft/pdf/summary-ifeu-fnr-btl-study.pdf
and EMPA, Switzerland (4-2007):
Ökobilanz von Energieprodukten
http://www.news-service.admin.ch/NSBSubscriber/message/attachments/8514.pdf
Engl. Summary - Life Cycle Inventories of Bioenergy
http://www.esu-services.ch/download/jungbluth-2007-TP1_bioenergy-summary...
These are full LCA studies, not mere oil yield results. Very authoritative sources. At least the EMPA study has been peer-reviewed by an external party. Not sure of publications.
Check out all documentation including submissions of the biofuels taskforce under the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Australia here:
http://www.pmc.gov.au/biofuels/final_report.cfm
I like to see something on recycling used vegetable oil from the billions and billions of fast food outlets. Collect, strain, treat with lye, mix with petroleum diesel. Assuming the idea isn't completely ridiculous on its face.
I like to see something on recycling used vegetable oil from the billions and billions of fast food outlets.
This is exactly why I started this thread. The editor of the book had requested that I write about this, but I had so far forgotten. But I certainly need to address that (especially since I am always telling people to collect and use their used vegetable oil).
Alaninbigeasy is going to have a tough time gassing up his car. Not enough McDonalds.
True :-)
Fried food is a "big deal" in the suburbs around New Orleans#, but not so much in New Orleans proper. Still, I might be able to make contact for waste not yet spoken for with a couple of sources.
We do have an abundance of restaurants, just not fast food "outlets".
# I have spoken to two restaurateurs that own restaurants in both Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Many more fried items on the menu in the post-WW II suburbs and a much higher % of sales (x2, x3) are fried. An odd observation.
Do Republicans like more fried food ? Does social isolation lead one to "comfort foods" i.e. fried ? I like fried oysters and GOOD fried chicken (I am picky), but that is about it.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I'll ask my cab driver what Republicans think of fried food. The one time I was in New Orleans was for Nolacon, the world science fiction convention in 1984, held just after both the Democrats and the Republicans both had their national conventions in NOLA. Our cab driver said the Republicans are better tippers but I wouldn't know.
Probably a different year, but I was once watching the RNC on NPR or some other biased news organization (like there is any other kind), and the announcers kept going on and on about how expensive the tuxes and the dresses and the jewelry is and not paying any attention to the procedeings. At least for that year, the democratic convention delegates had a higher average income then the republican convention delegates. I'm guessing the republicans have more self employed people with more flexibility on their taxes, but I wouldn't know.
Perhaps you could change your name to AlanaBItGreasy?
;-)
Cuchulainn
It may not matter anyway. Heard a news story earlier this week (think it was on NPR) that McDonalds has realized the potential for grease-derived bio-diesel. They are now looking at keeping the stuff to power their own trucks.
Looks like the end of the free ride for "grease cars"......
http://www.blueridgebiofuels.com/
They are our local biodiesel providers. Good folks, expanding as fast as they can. I've convinced my employer (a small local municipality) to start using their biodiesel to fuel our diesel trucks.
There should be small enterprises like this springing up all over.
I was pleasantly surprised to find, on arriving in Portland (OR) and looking for sources of biodiesel for my '81 Mercedes 300D, that the local provider, SeQuential Biofuels, uses as feedstock a combination of rapeseed grown in Eastern Oregon and waste veggie oil from local food processors and fast food outlets. I don't know the proportions. I was expecting soy oil imported from the Midwest, as I know is used by a small biodiesel outlet in Puget Sound.
A newspaper article a while back quoted an Eastern Oregon farmer that rapeseed is an ideal rotation crop for their primary crop, winter wheat.
It's not, not right now.
However, feedstock competition is going to heat up.
Once it does, so does the price of animal and vegetable fats.
This could affect the price of those fries :)
Seriously, it's an interconnected system and building future refining potential on current waste feeds that may not be there in the future at the price they are today...well, I'm sure many have done the calculations on this. Let's hope they are right.
Then again, if you have a process that takes almost any feed and turns it into a very usable fuel, then you can pick and choose among your feedstock for the refinery: wood biomass, used vegetable oils from food industry, pure canola oil, soybean oil, palm oil, animal fats... Makes sense to me, as long as you have something to choose from.
Will the worldwide supply of biomass be sufficient for all the competing parties (biofuel refineries, food industry, animal farming industry, forest & paper industry, etc)? I have no idea.
One thing particular for US is: afaik, it makes more sense to make diesel out of fats and US runs on gasoline (or ethanol, if you will), not diesel.
In Europe, diesel rules and is still growing.
But then again, nobody's looking for a silver bullet, but just another BB and they're all welcome.
Nobody's looking for a silver bullet? So that's why I haven't been able to sell my $50 procedure for converting an ICE engine into a mini-fusion reactor capable of extracting all the energy we could possibly need directly from seawater...
Robert, co-location of biodiesel and ethanol production? ie use biodegradable ethanol instead of toxic methanol in the transesterification process. There maybe other synergies...
http://www.greasecar.com/
Worth a read on SVO adaptations for cold weather. And a bit of the culture.
I own a Mercedes W123 series diesel (1977-1985 240D & 300D) which are considered the premier "greasers" (fuel pump can push pureed bananas, etc.), so I get asked all the time about running grease.
Since I only use 5 or 6 gallons/month (months I am not evacing that is), not worth the hassle.
Also mention sulfur content. EPA warns against home brew bio-diesel not meetings sulfur regs & "other" regs so it may pollute more. My thoughts are that they just do not like anything not regulated.
Best Hopes for biodiesel,
Alan
i doubt home made biodiesel has more sulphur than oil.
plants typically do not need much sulphur to grow.
this is probably scare-mongering.
i also have no hard facts either way.
facts here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_nutrition
sulphur is ~1,000 ppm in the fertilizer, unknown in the plant. (i looked at some botanist sites, and they indicated that canola crops needs the most sulphur addition)
note this 1000 ppm is 1ppt which is 0.1%. even if the BCF for plants is 10, it's only 1% sulphur in the plant as a percentage of total weight. The seeds likely have a bit more.
This is great stuff guys ... Web 2.0 at it's best ... so many references ... all I need to know about renewable-diesel (for now anyway) in a matter of minutes!
Xeroid.
This isn't Web 2.0 - this is Internet 101.
I tend to think that TOD is the epitome of Web 2.0--when it works it's a beautiful thing.
Well, there are certainly elements of Web 2.0 being used, including the speed at which disparate information is pulled from and shared to people over the entire globe - and the reliable functioning of the site is certainly something any sys admin from 1999 would admire.
But simply sharing information, with the addition of graphics, is basic Internet - that it took so many years to get right is something else. And that TOD remains a valuable resource remarkable.
TOD seems to get it right, the same way that Groklaw does (ever thought about ibiblio hosting?) - in that sense, both are Web 2.0, compared to Slashdot as 1.0.
On the other hand, slashdot.org remains as basic Web as boingboing.net - text with links.
Personally, I find most of the Web 2.0 meme to be about usability, with some true aspects of cross-site access/APIs being an interesting aspect, when it isn't just shilling.
Well, time to end the comment before exploring the GPL as a post-peak model of how humans can interact in a civilized manner - since some doomers here see the end of the Internet as part of the necessary collapse of the world as oil production declines.
But I still think this is Internet 101 - which is to the TOD's deserved credit, whether Web 2.0 or not. My children may experience something I would consider Web 2.0 - by then, I may miss the point.
Two things:
Genetic Engineering in respect of making more oil from any of the feedstocks (particularly Algae). IIRC there is a partnership grouping recently announced in the US?
Serial Hybrids and the use of diesel ICEs as a viable and efficient route to alternative transportation.
Plug in hybrids with small diesel engines have huge potential, 50 miles on electric then another 50 miles on a gallon of bio diesel! Make it lightweight and aerodynamic and you could double those numbers. Also bio-diesel for trains seems a good idea. The algae potential seems pretty good, but not sure anyone has a successful process. Does anyone know about the possibility of growing marine crops for bio fuels?
aerodynamics and weight have always been reduce-able, but it hasn't happened in recent times.
50 miles on electric then another 50 miles on a gallon of bio diesel! Make it lightweight and aerodynamic and you could double those numbers.
DOUBLE? ;)
Here's a news item on the GE partnership
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/07/tons-of-funding.html
There a product of the finish company Neste Oil that is called NexBtL. It is not biodiesel nor ft diesel. Neste Oil says it is a second generation biofuel, better than diodiesel and cheaper than ft diesel. I think Petrobras has developed a similar product.
Finally, www.biopact.com has a lot of material on biofuels.
That one falls under the hydroprocessing category of green diesel. This is very similar to what ConocoPhillips recently announced in their collaboration with Tyson Foods. This is, in my opinion, the future of renewable diesel. Biodiesel won't be able to compete in the long run.
The article below indicated world vegetable oil production is about 40 billion gallons/yr. That is a bit less than a billion barrels of vegetable oil per year. The world consumed about 31 billion barrels of petroeum + liquids (NG liquids & condensates) per year. Considering vegetable oil was used for cooking food, and food is of greater strategic value than petroleum, one does not see it as a major transport fuel. If the world's entire vegetable oil harvest were converted to fuel use it might match about 3.2% of recent petroleum needs. As petroleum consumption might grow 1-3% per year if oil prices will remain low, biodiesel could not be a reliable alternative renewable resource to replace petroleum. You could not sustain a world on biodiesel. Reused restaurant fryer oil has been used as biodiesel in diesel cars. Its use is important, but only a few people can gain satisifaction from it.
http://www.mauinews.com/story.aspx?id=32023
As petroleum consumption might grow 1-3% per year if oil prices will remain low, biodiesel could not be a reliable alternative renewable resource to replace petroleum.
Nothing will be a reliable alternative renewable resource to replace petroleum.
Don't you know?
Thank you Rainsong for your candle of light in this tunnel of darkness.
No offense intended Robert, but as well as Rainsongs critique, I am beginning to be of the opinion that in a world of increasing population, and the lack of any decrease in first world energy demand that the addition of 'new' energy in almost any form merely adds to the problems of establishing a natural sustainable economy.
The use of *renewable diesel* or any other form of agricultural fuel production would of course tend to reduce population unfortunately this population decrease would only occur in populations that use very little fuel. If you could investigate a fuel source or allied product that would reduce first world populations I would think you might be on to something relevant to our needs. Possibly we could add something like an acrylamide, a super water absorbant polymer, that causes sterility. Maybe one could market it as a diesel additive? In that case I would be all for biodiesel:)
Re: *renewable diesel*
I for one do not know how you are defining these terms, maybe you have mentioned them previously on this site? I would like to know because you might mean something other than what, unfortunately, looks to me like just more shine.
I for one do not know how you are defining these terms, maybe you have mentioned them previously on this site? I would like to know because you might mean something other than what, unfortunately, looks to me like just more shine.
One of the purposes of the chapter is to define and contrast the differences. People don't know. Green diesel is chemically not the same as biodiesel.
But this is not a chapter entitled "How We Can Run the World on Biodiesel." It is an objective rundown of the status of various diesel technologies. So I don't know what you mean by "shine." In the real world, these technologies exist. I am going to explain them in some detail.
Hokay, so you don't want to define for me what these terms mean, that is up to you.
But if you also want to go lawyer-like on me, then:
and
In answer to your request, the following:
What will be the effects of 'renewable diesel' on the prices of agricultural products as food, how will the world's poor be affected?
What will the ecological effects of this production be as in: Will the ecosystems be up for one more shock from the use of what you are calling marginal lands?
These are just a couple of the things I would like to see in your book. If you wish for a balanced look I would expect to see this sort of question answered, otherwise to me it will look like more shine, like moonshine from corn.
SVO - Straight Vegetable Oil - unmodified vegetable-derived triglycerides. Can be used under some conditions and with some disadvantages in a diesel engine.
Biodiesel is defined as the mono-alkyl ester product derived from lipid feedstock like vegetable oils or animal fats
Green diesel is chemically the same as petroleum diesel, but it was produced by hydrocracking a lipid, or partially oxidizing one and doing an FT reaction.
If you wish for a balanced look I would expect to see this sort of question answered
Those are exactly the sorts of questions I am answering.
Great, I'll read your book!
Thanks.
Ethanol production has driven up the price of corn, the price of milk went up from about $2.00 a gallon to $3.00 a gallon and as ethanol production expands the price of milk might go to $5.00 as I heard tonight on the news. Some "expert" estimated that the price of corn going up would have little impact on food prices as most of the food price was in the marketing, transport, and processing, ... yet the price of milk seems more dependent on feed costs.
The amount of food prepared with vegetable oil includes all sorts of bread and bakery items, sauteed and fried foods, pizza, donuts, french fries, fried rice, margarine, salad dressing etc. Biodiesel might become another way to drive food prices up.
If you live in the tropics you might decide whether you want to grow palm oil trees, or plant sugar cane. One for biodiesel, the other for ethanol ... until they take it to sell it in the food market if it will bring more money there. Some people might have to sell their cars to get food. Others might sell their farm products to get cars as food will bring record profits. Nations reliant on food imports might suffer the new reality, expensive food.
Make no mistake about which small contribution biofuels will make. All Australian sugar cane, for example, distilled into ethanol would yield 5 litres per week per car. Previous postings were absolutely right in saying biofuels should be reserved for essential services and indeed to run agricultural machinery itself.
Robert - Nova Biosource Fuels is a public company ("NBF") that claims to be using a patented process for transforming fat waste products much more cheaply and with a higher quality output than the Tyson/Conoco process. It is not a hydro process but rather a heat and pressure process - maybe related to Fischer/Trophe. The process itself generates 70% of the energy required, I believe. They seem to be well financed and managed by experienced and sophisticated people. They aim to produce 500 million gallons per year within five years. They have two plants operating currently and are slowly transitioning to a high FFA input. If you do not know the company's technology, you might want to give them a call.
NExBTL is considered by Neste Oil to be a bridge between 1st and 2nd gen (well, it's marketing talk mostly anyway). See the following screen grab from Neste Oil's own materials:
I think in the future, the idea is to get forest biomass to work also as a feedstock for processes like NExBTL via FT synthesis:
but the processes are not there yet.
However, even paper & pulp companies are working hard on this right now:
As for current NExBTL process, according to Heidelberg:
That means that the use of NExBTL saves primary energy and greenhouse gas emissions over the entire life-cycle in comparison with diesel fuel from fossil energy carriers for all comparisons, scenarios and sensitivity analyses considered in this study.
Looks promising to me, but I'm concerned about use of palm oil as a feedstock.
The 1st NExBTL plant has already been built and is operational. The second one is being built right now (operational 2008).
Again, I'm not affiliated with them, but watch NExBTL development closely. I do NOT own their stock, nor is this an endorsement.
Looks promising to me, but I'm concerned about use of palm oil as a feedstock.
Just finished jatropha; moving on the palm oil now. That is going to be the one with the largest negatives.
As far as NExBTL, I consider that 2nd generation. The FT route may never be economical, but I would call that 3rd generation. It is still a long ways off, but the hydrogenation route is working commercially today.
Apart from the use of palm oil shipped half way around the world, the hydrogen comes from petro-refining so the NExBTL approach may not be sustainable. External hydrogen seems to be dropped from their next round of technology.
The use of renewable or nuclear hydrogen was proposed by Purdue. The resulting H2CAR technology was discussed on TOD
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2397
and dismissed. How soon they forget.
Hydroxymethylfurfural has been produced from carbohydrate stocks with fair efficiency. Much higher yield than biological ethanol. Apparently there's reason to expect that it can be made from cellulose --
HMF may be less important as fuel than as a feedstock. However, UW recently published an article about reducing it to dimethylfuran for use as a fuel. DMF has a liquid range similar to gasoline.
The only disadvantage I've seen for this process is that it requires hydrogen to reduce HMF→DMF.
RR: You are a good man!
WRT:
I would strongly recommend that you also include sunflower oil on that list. The yield isn't quite as high as rapeseed or jatropha, but it is considerably higher than soybeans. Sunflowers are already a fairly mainstream crop, a lot of farmers are already equipped and know how to grow them. They can be useful in crop rotation schemes. They can be grown over a very wide area. What I believe especially commends sunflowers is that they are well-adapted to small scale appropriate technology schemes. Sunflowers are easy to grow and harvest, even by hand. Even if there are lots of large scale industrial operations producing huge quantities of biodiesel from jatropha or palm oil feedstocks, there will still be plenty of places around the world where people will have to grow their own sunflowers and press their own seeds into SVO if they are to continue to have anything at all to keep some diesel engines running.
I don't know if you want to say this in your article, but if worst comes to worst and a local community needs to get up and running with sunflower oil production fairly quickly, there will be enough sunflower seeds sitting on local grocery store shelves and in people's houses waiting to go into bird feeders to supply plenty of seeds for an initial planting (speaking of N. America, that is - maybe not true for the rest of the world). Sunflowers are pretty much the ONLY feedstock crop for which this could be said with confidence.
Would be far better to grow sunflowers to eat the seeds, offsetting the need to travel to get food etc. But the harsh reality is many people can afford to pay far more for fuel than some people will be able to for food, I don't know about anyone else but I can see this as a HUGE problem
I have gone back and forth on sunflower oil. If you knew who was editing the book, and what he has written about sunflower oil (EROEI), then you would understand what I mean.
I am thinking of posting a chunk of the jatropha section for some online peer review here. I think it looks better than all of the food alternatives, but still doesn't have a chance to displace petroleum. But it has a chance to make a good contribution without competing with food.
And you might want to add to your complex calculation matrix:
Sunflowers are water hogs.
http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/54450000/News/DataHelpsProduc...
Almost any of the seeds can be crushed for oil on their local farm with the seedcake. So any oil production will be used on the farm 1st.
I wouldn't recommend trying to raise sunflowers as a large-scale crop in arid regions. Areas with good rainfall should be OK.
Yes, I believe that small-scale production right on the farm could be a viable strategy to keep the tractors running. Even if not theoretically optimal, the simple point is that IT CAN BE DONE. If people get in a bad enough situation, they will do what can and must be done.
Can be done, and when people get in a bad situation, they will do it. Right.
So, (here I go again) make that tractor stirling, the one I got shot down for suggesting years ago, and it will burn JUST ANY OLD CELLULOSE WHATEVER, and you don't have to jump thru all those hoops so voluminously described above to get from sunlight to diesel. A stirling will muscle that tractor along, burning straw bales- like a horse. Like a couple of hundred horses.
Hasn't been done? Sure, like a lot of things, like for example, thinking ahead.
Steam engines powered the "bonanza farms" 100 years ago, see the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion
http://www.rollag.com/
Stirling engines get 4 or 5 times as much power/fuel rate as small steam engines, which are very poor in efficiency, and also tend to kill non-expert operators. One killed a guy right near me last year. Very loud.
This is only anecdotal, but both sunflowers and hemp were grown in Germany in the mid to later 1990s as oil/fuel crops (EU subsidies also played a major role), and both have again essentially fallen off the plant rotation list in favor of rapeseed.
Being the EU, there are a number of reasons for this, including overproduction while chasing 'free' money (sounds familiar, right?), but in terms of oil crops for fuel, rapeseed has clearly won out in this region of Germany - in part, because it grows well during colder seasons, unlike sunflowers or hemp, and in part because its yield is higher.
Sunflowers may be a decent backup to rapeseed in terms of crop rotation in a longer term scheme, but hemp is quite inadequate as a fuel crop. Though there is a German company which presses the stalks to create high value home insulation - hemp may actually play a long term role in terms of energy, but not as fuel. A link (in German) - http://www.thermo-hanf.de/front_content.php Sadly, the odds of using a material like hemp to cut energy use in the U.S. is essentially zero - one reason hemp is considered good in this context is that it is renewable, and disposal is also simple and environmentally 'unbedenklich'- unlike styrofoam.
Rapeseed, being a Brassica (member of the cabbage family) is probably a better choice than sunflowers for northern Europe, and for northerly climes in general. It probably would be a better choice for places like Michigan or Maine; while sunflowers would be a better choice for much of the central and southern US, excepting the arid southwest. Different feedstock crops are adapted to different growing conditions, each area should use what grows best in their area. The good news is that there is a feedstock crop with fairly decent yields for most growing conditions worldwide.
If you knew who was editing the book, and what he has written about sunflower oil (EROEI)
This ?
Shhhh! :-)
If one goes about growing sunflowers in the most energy-intensive possible way (trying to raise them in an arid area to which they are mal-adapted, using huge inputs of irrigation water and fertilizer to attempt to achieve the highest possible yields, for example), and processed in the most energy-intensove possible way, and with the longest possible trips from farm to processing plant and from processing plant to end user, then one might just possibly come up with such unfavorable EROEI numbers. To be fair, the same adverse assumptions should be applied to other feedstocks as well.
One can always come up with unfavorable assumptions to make something look bad, just as one can also come up with favorable assumptions to make something look good. The crucial question is: how do alternative choices stack up under the SAME assumptions? Unless such similar assumptions are applied, you end up with meaningless apples-and-oranges comparisons.
1. Criteria for sustainable biomass production, Dutch Interdepartmental Programme Management Energy Transition.
2. Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
3. Gristmill: Keep It Green -- To fulfill its environmental promises, biofuel policy needs a kick in the pants
4. The Grist series on biofuels and the reports section of Biofuelwatch.org have some nuggets of information.
5. Biofuels At What Cost? Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel
6. Animal grease biodiesel from McDonald's and Conoco
Incidentally, even though I haven't responded to all the ideas, I do appreciate them. There are a number that I looked at and jotted down a note, but did not actually respond. So don't think just because I didn't respond that the information wasn't useful. I will come back to this thread multiple times in the next 3 weeks.
This post was a perfect example. Lots of good information, which I used (led me to a lot of stuff on palm oil that I am using now), but I didn't think it required a response.
From a physical materials standpoint, I would want to see an input/output cycle in detail for biodiesel or other renewable diesel. Where the inputs come from, where their inputs come from, where the wastes go, etc. Soybean oil comes from soybeans, show how the production of soybeans is sustainable. Soybean crops require fertilizer, show how the fertilizers are sustainable.
Even jatropha which can be grown on otherwise unproductive land, will eventually need fertilizer. As I understand it, jatropha supposedly "fertilizes" the soil with the leaves it drops. But plants are composed of C, N, H, and O, along with various necessary trace elements (phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, calcium, iron, magnesium, molybdenum, copper, zinc, manganese, boron, etc).
A plant can get C, H, and O from water and the atmosphere, but where does the continuous supply of nitrogen and trace elements come from? If it is understood (it is) that jatropha production can be increased with an addition of calcium and magnesium to the soil, then clearly the less "marginal" the land, the better the production of jatropha.
Ideally, if what we people are looking for is a fuel, then it needs to be composed of only carbon and hydrogen, and oxygen in the case of biodiesel. These elements are plentiful. But plants also need sufficient nitrogen and trace elements, which come from somewhere to enable the plant's growth, and go somewhere after the hydrocarbons are extracted. Since we can't get something for nothing, I'd just want to see where everything is coming from, and where it goes, and how it all fits together.
Under environmental considerations, I'd also want to see something that addresses the historical unreliability of crop production that has led to repeated famines, and how we might address that unreliability in the face of global climate change.
See:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2771#comment-213294
You may want to touch on the bio-diesel options for replacing Jet A fuel for aircraft turbines. The two primary issues are lower specific energy content and cloud point. Jet A requires a cloud point of -40C. All of the conventional vegetable oil ester blends have CP's much higher that this. There is work going on in Brazil (Tecbio) and elsewhere to achieve these low CP's. Most of the researchers are pretty tight lipped about their approach, but some options are: 1) fractionation of biodiesel into high CP and low CP blends, 2) use of low melting point source oils (high in linoleic acid, low in oleic acid)and longer chain alcohols (butanol), and 3) non-catalized tranesterification (high pressure and temperature). Approach 1) would mean that for a given biodiesel batch the 'good stuff' would be sold to the airlines, with the remainder going into the road fuel pool.
Fischer-Tropsch derived biojet may indeed be more practical, but the bio-diesel/bio-jet option is being worked.
Jet A requires a cloud point of -40C.
Just a slight redesign of the fuel system to heat the lines and tanks would take care of this. Considering that most planes run constantly (and when they're not running, they're hopefully on the ground) it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
Doesn't sound that hard, but it is in practice. Power required to fly goes up at the 2.5 power with weight, and all that preheating has mass. Worse, if biodiesel has a lower energy density (I'm simply ignorant on this point) than regular diesel, you have to carry more of it, meaning much more weight in tanks, engines, and aircraft structure. Changing is not necessarily a matter of swapping out the engines, sticking a preheater in somewhere, and resuming your regularly scheduled service. It probably means an entirely new airliner or route structure, both of which are huge expenses for an airline.
"Let us wrestle with the ineffable and see if we may not, in fact, eff it after all."
-Dirk Gently, character of the late great Douglas Adams.
The one real use for solar electrolyzed hydrogen that isn't completely silly on its face. Airplane fuel. Yes that means entirely new airliner.
You're right, that is a great application for hydrogen, at least for propeller driven planes (fuel cell / electric motor power). I'm not familiar with anyone trying to use H2 as turbojet/turbofan fuel though. So unless you can point me to a hydrogen powered jet engine, I'm afraid that new green airliner is going to be more like the DC-3 than the 787.
"Let us wrestle with the ineffable and see if we may not, in fact, eff it after all."
-Dirk Gently, character of the late great Douglas Adams.
Hey Pode, is Mach 5.5 fast enough for you?
Like the RB545, the SABRE design is not a conventional rocket engine nor jet engine, but a pre-cooled turborocket that burns hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen and air.
At the front of the engine a simple translating axisymmetric shock cone inlet slows the air to subsonic speeds using just two shock reflections and then passes the air through a pre-cooler.
Behind the pre-cooler, the SABRE system consists of a number of different engine components, each tuned to a different portion of the flight. SABRE uses two "pure" rocket engines surrounded by a ring of smaller engines similar to ramjets.
[edit] The pre-cooler
As the air enters the engine at supersonic/hypersonic speeds, it becomes very hot due to compression effects. The high temperatures are traditionally dealt with in jet engines by using heavy copper or nickel based materials, and by throttling back the engine at the higher airspeeds to avoid melting. However, for an SSTO craft, such heavy materials are unusable, and maximum thrust is necessary for orbital insertion at the earliest time to minimise gravity losses. Instead, using a gaseous helium coolant loop, SABRE dramatically cools the air from 1000 C down to -140 C.[2] in a heat exchanger while avoiding liquification
Previous versions of pre-coolers such as HOTOL put the hydrogen fuel directly through the precooler, but inserting a helium cooling loop between the air and the cold fuel avoids problems with hydrogen embrittlement in the air pre-cooler.
Avoiding liquifaction improves the efficiency of the engine since less liquid hydrogen is boiled off; even simply cooling the air needs more liquid hydrogen than can be burnt in the engine core, the excess is dumped overboard (through a ramjet.)
However, the dramatic cooling of the air raised a potential problem: it is necessary to prevent blocking the pre-cooler from frozen water vapour and other fractions. A suitable pre-cooler, which rejects condensed water before it freezes has now been experimentally demonstrated.
[edit] The compressor
The cooled air is then passed into a reasonably conventional turbo-compressor, similar in design to those used on a jet engine, but in this case powered by a gas turbine running on the helium loop, rather than off combustion gases as in a conventional jet engine. Thus, the turbo-compressor is powered by waste heat collected by the helium loop.
[edit] The engines
After being launched and brought to speed by a short burst of the rockets, the jets are started, fed by air bled from the shock cone. At this point the pre-cooler/turbo-compressor is not being used. As the craft ascends and the outside air pressure drops, more and more air is passed into the compressor as the effectiveness of the ram compression alone drops. In this fashion the jets are able to operate to a much higher altitude than would normally be possible.
At Mach 5.5 the jets become inefficient and are powered down, and stored liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen is used for the rest of the ascent in the separate rocket engines; the turbopumps are powered off of the helium loop from the heat produced by cooling the engine.
[edit] The helium loop
The 'hot' helium from the air pre-cooler, and cooling the combustion chambers is recycled by cooling it in a heat exchanger with the liquid hydrogen fuel.
The loop forms a self starting Brayton cycle engine, and is used to both cool critical parts of the engine, but also to power turbines and numerous miscellaneous parts of the engine.
The heat passes from the air into the helium. This heat energy is not entirely wasted, it is in fact used to power the various parts of the engine, and the remainder is used to vapourise hydrogen, which is burnt in ramjets.
[edit] Performance
The designed thrust/weight ratio of SABRE ends up several times higher—up to 14, compared to about 5 for conventional jet engines, and just 2 for scramjets. This high performance is a combination of the cooled air being denser and hence requiring less compression, but more importantly, of the low air temperatures permitting lighter alloy to be used in much of the engine. Overall performance is much better than the RB545 engine or scramjets.
The engine gives good fuel efficiency peaking at about 2800 seconds within the atmosphere. Typical all-rocket systems are around 450 at best, and even "typical" nuclear powered engines only about 900 seconds.
The combination of high fuel efficiency and low mass engines means that a single stage to orbit approach for Skylon can be employed, with air breathing to mach 5.5+ at 26 km altitude, and with the vehicle reaching orbit with more payload mass per take-off mass than just about any non-nuclear launch vehicle ever proposed.
Like the RB545, the pre-cooler idea adds mass and complexity to the system, normally the antithesis of rocket design. The pre-cooler is also the most aggressive and difficult part of the whole SABRE design. The mass of this heat exchanger is an order of magnitude better than has been achieved previously; however, experimental work has proved that this can be achieved. The experimental heat exchanger has achieved heat exchange of almost 1 GW/m³, believed to be a world record. Small sections of a real pre-cooler now exist.
The losses from carrying around a number of engines that will be turned off for some portion of the flight would appear to be heavy, yet the gains in overall efficiency more than make up for this. These losses are greatly offset by the different flight plan. Conventional launch vehicles such as the Space Shuttle usually start a launch by spending around a minute climbing almost vertically at relatively low speeds; this is inefficient, but optimal for pure-rocket vehicles. In contrast, the SABRE engine permits a much slower, shallower climb, air breathing and using wings to support the vehicle, giving far lower fuel usage before lighting the rockets to do the orbital insertion.
[edit] Advantages
The engine is capable of very high speed, a good thrust to weight ratio over the entire flight with high efficiency.
In addition, unlike scramjets or ramjets the engine can be easily tested on the ground, which massively cuts testing costs.
Cost, cost efficiency per distance travelled and whole fuel cycle EROEI for this litte technofreak delirium, PLEASE!
Pode challenged me to find ANYONE who is using hydrogen in a jet airplane. Nobody in their right mind would make a hydrogen burning jet plane today unless they were trying to go Mach 5.5. I make no claims for the feasibility of hydrogen for commercial jet planes except that it is possible. In the post-kerosene world, hydrogen is one possibility and there are others.
Hydrogen tanks are extremely bulky. However, hydrogen is perhaps the ultimate gas-turbine fuel because it is such a great coolant.
A large fraction of an airliner's total fuel consumption occurs during takeoff and climb. This gave me an idea: remote controlled fly-back drop tanks. These tanks could hold enough hydrogen for the initial phases of flight, then detach from the aircraft (removing their weight and drag) and fly/glide back to the ground for re-use. This would also eliminate the need for good insulation on the tanks, because they would be emptied very quickly. Small fanjet engines on the tanks would compensate for their drag and allow them to maneuver after being dropped.
The reduced weight of kerosene on the aircraft would also allow for faster climb to cruising altitude. This would save even more petroleum fuel.
Workable? I don't know. But if nobody's gone over it yet, it bears a closer look.
I was unaware of the multi-cycle thing mentioned above, thanks for the lead. I'm sceptical that it'll play for airliners, though. Fuel efficiency for aircraft goes with the bypass ratio. In the limit, you want to impart an infinitely small acceleration to an infinitely big volume of air, which is the opposite of the scramjet. If there's abundant hydrogen around, that Mach 5.5 airliner might very well work, but if fuel efficiency is going to be any kind of factor at all, not so much.
FYI with the drop tank idea, the rule of thumb is that half the fuel / energy in a drop tank goes to overcoming the drag of the tank. Still worthy of a closer look, though. Maybe if I can get my day's quota of paper pushed, I can find a blank envelope and do some of the engineering I was trained for :)
"Let us wrestle with the ineffable and see if we may not, in fact, eff it after all."
-Dirk Gently, character of the late great Douglas Adams.
Not multi-cycle. Dual fuel. Hydrogen mixes easily, burns quickly and tolerates wide ranges of fuel-air ratio. Once the hydrogen was gone, the engines would go back to kerosene.
The other thing about LH2 is that it could be used to pre-cool the turbine cooling air. This would allow the turbine inlet temp to run higher during the critical time of takeoff and climb, adding to both power and efficiency.
Perhaps that's true of fighter aircraft which use the tanks for extended cruise, but with a flight profile which only carries the tanks for takeoff and climb I would expect drag to account for much less of the total. Divesting the aircraft of the kerosene required for that part of the flight would reduce the takeoff weight and thus the induced drag as well. Kerosene's lower heating value is about 42.9 MJ/kg, hydrogen 120 MJ/kg; if you can keep the drop tank's weight down to half that of its contents, you could cut the aircraft takeoff weight by half the weight of the fuel saved. You would also replace the entire amount of kerosene with hydrogen, which could be made from something like gasified waste. The aircraft would pay a small weight penalty for the hard points and plumbing, but would otherwise be able to operate normally if LH2 was not available.
Somebody should tell Sir Richard Branson about this.
My link explains that they put a helium heat exchanger between LH2 and the turbine air to avoid hydrogen embrittlement problems. Is there going to be helium after we run out of natural gas? The post peak world probably won't be worrying about how to build a single stage to orbit vehicle.
A post peak oil world will at least continue to use the current launchers since GPS, weather satellites, communications satelites and surveilance is very usefull.
It is small technology sector compared with the rest of the economy and now when we know how to do it it is a lot cheaper then it were during the 1950:s when the basic technology were developed.
Using space technology probably saves lots more fuel then what is needed to run it. And we have to fall very far to not be able to let the brightest engineers work with such technologies making it reasonable that new development will continue.
But it would still be nice if the current Nasa could get something like http://www.directlauncher.com/ working before recession or depression slims down the organization. Such lauch wehicels are not needed to continue the economical use of near space but I find it very worthwile to be curious about the universe. It would allow lauchning some very large space telesocpes and explore more of the universe. Knowledge makes life worth living.
Your link is irrelevant to this concept. It's about something radically different.
I found some information about fuel consumption of airliners and learned that a 747 requires only about 5000 kg of fuel to climb to cruising altitude; most fuel is burned in cruise. This makes it likely that hydrogen drop tanks would not be worthwhile on airliners.
In the limit, you want to impart an infinitely small acceleration to an infinitely big volume of air
I think you want your exhaust velocity to be equal to your cruising velocity for optimum fuel efficiency. For a commercial jet plane, their cruising velocity is probably close enough to zero that this is a nit-pik.
The guys trying to make ramjets and scramjets want to go Mach 6 or whatever.
Friend of mine is making a one seater electric airplane powered by lithium ion batteries. We can pretend it is hydrogen fuel cell + flywheel just to be on topic if that makes people feel better.
Anyways, ICE are rated at their maximum power but electric motors are rated at their most efficient power. You can get arbitrary large amounts of power out of an electric motor if you can provide arbitary large amounts of power in, don't mind the horrible efficiency, and nothing melts or smokes.
So in an electric powered airplane you can get use say 3x the electric motor's rated power for takeoff.
Sorta like afterburners in WWII fighter planes. They burn an hour's worth of fuel in two minutes but if that means you are going home and the other guy isn't, it's worth it.
This is one of the few applications that a transmission is not needed. The RPM of the motor equals the RPM of the propeller.
We are back to Togo's DC-3 world, but I'm just making conversation. Maybe a DC-3 is good enough in the post peak world. Mankind survived three million years without anything better.
Insulate the fuel tanks and lines (probably done already) and use the fuel itself to heat the rest of fuel through an open return loop. The extra weight should not be that much, much less than the miles of wires and weight of the entertainment systems they've been installing on planes lately.
I do not know whether your book should expand to cover the topic, but the people that I talk to in the field that have purchased and used Biodiesel are worried about two factors -
- Quality of the fuel delivered - Personnel have had experience with fuel line seize due too poor blending. They had a snow plow seize at the bottom of a ravine due to a "french fry" in the tank.
- Engine wear - Increase engine wear due to inadequacy of the lubricants associated with biodiesel. I would think that increase engine wear would lower the EROEI potential.
I always asked field people how all of this environmental stuff plays, because if it increases labor without doing the job it is a tough sell.
There are two "engine wear" issues with burning biodiesel AFAIK.
One is the fuel pump. Many fuel pumps use fuel as the lubricant (not good on a cold winter start up with high cloud point bio-fuel, even with fuel preheaters, the first strokes will be with goo). My M-B uses engine oil as the fuel pump lubricant.
The other is carbon buildup on the edges of the combustion chamber (just above the rings on the piston is a bad place for example). An Italian tune-up (prolonged high revs) helps but is not a sure cure.
One oddity with the M-B W123 is that prolonged running AFTER a loss of coolant accident results in a smoother running engine. All the carbon is burned off in the overheated engine. Cast steel head and block in an engine 100 lbs heavier than a V-8 "makes a difference".
Best Hopes,
Alan
Do you have support for this statement? The homebrew biodiesel community has always accepted that biodiesel has excellent lubricity, much better than ULSD.
This is third- or fourth-hand. An independent Mercedes mechanic in Oklahoma City told me that he was told that government agencies in town that used biodiesel made from animal fats (which according to him requires lye to be added) were having a lot of engine wear problems. The mechanic had no experience with cars he worked on as there's no retail biodiesel sold in the area.
Does anyone know if there is any difference with additives between animal and vegetable feedstock?
This may be true, but would be the result of using poorly processed, low quality BD. It is not hard to make ASTM certified BD, that would contain no residual lye or methanol. The basic process uses KOH or NaOH mixed with methanol as the catalyst (with animal fats or vegetable oils). The byproduct glycerin is separated out and the biodiesel is purified by one of several methods. There are other newer and higher tech processes being used and researched of which I cannot speak for.
As for lubricity www.uidaho.edu/bioenergy/BiodieselEd/publication/06.pdf
"Blending as little as 1 or 2% biodiesel ... increased the lubricity to an acceptable level for the new ultra low sulfur(15 ppm) number 2 diesel fuel."
If you buying biodiesel, know who makes it and of what quality it is.
I would suggest to divide the "Environmental Consideration" part into two subchapters, a) agricultural impacts such as monocultures, clear cutting, deforestation dealing with the prerequisites of biodiesel production, and b) the emissions of biodiesel compared to those of mineral diesel.
On german pages I read things like biodiesel produces less soot, but more precursory substances for ozone. There is also some swedish report from 2002 (German newspaper) about exhausts from biodiesel being ten fold more carcinogen.
The CO2 balance of biodiesel seems to be disputed, according to the german Umweltbundesamt the whole process produces more CO2 than is absorbed by the plants.
Here are some search results on Jatropha from Highbeam (a subscription service). Let me know if you want the full texts of any on these:
South Africa: Biofuels - Setting boundaries.
Pensions Management; Jun 1, 2007; 1,428 Words ... may also take a stake in local biofuels production. Ethanol could be ... opportunities All roads are open to biofuels producers. Maize, sugar cane ... African government says it wants biofuels to make up 4.5% of the nation ... Could the cultivation of land for biofuels encroach upon food ...
Mail Call: Prospects of War; Our cover story "The Hidden War With Iran" drew readers' ire at George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for their dangerous hostility. One said: "It is tragic that the world is being held hostage by two madmen.".(Letter to the editor)
Newsweek International; Apr 16, 2007; 2,752 Words ... Energy Source The article referring to Jatropha Curcas as the Cinderella plant (Feb ... which are used for ethanol production, Jatropha requires minimal upkeep and does not ... in motor vehicles by 2010. Above all, Jatropha may be able to achieve democratization ...
DEVELOPING NEEDS OF HAITI:ELIOT L. ENGEL
Congressional Testimony; Mar 13, 2007; 978 Words ... ways to support Haiti in developing a viable and sustainable biofuels industry. With President Bush`s visit to Brazil last week ... with Haiti to develop crops that promote energy independence. Jatropha is one such crop which I know will be discussed today. While ...
DEVELOPMENT NEEDS OF HAITI:MR. WYCLEF JEAN
Congressional Testimony; Mar 13, 2007; 2,645 Words ... experimentation. The country can also develop a viable and sustainable biofuel industry based on the cultivation of crops like Jatropha that could bring renewable fuels to local markets. This appropriate technology of renewable energy, coupled with an entrance ...
DEVELOPMENT NEEDS OF HAITI:WYCLEF JEAN
Congressional Testimony; Mar 13, 2007; 2,652 Words ... experimentation. The country can also develop a viable and sustainable biofuel industry based on the cultivation of crops like Jatropha that could bring renewable fuels to local markets. This appropriate technology of renewable energy, coupled with an entrance ...
DEVELOPMENT NEEDS OF HAITI:ELIOT L. ENGEL
Congressional Testimony; Mar 13, 2007; 983 Words ... ways to support Haiti in developing a viable and sustainable biofuels industry. With President Bush`s visit to Brazil last week ... with Haiti to develop crops that promote energy independence. Jatropha is one such crop which I know will be discussed today. While ...
The Cinderella Plant; Africans used to think jatropha was a worthless bush. Now it may be an important new source of energy.
Newsweek International; Feb 19, 2007; Palmer, Karen; 648 Words ... years. During a drought, jatropha bushes simply drop their ... studies have shown that jatropha oil burns with one fifth ... land were plowed into jatropha plantations, output ... in the lab; so far, jatropha is the only one ready ... Africa. Experimental jatropha plantations are now ... being ...
How to make a global trade in biofuels work
Salon.com; Feb 6, 2007; Andrew Leonard; 1,581 Words ... about biodiesel from inedible jatropha oil seeds grown on "marginal ... believes that encouraging trade of biofuels from the South to the North ... of an international trade in biofuels in which the nations of the ... developing countries that grow biofuels (the "South") to institute ...
Angola joins Opec: the decision by oil producers' organisation, Opec, to admit Angola as its 12th member has finally set the seal on the country's emergence as a major international oil producer. Neil Ford discusses the impact on the country's economy.(ANGOLA)(Organization of the Petroleum Exporting...
African Business; Feb 1, 2007; Ford, Neil; 1,397 Words ... from onshore and offshore oil and gas exploration, including biofuels. Brazil is by far the world's biggest producer and consumer of biofuels; fuel made from sugar cane is used in many of the country ... Maputo has expressed its interest in using locally grown jatropha to produce biodiesel, while Petrobras ...
Power is the key: Namiba's ambitions to diversify its economic base from dependence on mining and agriculture will depend on its ability to increase its power supply. Neil Ford reports on the latest projects that will help this southern African country do just that.(NAMIBIA)
African Business; Feb 1, 2007; Ford, Neil; 1,496 Words ... renewable energy interest is biofuels. Government research has concluded that the shrub jatropha curcas, originally indigenous ... taken from the nuts of the jatropha and processed into a motor ... planting 63,000 hectares of jatropha by 2013. Jatropha is being ...
I want my algae-mobile
Salon.com; Jan 10, 2007; Andrew Leonard; 1,197 Words ... distinct possibility when brewing biofuels on the cheap.) And really, who better ... Computer Club than actual home-brewers? Biofuels are becoming a big story from Senegal ... representatives of the San Francisco Biofuels Cooperative and the Biodiesel Council ... about corn and soy and sugar cane and ...
Oils' well? The prospects for biofuel stocks.(biomass energy)
E; Jan 1, 2007; Fried, Rona; 757 Words ... ethanol. Today, biofuels are not a simple ... have been pushing biofuels into the American ... the past year, biofuels have come into ... commitments to biofuels. Some 44 ethanol ... place to promote biofuels and another dozen ... European Union wants biofuels to make up 5.75 ... solar and wind, ...
Titans of Biofuels: Over the Barrel.
Top Producer; Nov 10, 2006; 1,722 Words ... has been looking at biofuels for several years ... our own minds that biofuels represented the most ... set up a dedicated biofuels business unit that ... also as a producer of biofuels so we can become committed ... made statements that biofuels could grow from 2 ... at play. We think ...
The battle over biofuels
Salon.com; Nov 3, 2006; Andrew Leonard; 1,126 Words ... agroclimatic conditions for the production of biofuels that can compete with fossil fuels ... and Indonesia. In these countries, biofuels programs are expected to bring millions ... Investing in income generating, large-scale biofuels production is a sine-qua non for poverty ... achieving energy independence ...
Biofuel neocolonialism?
Salon.com; Nov 1, 2006; Andrew Leonard; 514 Words ... Convention on Climate Change decrying the risks of biofuels. Calling biofuels "a disaster in the making," the signatories to the ... of inequitable support for the import and export of biofuels." There is nothing green or sustainable to imported ... The Global Forest Coalition has valid concerns about ...
An insatiable hunger: cheaper and more sustainable feedstocks are needed if the shift from fossil fuels to biofuels is to be a success.(Conference news)
Chemistry and Industry; Oct 2, 2006; O'Driscoll, Cath; 1,579 Words ... substitute more petroleum for biofuels in our vehicles continues ... that our appetite for biofuels might outstrip the amount ... the 2% average level of biofuels used in global transportation ... problems, big increases in biofuels production prompted by ... eat. First generation ...
PHILIPPINES: Joint venture construction plans for proposed $165,000,000 integrated biofuels plant, PNOC-ALTERNATIVE FUELS CORP. (PNOC-AFC) [Philippines] & SAMSUNG CORP. [South Korea] Order #: 106806.
WWP- Report on Oil Gas & Petrochemicals in the Developing World; Oct 1, 2006; 943 Words ... building an integrated biofuels plant in the country ... 120,000-hectare (ha) jatropha plantation, an indigenous ... build a 200,000 mt/y biofuels refinery. Longer-term ... low-grade coal as well as a biofuels terminal facility. PNOC ...
On the five-year anniversary of September 11th, palm oil, the IMF, Moscow, recycling computers, Queensland, Alaska, avoiding pregnancy.(Letter to the editor)
The Economist (US); Sep 16, 2006; 1,611 Words ... gains. A more suitable approach lies in using the oils from non-edible, drought-resistant plants, such as Jatropha and Pongamia, for biofuels. Murali Reddy Corvallis, Oregon Power sharing SIR - We agree that the IMF needs to be modernised, that ...
Bigger, Faster, Better; India's top tycoon hopes to kick the country's nascent boom into hyperdrive by remaking its stores, farms and even its biggest cities.(Mukesh Ambani)
Newsweek International; Jul 17, 2006; Moreau, Ron Mazumdar, Sudip; 2,504 Words ... foment a second green revolution in biofuels. The Indian market is smiling on all ... research includes experiments in growing biofuels from the jatropha plant and cellulose on a commercial ... like the Da Vinci code, cellulose and jatropha could give us two agro-routes to a world ...
DuPont at Jefferies & Co. Clean Tech & Alternative Energy Conference - Final
Fair Disclosure Wire; May 16, 2006; 5,536 Words ... platform with more than $300 million in sales for biofuels and a risk-adjusted net present value north of ... position, over $300 million of sales within the biofuels area, mostly on the agricultural side. I will ... give you an idea of what is alternative energy. Biofuels, mostly derived from agricultural ...
JV to undertake India's biggest biofuels project.(Joint-Ventures)(Brief article)
Control Engineering; Mar 1, 2006; 206 Words ... feasibility of producing biodiesel from Jatropha Curcas, a non-edible oil bearing crop. The project will cultivate Jatropha in some 8,000 hectares of land currently ... be used for energy crops. Because Jatropha is drought resistant and can grow ...
The good and the bad.
Investors Chronicle; Aug 19, 2005; 800 Words ... Oils D1 Oils produces biodiesel from the berries of the jatropha tree. Despite a 2004 pre-tax loss of GBP3.06m, demand ... biodiesel should improve on the back of European Union biofuels regulations. It also provides local employment in African ...
The jatropha miracle: a quiet revolution is spreading through Africa that could have enormous economic consequences and yet is attracting very little attention. It means, in fact, that anyone with a few arid acres can become an oil baron. Tom Nevin unravels the mystery.(services and contracts of D1...
African Business; Jul 1, 2005; Nevin, Tom; 1,140 Words ... Farmers contracted to Stancom will plant jatropha on land managed by Stancom that is ... biodiesel. More than 40% of the energy in jatropha seeds can be extracted as oil that ... developing a pilot project of 10,000ha under jatropha and has options for a million hectares ... sites have been identified for ...
Fuelling the future.
Investors Chronicle; May 13, 2005; 2,846 Words ... There are two other quoted businesses, Biofuels and D1 Oils, that are in the business ... from crops like rape seed, palm oil and jatropha, and they help reduce the level of emissions ... regulatory tailwind. The European Union has a biofuels directive in place that calls for 2 ... this could end up being ...
India's biodiesel future?(Asia)(Brief Article)
Earth Island Journal; Mar 22, 2005; 222 Words Jatropha curcas is a tough, drought-resistant plant that may ... India's burgeoning energy demands. India needs to grow jatropha to tackle dry land and generate biodiesel, says India ... Abdul Kalam. The scientist-turned-statesman is touting Jatropha's virtues as a fast-growing, high-yielding, cheap source of ...
Trees and their economic importance.
The Botanical Review; Oct 1, 2003; Seth, M.K.; 24,219 Words ... Wandrekar. Many of their works have been included in books on Indian botany (Seth et al., 2002). Kalidasa observed ... remains. Fuel is any material that burns readily in air. Biofuels are materials of biological origin that are used for producing ... vern. thebow; family Cucurbitaceae, order Passiflorales * ...
Biodiesel in Berkeley. (The Ecology Center's Trucks no Longer Run on Petrol).(Column)
Earth Island Journal; Jun 22, 2002; Williamson, Dave; 2,291 Words ... now, we have had few alternatives other than using less fuel. Biofuels could change that. At one point last winter, when the cost ... sesame, safflower, rice, sunflower, peanut, tung oil tree, jatropha, macadamia nut, brazil nut, avocado, coconut and macuba palm ...
Feedstocks:
diesel tree same as Jatropha?
http://www.google.com/search?q=diesel+tree&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsof...
Green diesel:
dimethyl ether
Looks like some references to jatropha as a diesel tree, but most of those references are referring to a different species. May be worth adding to the list.
Is my posting below the same thing as your "diesel tree"?
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2771#comment-213438
A teaser on DME from:
http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/Archives/2006/20060829.html
One alternative to burning coal directly is to first convert coal into something called dimethyl ether (DME). DME is a colorless water-soluble gas. DME is nontoxic and environmentally friendly. It can also be used for transportation.
A September 2004 research paper by Princeton University entitled Transportation Fuel From Coal With Low CO2 Emissions discusses the possibilities:
"This paper explores a strategy for mitigating climate change for coal-derived synthetic fuels both by CCS and by choosing an energy carrier that facilitates a shift to more efficient energy end-use technology. The focus is on dimethyl ether. Its high cetane number makes DME a suitable candidate fuel for compression ignition engine vehicles, which are more energy efficient than spark ignition engine vehicles. Compression ignition engine vehicles are not more widely used in part because of difficulties in realizing simultaneously low levels of emissions of both NOx and particulate matter (PM), which are being sought in tightening air pollutant emission regulations throughout the world, driven by public health concerns. The tradeoffs that make simultaneous NOx and PM control difficult for diesel fuel do not exist for DME, the combustion of which generates essentially no PM because of the absence of C-C bonds and of sulfur...These pollution control advantages can facilitate a transition to fuel-efficient vehicles, such as compression ignition engine/hybrid electric vehicles, although the pollution control advantages offered by DME are offset in part by the refueling infrastructure challenges that arise because at atmospheric pressure DME is a gas that must be stored in mildly pressurized canisters such as those required for LPG."
"Crude oil price at which wholesale prices are equal for DME and diesel fuel ranges from $27-36 per barrel. Such surprisingly low DME production costs must be considered together with extra costs of getting DME to the consumer (infrastructure costs) relative to petroleum diesel and potentially lower costs for DME vehicles as a result of lower costs for pollution controls. A preliminary analysis suggests that added infrastructure costs may be roughly offset by the reduced vehicle costs."
this is from http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2005/11/methanol.html
note that methanol is a feedstock for dimethylether (DME)
About Methanol
I recently read two related articles regarding methanol which were somewhat conflicting and perked my interest in methanol. The first was the announcement of a new plant for producing methanol.
Methanol Holdings (Trinidad) Limited (MHTL) announced that its M5000 methanol plant achieved first methanol production on September 23, 2005 and expected to achieve full production of 5400 tons per day, making it the largest methanol plant in the world, during the first week of October. The total production capacity of MHTL's four plants is now about 4 million metric tons per annum (11,000 tons per day).
My immediate naive reaction was that converting stranded natural gas to methanol was an inexpensive way, less expensive than FT synthesis, to convert the gas to a liquid which would make the transportation much less complex (stranded gas refers to gas that is not in sufficient supply to justify converting it to LNG). Methanol could be used as a vehicular fuel, so there should be a market for it. Shortly after I saw the above announcement I saw an article in the Oil & Gas Journal about an overcapacity situation in methanol. According to the article:
During its 5-year study period, beginning in 2006, CMAI in its 2006 World Methanol Analysis, forecasts world demand for methanol to be about 38 million tonnes/year. Meanwhile, nearly 27 million tpy of new capacity is planned for the same period and most expansions are not demand-driven, it said.
The largest absolute growth for methanol will be fueled by the Middle East and Northeast Asia, most notably China, as this country continues to build infrastructure to support its economic development.
Methanol demand in North America will decline as the methyl tertiary butyl ether phase-out programs sweep the US by 2007. This will eliminate the use of 9 million tonnes of MT BE by 2008, the equivalent of more than 3 million tonnes of methanol. Also, Europe is rapidly replacing MT BE with biofuels. It is expected to reduce MT BE production by 1.8 million tonnes (about 600,000 tonnes of methanol) from the 2000 peak consumption time frame to the end of the study period.
CMAI said the probability is high for the planned methanol-to-olefins complex in Nigeria in 2009. This addition, which will interact independent of the methanol industry and derivatives, will create almost 2.2 million tonnes of new demand.
Methanol is the simplest alcohol and has a chemical formula of CH3OH. It is clear and colorless but has a characteristic pungent odor. It is a volatile and flammable liquid and may be fatal or cause blindness if swallowed. Hence, it is certainly not a drinking alcohol but rather an extremely versatile industrial chemical used in the manufacture of a wide range of raw materials including Formaldehyde, MTBE, Acetic acid Dimethyl Terephtalate (DMT), Methyl Methacrylate (MMA) Methyl amines, fuel, and antifreeze. These are used to make a wide variety of products such as plastics, solvents, dyes, glues, wood products, polyester fibers and fabrics for clothing.
Developing markets for methanol are in fuel cells as the source of hydrogen and as a precursor for olefins; benzine, butadine, ethylene, propylene, styrene and toluene; which are some of the most important building blocks of the petrochemical industries and used to make such consumer products as plastics, packaging, automobile parts, small appliances, carpet backing, synthetic rubber and nylon fibers.
The use of methanol as a vehicular fuel intrigued me and I found these arguments for its use as proposed by Vanderzee:
* The world-wide energy crisis is driven by the cost and availability of gasoline.
* The U.S. has a 200+ year supply of usable fuel in the form of coal.
* We can convert coal to methanol using proven technology in “zero discharge” plants.
* Methanol is a high performance motor fuel – just ask the Indy car drivers.
* Methanol can be stored in tanks, transported by pipeline or tanker and pumped into our cars just like gasoline, which minimizes conversion costs for our fuel infrastructure.
* Auto manufacturers can produce methanol engines at the same cost as gasoline engines.
* Methanol is not a threat to groundwater, per the EPA.
* We can build coal to methanol plants in Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia – creating jobs in regions that need investment.
Zumerchik has this to say about this subject:
Automobiles that are designed to run on methanol need a few modifications to become flexible fuel vehicles (vehicles that run on either gasoline or methanol). First, for the fuel tank, fuel lines and fuel-injection equipment, the vehicle needs noncorrosive materials such as stainless steel and high-fluorine elastomers. Second, since methanol is a lower energy density fuel, fuel injectors must be larger to provide greater volumes of fuel, and vehicles must be equipped with larger fuel tanks to achieve a range comparable to a gasoline vehicle. Third, a fuel sensor that detects fuel composition is needed to relay information to the on-board computer. And finally, the lower volatility and higher heat vaporization of methanol requires a special starting system for convenient cold weather start-ups.
I found other sources that said that special starting systems were not needed unless the methanol concentration was greater than 85%. It sounds to me that, except for the fuel sensor that detects fuel composition, which is not necessary to run ethanol, a car that can run methanol can run ethanol. There are thousands of cars running on M85 methanol in California to meet stringent emissions standards and I found a large fleet running on methanol in Arizona.
There are a couple of safety concerns with methanol because it is very poisonous and the fact that when it burns the flames from pure methanol are colorless, but fires are easier to put out than gasoline fires. There have been several reports of the corrosiveness of alcohols when used in standard diesel engines.
EPA has found that the efficiency of methanol fueled engines was 33% higher using 100% methanol rather than gasoline, while ethanol had 25% higher efficiency than gasoline in advanced high efficiency engines.
With our large coal reserves making methanol from coal would be less expensive than making diesel or gasoline from coal. A 2004 DOE report (p 6) indicated that methanol could be made from coal for $0.50 per gallon. The tests for this study were made at a Tennessee Eastman chemical plant that was already gasifying coal to produce chemicals. The $0.50 per gallon figure was obtained assuming methanol was coproduced from an IGCC plant. Making methanol from biomass is also possible, competitive with gasoline according to a ALTENER report, but more expensive than making it from coal. ALTENER studied the gasification of black liquor to make methanol, a process also being studied by the U.S. DOE.
Production of methanol from natural gas as practiced by MHTL is broken down into four steps:
1. FEED PURIFICATION - The two main feedstocks, natural gas and water, both require purification before use. Natural Gas contains low levels of sulfur compounds and undergo a desulfurization process to reduce, the sulfur to levels of less than one part per million. Impurities in the water are reduced to undetectable or parts per billion levels before being converted to steam and added to the process. If not removed, these impurities can result in reduced heat efficiency and significant damage to major pieces of equipment.
2. REFORMING - Reforming is the process which transforms the methane (CH4) and the steam (H2O) to intermediate reactants of hydrogen (H2), carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO). Carbon dioxide is also added to the feed gas stream at this stage to produce a mixture of components in the ideal ratio to efficiently produce methanol. This process is carried out in a Reformer furnace which is heated by burning natural gas as fuel.
3. METHANOL SYNTHESIS - After removing excess heat from the “reformed gas” it is compressed before being sent to the methanol production stage in the synthesis reactor. Here the reactants are converted to methanol and separated out as as crude product with a composition of methanol (68%) and water (31%). The crude methanol formed is condensed and sent to the methanol purification step which is the final step in the process.
4. METHANOL PURIFICATION - The 68% methanol solution is purified in two distinct steps in distillation columns to yield a refined product with a purity of 99% methanol.
Resources:
Methanol Holdings (Trinidad) Limited, Trinidad, West Indies
CMAI forecasts flooded methanol market, Oil&Gas Journal e-newsletter, November, 2005
Yogi and Gasoline, Peter J. Vanderzee, Energy Security, March 28, 2005
Methanol, John Zumerchik, Macmillan Encyclopedia of Energy, 2001
Research in alcohol Fueled-Engines at EPA NVFEL , Matthew Brusstar, U.S. EPA National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory February 25, 2003
Commercial-Scale Demonstration of the Liquid Phase Methanol (LPMEOH tm) Process, Air Product Liquid Phase Conversion Company, June 2004
"Technical and Commercial Feasibility Study of Black Liquor Gasification with Methanol/DME Production as Motor Fuel for Automotive Uses - BLGMF" , ALTENER, European Union, December 2003
"Gauging Efficiency from Well to Wheel", Frank Kreith and R.E. West, Mechanical Engineering 2003
Robert:
There's lots of information on the California Air Resources Board site:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/db/search/search.htm
How about this calculation? From a glance at the solar insolation map of the U.S., it looks like the average value for the entire country is about 4 kwh per square meter per day. 1 kwh is equal to 3412 BTUs. According to this:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7241e/w7241e05.htm
Photosynthetic efficiency ranges from 3-6%. So, at an average of 4.5%, each square meter can produce 153 BTUs/day of biomass. This works out to be 621,382 BTUs per acre if you captured 100% of the biomass that grew on that acre. Every day the world consumes 84.5 million barrels of oil. One barrel of oil contains about 6 million BTUs. Therefore, each day, the world burns the equivalent of 84.5 million * 6 million/621,382 = 815 million acres of daily biomass growth. That is just under 5 times the size of Texas, or about 36% of the land area of the United States.
Of course you can't harvest all the biomass from the land without running into some major problems. Let's say you harvest 10%. Now you need the biomass yield from 8.15 billion acres - 22% of the entire land area of the world - just to produce the energy contained in the oil we currently use.
Any errors in that calculation? I think that sums up the problem we find ourselves in as the world starts to run short of oil.
Only 13.3% of the earth's land area is arable (source: CIA Factbook), or 18% in the U.S. I'm not sure if that's what you are factoring with your 10% harvest.
Wikipedia has an interesting map of % arable land in each nation.
I suspect your ratio should be denominated by "arable" land instead of "total land area of the world".
That's it in a nutshell. Working those figures for US energy independence, we don't have the land. Well, just barely.
It's not simply "conserve"-often construed as save.
We must do with less, much less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel#Yields_of_common_crops
Using an average solar Insolation value of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Insolation.png
here is the table, my apologies for length.
so pretty much all biodiesel is crap.
if we start with PV at even 10% efficiency, and then throw away 75% of the captured energy to produce fuel, we will still need less land. (pv also is not dependant on arable land).
I always bring up PV because if the superior PV cannot succeed, then how can biofuels from seeds/oil crops?
just an fyi, but i hate using Kw*h, it is a unit of energy, however joules and watts are more important.
also note that said solar insolation is the daily average, so you will consistently get that much out, day over day, year after year (less a bit, 0.5-1% for solar cell output depreciation).
thank you for reading this, comments please.
I figure today's PV panels are 20% efficient but they want money for them. Chlorophyll is 3% efficient but you just scatter some seeds and then wait. So the question becomes whether land area is the bottleneck. And we are talking arable (to some extent) land not desert.
yes just with everything either pay up front, or continue to pay for substantially higher YoY expenses (water and fuel)
beyond simple musings it rapidly gets quite complicated for me to work on. the # of variables goes up a lot.
i wonder how much seeding + growing + harvesting costs are for 35 years for the proper amount of space, and the PV comparator. (again i always use PV because if PV is better suited and not being used, an inferior solution (oil crops) simply cannot work.)
Not quite. You can't run your car on PV panels. If the problem is to provide transportation fuels, oil crops might and I emphasis might be the best choice even at lower efficiencies, because you don't have to store electricity in batteries.
could be, that tradeoff is beyond my simple analysis.
i have a strong inkling that a parallel flywheel + battery or even flywheel + ICE would make the strongest near term contribution to energy conservation in transportation.
the flywheel can store energy at a specific energy level of greater than 1.4 Mj/kg, (gas is 30 Mj/kg, of which 80% is tossed out giving roughly 6 Mj/kg of usable work). flywheels can operate in the hundreds of KW for power output and last for hundreds of thousands cycles.
the 1.4 Mj/kg is only the usable energy, but it can be recycled, something like an 80% efficient capture/reuse cycle can be done with flywheels. this results in using older energy for a roughly 400% boost to available energy. (1 +0.8 +0.8*0.8+0.8*0.8*0.8...) infinite series.
it's because the first cycle you get 100% use of the energy, while the second cycle you get 80% use of the previous cycles energy, only requiring 20% new energy. (100/20=5 times boost in power = 400%)
one could simply run the ice directly to the drive train and do the same for the flywheel. The ICE starts the car, and then shuts off for 80% of the rest of the journey. In the city where start/stopping is huge, this would make a significant contribution to improved mileage (and i mean a probable conservative 2x-3x) if you use the electric motor connected to the flywheel for every low speed start after the first one you get the best of both worlds. ICE is best for long haul trips at steady speeds. Electrical is best at short term random break/start routines.
http://www.upei.ca/~physics/p261/projects/flywheel1/flywheel1.htm
I think we are getting off topic but I don't care. I'll prattle on as long as you want unless someone tells me to stop.
My source gives 360kJ/kg as the specific energy for flywheels. The same as batteries, but flywheels have much better specific power and last forever. I'm not for or against flywheels, I'm just making conversation. Do you have a source for 1.4MJ/kg?
I pretty much agree with everything you say. ICE+flywheel hybrid just like current ICE+electric hybrids. Great in city, the hybrid part doesn't help you on a long haul trip.
In an electric hybrid or a conventional ICE with a starter battery, the battery is never run down so it lasts a long time. Not true in a EV.
Not sure why you would ever make a flywheel+electric car. Electric motors already have great low end torque which gasoline engines suck at. Unless you are making a drag racer, I think it is overkill. Someone would probably pay you a million bucks for a car that goes 0 to 60 in one second flat, but we are talking conventional transportation I think.
Thought of a reason. flywheel+fuel cell. Fuel cells want to drive a constant load and flywheel has high specific power so it will provide the performance customers demand.
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I think the bottom line is going to be:
We might just grow enough biodiesel to keep running the energency vehicles, ag equipment, ships, shuttle buses, other essential equipment only.
We might just grow enough firewood to enable people living in areas with cold winters to keep from freezing, IF they live in small, tight & well insulated homes, keep the indoor temps below 60F, and make the most of passive solar to the extent possible.
We might just produce enough methane from municipal and agricultural wastes to replace enough natural gas to enable those who really need it to be able to heat their homes, water & food, to the extent that solar and firewood fall short.
We might even be able to produce just a little ethanol for use in engines for high priority equipment that simply can't be diesel, and also perhaps to replace some crude oil as a petrochemical feedstock.
However, all of the above are going to have to be quite limited, because we are going to have to preserve enough land to feed people and to keep from totally wrecking all natural ecosystems.
All of which means that we are all going to have to power down our lifestyles to bare essentials, get conservation and energy efficiency to the max, make the most we possibly can of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc., and thus limit our demand for biomass fuels to what can be sustainably produced.
As your numbers illustrate, the idea that we are going to sustain our existing lifestyles (let alone continue to grow them!) on biomass fuels is ludicrous -- it simply can't and won't happen. The mistake to avoid, though, is in therefore dismissing biomass fuels altogether. They are indeed a big part of the answer, but to a different problem: not how to sustain our present lifestyle, but how to simply sustain our lives at all.
Very sensible, WNC, except for the fact that there is no meaningful global "We", but a lot of "We's".
Take a country that today is a big exporter of soybeans, sunflower and their oils. If maximizing the local production of vegetable oil from those feedstocks and turning that production into biodiesel allows them to run most of their current infrastructure, why wouldn't they?
So my advice to Robert Rapier is to pinpoint the countries that today are the biggest producers of oil seeds and compare their maximum potential vegetable oil production (using all their seed production) with their current diesel fuel consumption. If the ratio is high, you can bet the country will progressively implement biodiesel production, probably first for exporting to developed countries (while vegetable oil is more expensive than diesel fuel but those countries still buy it for GHG reduction's sake) and then switch that production to internal use (after TSHTF, i.e. oil exports plunge and oil price soars).
So, WNC's statement "we are going to have to preserve enough land to feed people" is meaningless globally. "THEY" (the current food and vegetable oil exporting countries) are going to preserve enough land to feed "THEIR" people. So the (many) people in other countries that today depend on food produced on that land will have a problem.
It's WestTexas' Export Land Model reloaded, this time for food exports.
Your calculation to reach 153 BTUs/square meter/day overstates the potential of biomass energy for a few reasons:
1) Crops do not grow all year round.
2) Even many types of trees lose their leaves in the fall. My guess is even the evergreens don't do as much photosynthesis per unit of light in the winter as they do during the summer.
3) When fields first get planted in the spring the seeds are underground and not photosynthesizing. Even once they break thru the soil to the surface they do not cover all the ground and most of the light still hits the surface.
4) Droughts and assorted blights wipe out crops sometimes.
Note that in tropical regions effective photosynthetic efficiency is probably higher since the plants can grow all year around (at least if they have water all year round).
Photosynthetic efficiency could be made higher still if upper layers get cut off periodically with lower levels of plant matter beneath them still there to catch the photons.
I've long argued that biomass is a bad idea because effective photosynthetic efficiency is probably less than 1%. We are better off developing photovoltaics that can collect a much higher percentage of the photons and do so all year around.
Your calculation to reach 153 BTUs/square meter/day overstates the potential of biomass energy for a few reasons:
Yeah, I have decided to go about it a different way that I think will be more understandable for people. If we planted all of the arable land in the world in rapeseed (or a rapeseed equivalent) - the most popular worldwide feed stock for biodiesel and very productive as far as biocrops go - how much oil equivalent would we produce? The answer - on a gross basis, ignoring fossil fuel inputs - is only a third of our current consumption. That should drive the point home.
If we planted all the arable land of the world with rapeseed could we even irrigate it? My guess is not. We'd have lower production during droughts.
Also, can rapeseed get grown on the same land year after year after year? Or does it require crop rotation in order to prevent drop-offs in yield?
Also, what percentage of all the arable land already is used in agriculture to grow food?
Also, how many species would get driven to extinction if we shifted so much more land into agriculture? The point I've repeatedly made to biomass fans is that biomass energy competes with food for humans and it competes with food for wildlife.
I was looking at the Dakotas and the Canadian provinces above them in Google Maps recently and was struck by just how much land has been cut into squares and put under till.
Biomass is a byproduct of other activities (growing grain, producing lumber, etc.) and it's not going away. Since it is a store of energy rather than a raw flow, it can be used to fill gaps in non-schedulable supplies like solar and wind.
BTW, welcome. Wondered if you'd ever show up here.
im going to email you some facts/figures for biodiesel production. feel free to use/not use them. a good primer would be to look at wikipedia's page on biofuels, it lists something like 40-50 different feedstocks and the rough amount you get back.
Englands McDonalds restaurants to run entire delivery fleet on their used cooking oil
http://autos.canada.com/news/story.html?id=f25c00ea-b366-4ff2-b7fc-c5c12...
http://www.off-grid.net/2007/07/02/mcdonalds-switch-to-used-cooking-oil/
I would guess that the folks planning to run their diesel vehicles on Free used cooking oil will find themselves without a supply in the near future in both Europe and North America!
For North America and northern Europe, I think the one real Achilles heel for biodiesel is the high cloud point.
Also, you might do a search at www.Amazon.com for books on biodiesel. I know that there are quite a number and a few of them have a reasonable amount of technical information.
Robert,
The one thing I want to know about any kind of diesel is:
What happens at minus forty degrees?
Well, biodiesel at minus 40 is a non-starter. Petroleum diesel is a challenge at that temperature as well. You have to change the blend up to put in more #1 diesel (aka kerosene or jet fuel) which costs more to produce, but has a much lower cloud point. After all, jet fuel operates fine at 35,000 feet, where the temperature is very cold outside.
Can we make kerosene out of plants?
Why not?
Or could we add ethanol?
Yes, kerosene will be one of the products from the 2nd generation processes - the green diesel. But not for first generation biodiesel processes.
For aircraft without fuel preheating systems don't forget the "Prist".
You winter in the sunbelt!
While we are growing oil palm for our own fuel requirements, we are also looking into other possible sources including Avocado, Coconut, Jatropha, Copaifera,and Kukui nut. We expect yields from oil palm to be about 600 gallons per acre here in Hawaii. The best yields from newer cloned hybrids in Indonesia, on excellent sites, are over 1200 gallons per acre. In one case over 1500. Coconut should produce about 300 as would Avocado. It really pains me to think about driving instead of eating Guacamole, but economics is economics. By the way, a farmer in 1900 needed to use about half his land to grow the fuel for his beasts of burden, which would then plow his fields, etc. We anticipate needing about 10% in oil palm to run the rest of our business.
please do not use gallons/acre. it is a poor measurement.
please use kg/acre and specify the oil type output. (ie % mol composition c13,14,15... where c## is carbon chain length lengths). A gallon will change with temperature, the kg will not.
do you have these numbers in kg/ acre?
I would also strongly strongly urge you, (i mean strongly) to compare the solar insolation at your Hawaii Site compared with Indonesia. and account for that. Do not simply look at the raw outputs, I could probably grow oil yielding trees in space (average solar insolation 1366W/m^2) with ~4-7 times the yields on earth (average solar insolation ~150-200W/m^2 ) simply because the energy inputs are so vastly different in the two locations.
so please consider the inputs, or else you will be sold a bill of bad goods by the company.
Robert
In your readings on Jatropha have you come across any material as to the likelihood of this species to become a weed if grown outside of its natural confines?
Don't forget to tell your readers that biofuel is a net energy loser NO MATTER HOW YOU SLICE THE CHEESE.
Google: Patzek and biofuel. He is a research scientist working out of UC Berkeley. He has done the mass in/mass out, and energy in/ energy out equations being sure to include all exogenous inputs.
You cannot violate the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. The US patent office would disallow that as a perpetual motion machine.
I figure as long as we are producing vegetable oil anyways to supersize our fries, we might as burn it afterwards. As to whether this will prevent the collapse of civilization, I have no idea.
Good points.
The aw of thermodynamics is true, but instead of radiating the suns energy back into the space a part of it might be converted (at a net loss of usable energy) to liquid fuel.
For our purpose it would be a loss if the conversion uses more fossil (or otherwise won) fuel-energy than it generates.
Gunther
Why are you being so gosh-darned negative? All these wonderful debates and proposals should not just fall onto the digital cutting room floor when so many are working so hard to create a better virtual life for all of us. What ever happened to your can-do?
Isn't it kind of ironic that all this good-intentioned intellectual capital is being expended on a thermodynamic hoodoo?
You have to ask yourself this: why have all those patriotic, hard-working American farmers paid their good money to the Arabs all these years when their tractor fuel was growing on the back-40? Are they numbskulls or something?
Of course, life itself is a net energy loser. It has been experimentally verified that living organisms do not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
When you say that biofuels are a net energy loser, the question needs to be: compared to what? To be fair, all of those mass in/mass out and energy in/energy out equations using all the exogenous inputs need to be applied equally to any and every energy source being evaluated.
The issue is not "mass in/mass out", rather it is "energy in/energy out," and the pertinent equations have been applied where appropriate. High-grade free-flowing petroleum has an eroei of 30:1. Biofuels do not have a positive eroei.
Biofuels don't have positive EROIs? Would you generalize that to, say, firewood?
I think your claim fails the test of reality. Perhaps some biofuels are negative EROI, but that's not all of them.
Liquid fuels, you ole' steam captain you.
I am concerned with peak [petroleum, oil, etc.]liquid[tranport]]fuel] not peak woody debris. what relativistic nonsense.
Some biofuels do have a postive energy return. Even in the P&P article, they show that production of soy oil is energy positive. It only went negative when they turned it into biodiesel. But if you ran soy oil in a diesel engine (which will admittedly cause other problems like engine deposits), you are certainly going to be energy positive.
I dont get why turning a bio-oil into biodiesel must turn the process net energy negative. You mostly add methanol that can be produced via biomass gasification. A full scale methanolplant frpm forest biomass plant has almost got a go ahead here in Sweden. And you get biodiesel and glycerol and the glycerol can be fed to a biogas plant wich alreday is a common procedure in Sweden. The plant is simple and you need some electricity for pumps etc.
Wood and charcoal are both usable as transport fuels, with some level of additional difficulty. If the goal is to keep the agricultural systems operating, solid fuel made from crop waste (stalks, straw and hulls) could be made on the farm and close most or all of the energy loop with very low transport costs.
The rest of the economy is still an issue, but electrified transport takes care of most of that. You can even reverse the flow of electricity from the farm; the charcoal production process generates combustible gas, which can be burned in a fuel cell or gas turbine to back-feed the grid. Schedule this production during e.g. lulls in the wind, and you've got a renewable system for producing energy when the price will be highest.
Cherenkov: "biofuel is a net energy loser NO MATTER HOW YOU SLICE THE CHEESE."
That argument is beside the point.
If one thinks like that, even fossil hydrocarbons are energy losers using that method. There are more energy inputs than what you get out.
But still we are running our economies on natural gas, fossil oil and coal.
But if you consider solar input free and do a real scientific LCA for energy i/o, then you get a more useful picture. It is after all a question of energy quality: you can't pour solar radiation into a combustion engine gasoline tank. You need to factor in usefulness of fuel (this has also been discussed here by Hagens & Cleveland).
If you take scientific LCA studies into account and calculate averages, then you get the following for bio-ethanol:
The figures can be better for biodiesel and green diesel (look up the Heidelberg/EMPA studies linked above).
As for Pimentel and Patzek studies, they have also been criticized by their peers, just as those studies that give too over-optimistic view into the net energy ratios of bio-fuels.
This has already been debated here and elsewhere, so lets not start it again (google for 'criticism pimentel energy' to find out several arguments). However, I think it is fair to conclude that the jury is still out on this AND that statistically Pimentel & Patzek are in the minority (i.e. negative energy return camp).
BTW, do note that I'm not a rabid biofuel advocate. The current worldwide comparable energy return for fossil oil that I've been able to find is c. 30:1 (from year 2000, compare to above image). We can read about all the other challenges (scaling, logistics, depletion, sustainability, etc) in the book discussed here.
So, challenges for biofuels do remain, but to think that none of them will never work to any scale is not just shortsighted and NOT supported by current scientific research on the subject.
halcyon I do not agree with you.
This is not true.
You are confusing energy conversion efficiency measures with net energy return from a primary energy source. For diffuse episodic solar energy to be useful to an industrial system it must be concentrated and stores. This takes energy and results in an eroei of somewhere around 8:1. Reasonable but not going to drive mom and the kids to soccer practice. Biofuels do not manage this high number. They are zero.
Criticized by their peers but not in peer-reviewed journals. I have yet to see P&P's important 2005 study systematically reviewed and critiqued. 'Statistically' P&P may be in the minority but theoretically, methodologically, and mathematically there are correct. Most of these other reports are remiss and not peer-reviewed. The debate is far from over.
Problems remain. Yes. Biofuels are a horrid ecological, social, and industrial mistake.
ANewLand,
I think you've misunderstood my argument.
Let's walk through.
1) According to Cherenkov all biofuels obey rules of thermodynamics [correct]
2) Because of 1, they will always give out less energy than what went into making them [correct, with big enough boundary definition, any biofuel will ALWAYS be a net energy loser. Always]
However, the same applies for fossil fuels, if you use Cherenkov's logic:
1) Fossil fuel inputs are: sunlight (chemically stored energy in biomass) + heat (geothermal) + pressure (from sediments on top of them + surrounding gas build-up) ( + human labour in pumping + refining + distributing , if you want to measure the system, not the fuel)
2) Because all energy conversions lose energy, there is less energy in fossil than what went into making them (compare 1). Cue 2nd law of thermodynamics [correct]
Now do you agree with me how silly that kind of argument is?
All conversions are always lossy. We all know that. We can't make energy out of nothing.
I think Cherenkov has a problem with boundary definition, not me. I'm fully aware how difficult it is, but at least I draw a boundary.
Also, he is not factoring in enerqy quality: converting vectors (sunlight, heat) with low quality usability for current energy infrastructure INTO high quality liquid fuels (with energy losses, which ALWAYS happen).
If he didn't do this basic mistake, he'd understand that fossil liquid fuels are valuable precisely because they are of high _quality_ (rather than merely of high EROEI with human work boundary definition) and have been converted through those dreaded energy losing conversions he is so afraid of.
Sure, they've been cooked by non-human processes for millions of years, which is exactly why they are valuable and why biofuels will never reach the same type of return on energy, if we draw the boundary around human expended energy (which we should, because we can't wait another 150 million of years for earth to cook us oil).
I'm arguing that if you take an infinite boundary definition for a complicated process like fossil fuel formation over 120-150 million years, you are bound to have a huge net energy loser.
But making an argument like that is just silly. It leads us nowhere.
Also, that doesn't mean I'm saying fossil fuels are "stoopid" or that biofuels somehow work magic.
I'm just trying to point out a fallacy, not to be a biofuel-advocate.
I agree with you on everything except zero.
http://www.eners.ch/downloads/eners_0510_ebce_paper.pdf
And that doesn't mean I think they will save the world.
But having an opinion that no biofuel will EVER work, regardless of what type of process is being used, is like trying to prove without a doubt that something does not exist (i.e. futile).
Especially when MAJORITY of peer-reviewed studies show both a positive (even if uselessly so for large scale) and rising net energy ratio.
Again, I'm merely trying to say that condemning oneself to doomerism via fallacy is not going to cut here.
If one does it, at least one should do it in a way that passes current science and logic :)
I'm still on the fence myself. Not believing biofuels will save the day (scaling/logistics are horrible, even if somebody came up with a magical process that tripled efficiencies). But I also don't believe in arguments that are silly and against current scientific knowledge.
Walk through 1. yes
Walk through 2. I don't think you understand recursive industrial life-cycle analysis. The further the boundary the more distributed (to other unrelated processes) and diluted the responsibility of each input becomes. So yes, the petroleum worker's lunch may be considered but only the component that feeds his time at the oil well. Likewise corn-tractor steel but not the forge steel at the steel mill. Anyway, we do know for sure petroleum has a positive eroei: enough energy leaks out of the production system to fuel mom's SUV and the kid's violin lessons. The same can not be said of biofuels.
Cherenkov 1. Your fossil fuel analysis is fun but meaningless. It is pointless to measure the energy requirments of a long dead plant. Once again you seem to conflate energy conversion efficiency measures with industrial life-cycle analysis. Human employees--real people, actual farmers--will use fuel to drive the tractor to grow the corn. Real fermenter operators will use fuel to cook the carbohydrates. If at the end of the day there is no fuel available to fill Mom's car then the system does not have a positive eroei. period.
Cherenkov 2. "Because all energy conversions lose energy, there is less energy in fossil than what went into making them (compare 1). Cue 2nd law of thermodynamics [correct]"
I will say it one more time this is not an energy conversion issue. Read what I said closely. Read Pimentel closely If a fuel does not have a positive energy return then it may still have greater useful social value (as the transport fuel from a coal-to-liquid process) but it can not be the primary energy that drives the entire industrial infrastructure that our lives depend on Only petroleum is that and it is in decline.
Peter
A short comment: In LCA one of the main problems is where to set the system boundaries. The present trend in Europe is to use system expansion where possible. This means that for bioethanol you could take one (or more)step(s) back and make an LCA the alternativee uses of a biomass source. This means for fx. a Wheat crop to compare (make a sensitivity analysis)of:
1 The use of wheat grain and straw for feeding animals
2 The use of wheat grain and straw as fuel for energy - district heat, electricity
3 The use of wheat grain for 1,2,4 and straw as a building materials (straw bale house)
4 The use of wheat grain and straw for biomethanol fermentation, Gasification etc.
What is often found is that option 2, sometimes also option 3 gives the overall best result, because of the combustion process is much more overall efficient than the biofuel process. And as long as fossil fuel is available, biomass combustion directly displaces othervise used fossil energy that still stand for >80% of all energy use ( http://ecoworld.com/home/images/world_energy_consumption_pie_97.gif)
Details for the interested here:
Methodology intro:
http://www.lcacenter.org/InLCA-LCM03/Ekvall-presentation.pdf
examples of use:
http://www.lcafood.dk/products/crops/casestudy99.pdf
http://vbn.aau.dk/fbspretrieve/1785245/lokaskyrsla.pdf
So maybe the best option for waste oil from the McDonalds is simple burning for heat and electricity and save some of the peak oil :-)
Kind regards/ And1
Coconuts
Encourage including Coconut oil. Annual production is about 10 million tons dry coconut kernel from some 50 billion coconuts on 1 billion palms, on 10 million ha, 90% of which are grown by smallholders. About 5 million tons kernel are processed to coconut oil giving about 3 million tons coconut oil (60% of 65%). See Asia Pacific Coconut Community statistics.
http://www.apccsec.org
Note that as the price of petroleum has tripled, the price of coconut oil has increased from $500/t (metric ton) to $930/t CIF Rotterdam.
Production is typically 1 t/ha of dry kernel ("copra") but can increase to 2.5 to 3 t/ha.
For diesel engines, coconut has the advantage of having the highest degree of saturation, and thus the lowest problem of polymerization and coking of all straight vegetable oils.
Renewable Fuels
See potential for solar thermal power and making hydrogen by splitting water via two step ferrite thermochemical route.
Energy required to separate carbon dioxide from sea water is only about 11% the cost of forming hydrogen.
Mericulture biomass
See potential for growing ocean biomass with artificial upwelling - much larger areas available than on land.
I attended one of Iowa State's week long Biodiesel programs, so this is a field I have a little more knowledge than most other categories of energy debates here.
A few points that should be covered:
A lot of people think that biodiesle made from waste fryer oil has, essentially, no input BTU's except those for processing it, since the fryer oil is a "waste" product.
In EROEI calculations of converting used fryer oil, you have to account for the BTU's expended gathering it. Also, you need to account for the fact that the used grease would often be used in animal feeds, so you need to account again for the BTU's used to grow replacement calories for animal feeds if the grease is used for biodiesel.
Also, SVO really isn't that good for engines - I can't remember the technical reasons for that, but you should look further into it.
Another point is that there's not much reason to go beyond B-20 blends - higher blends tend to have more cold weather problems, and there isn't likely to be enough biodiesel available to blend greater than 20% for the next 20 years. After the next 20 years, there may not be enough dino diesel......
This French article might be worth a look for the tables and graphs utilized in the presentation:
http://www.industrie.gouv.fr/energie/renou/biomasse/enjeuxbiocarburants.htm
And here is the Google misTranslation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.industrie.gouv....
I think that the "colza" feedstock probably refers to rapeseed.
Doing some research for you, just came across another tropical feedstock that I had not heard of before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pongamia_pinnata
Apparently being used for biodiesel in India.
the environmental side.
you could go into the problems of monoculture and plant cloning from the diversity side.
it would be interesting to know if the chemicals used for transesterfication pass EPA review for larger quantity release. Same in canada for CEPA, and in europe.
genetically engineered biological organisms for the wild (ie open pond algea systems), in canada are covered under CEPA they have to be evaluated by the Biotech group (part of HealthCanada and Environment Canada).
the other problems we already faced (exxon valdez spill), and will face again.
Driving a 4cyl GM-made diesel virtually everywhere in the US, some Canada, some Euro, the quality of fuels is varied. Here in Chicago, I see ULSD stickers, but rarely a Cetane sticker. Either the petro retailers/distribs are too ashamed/unable to put a higher than 40C or theyre not reqd by law? So the B11 i buy will be what C?.
Modern diesels that are expected to meet or beat T2B5 need 50+ C. And bioDs can do that. But it also demands quality petroD too. Deptof AGS should step-up.
Another debate/war going on is between rarely elected/accountable govt agencies, EPA and CARB. Now NE states want to sign on with CARB, which is quaint since they still allow burning dirty heating oil all winter and all of them are just now getting on dirty off-road and marine Ds. Who elected CARB to make national and now international policy?
Nobody (outside of Malaysia) wants to see tropical rainforests toppled for Oil Palms. But OPs will grow anyplace theres tropic sun, marginal soil and water, right? even S Florida? And surely hardier varieties of many plants can be developed and put in rotation.
As we move toward a more involved clean/responsible diesel world, burning anything that your old clunker burns (ie SVO, WVO, Wpaint thinner, whatever) will become increasingly verboten. There is no room for inferior fuels.
Good luck on your quest. Fred
The FT-synthesis with biological WASTE as feedstock goes into pilot-plant production.
See biomass to energy on
http://www.choren.com/en/
It is possible to use plant oils in diesel engines if some parts are modified. See elsbett conversion technology
http://www.elsbett.com/gb/about-us/introduction.html
That really rises the question why a farmer does not grow the oilseeds to power the machinery. Technically it seems possible.
Gunther
I have been talking directly with the Choren guys for a long time. In fact, one e-mailed me last night after seeing this thread.
This thread, by the way, exceeded my expectations. Lots of good debate and discussion. I have a lot of this covered already, but did get quite a bit of new information and resources. Back to work now. I hope to finish palm oil today and start in on Choren's process soon.
Rumors I've heard about RME (rapeseed methyl ester):
- Productivity is low.
- Nitrogen requirements are high.
- Nitrous oxide emissions are high, causing high GHG emissions.
Numerous recent postings have pointed out that there is currently no commercial source of algal vegetable oil. This merits further research, and a mention if it bears out.
Productivity is the other element. Rapeseed (canola) yields perhaps (with improvements) 150 gallons/acre/year. Supplying the US's 60 billion gallon/year distillate appetite would require some 400 million acres of canola. This Ain't Gonna Happen.
I see you've already found plenty about jatropha. I have nothing to add.
True, RME is the lowest yield in net energy per ha of the biofuels used in Sweden. The good things with RME are that no new farming machines or practices are needed, the biodiesel process is cheap and simple and the press-cake can be used as animal feedstock replacing imported soya or for biogas and the end product is of course fertilizer. The bad things are the yield and that the rapeseed crop rotation is sparse to keep the crop healthy.
Since it is a fairly cheap process that can be built in any size the total RME production potential for Swedish rapeseed is already more or less built.
A few days ago there were a surprise development in ny neigbouring town Norrköping. A 800 000 ton/year rapeseed processing plant is being built at the harbour to process imported rapeseed. The idea seems to be to complement the mechanical oil extraction with a chemical solvent step and then make fuel pellets for the well developed fuel pellet market.
The plant will be situated togeather with an ethanol plant that currently is being enlarged, a biogas plant and a combined heat and power district heating plant that producess process steam, electricity and district heating from low grade forest biomass.
Its a nice development from a free-market perspective since we now have real competition with both large and small investors competing with small scale local low transportation need production with tiny turn-key plants that are being series produced and large scale high efficiency processes.
algal biodiesel was researched to death in the 80's, there is a 330 page report publicly available, i am off to go find it right now.
here it is:
http://www.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/biodiesel_from_algae.pdf
Robert;
My 12HP Listeroid diesel (post-Katrina generation system) has been outfitted with fuel lines that allow me to use any VegOil, used motor oil, etc. I thought that someone should put such engines on a trailer with direct drive to a seed oil expeller (pull the whole rig with a VegOil pickup) and go to farms on a schedule. Process the farmer's sunflower seed, canola, cotton, soy, etc. as the stock for his own tractor fuel and take , say, a 20% cut as payment. Sell the profits to biodiesel processors in the city. Such engines can also power a sugar cane mill to make the syrup for distilling alcohol (a major ingredient of traditional biodiesel).
Sorry, can't provide a link, but recently read in the paper that some company here in Oregon is producing a mobile biodiesel processing rig, with the first ones just now going into use.
IIRC, they are being made from shipping containers.
Liz;
This one is A LOT cheaper!
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_processor.html
Rob (Creole G.)
I would spend some time on taxation. If (when) there is a large scale switch to bio/green/svo diesel, how will it be taxed, if it will be taxed at all. If not, how will our friends in government make up for that lost revenue?
Going to be difficult to tax something that doesn't run through a metered pump - see post by CreoleGenius above. On the other hand, fuel for off-road use isn't being taxed now (at least in USA, and probably in many other countries as well).
The same issue applies with electric vehicles, BTW.
The whole model of public finance for streets and highways will have to be revisited. It will have to be in any case, because traffic volumes will inevitably decrease, and fuel tax revenues as well.
One high-tech possibility would be to imbed an RFID in every on-road vehicle (even including bicycles), with a reader installed along the road every few hundred feet or so. The vehicle licence holder of record is then charged so much per mile of road usage, perhaps on a sliding scale by vehicle weight class.
Such a system, by the way, could also be programmed to automatically detect vehicles exceeding posted speed limits, and to automatically generate fines that get posted to the license holder's bill as well. Of course, if you let someone else drive your car, you could end up getting stuck with the fines for their speeding; this will probably spell the end of teenagers borrowing their parent's cars!
This would create a nice cottage industry for electro-geeks building these things:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2006/01/weapons_the...
The Oildrum is obviously peppered with engineers who do not want to, or can not accept critical ecologic principals. But to those with well-rounded educations it has become obvious this particular "soft" science has come to trump the heavily industrialized paradigm we live under.
But this is understandable given the fragmented specialized nature of education today.
FOLKS: THERE IS NOT ENOUGH CHEMICAL FERTILIZER, ARABLE LAND, AND POTABLE WATER TO GROW OUR WAY OUT OF THIS MESS OUR TOYS HAVE CREATED.
But it is negligent for the engineer-set to not appreciate impossible energy returns, and the social and political consequences of zero net energy: the last little energy drops leaking out of a theoretical biofuel system will be used by the workers to get to their jobs. Biofuels are a petroleum sink.
Proponents, please answer this: Why has not the United States farmer, the smartest most highly educated and well-funded farmer in the world, not discovered the energy OPEC in their back-40? Ethanol fermentation systems are well known on the farm (silage is fermented), corn has historically been in excess and subsidized by US floor supports and marketing programs, the farm community is very familiar with industrial equipment and processes (dairy liquid processing, machinery repair, etc.) and so there have always been tools, money, and know-how to grown on-farm liquid energy. Yet is has never been done. Tells me something. It can't work.
It tells me that oil has been very cheap.
But lay down and die if you want.
I am sure that the farming industry can sustain itself as it did before fossil fuels but now it can use much better crops, fertlizer need can be analyzed a lot better and applied with precision, the tractor fuel manufacturing can use lower grades of fuel then oxen and horses needed in their time and there is plenty of electricity for making nitrogen fertilizer, run workshops and processes, and so on.
A future with neglible fossil fuel can still be rich with todays technology but not as lazy and negelectfully rich as during the 1900:s.
Cheap oil does not explain previous disinterest in biofuels. If each and every farmer had the possibility of a biofuel oil well in their back-40 then wouldn't our free-market have compelled that farmer to use it?
"Lay down and die." What have you done to change our "lazy and negelectfully rich" lifesytle? I challenge the usefulness of spending our remaining petroleum on frivolous government subsidies, environmentally and socially destructive biofuel gimmicks.
Better crops and scientifically-applied fertilizers have already been calculated into biofuel energy return systems. You must believe in magic agriculture fairies if you think that crop improvement are going to change this equation.
Why would farmers bother with making biofuels when oil were dirt cheap and they could get a better return-on-investment by doing other things that often used oil?
Its like the mass conversion from firewood to oil heating in the Swedish countryside when it paid better to sell the firewood to a paper mill and buy oil and using oil were simpler. This process has been going on in reverse for some time now and a few more years and the use of heating oil will be extinct due to punitive taxation and higer crude prices.
I am working hard with these issues, mostly from a global warming perspective. The solution model I work with is to combine very manny kinds of investements both in efficiency, city planning and production and encouraging investments of manny sizes to make them fit a maximum of different entrepreneurs and physical opportunities. There are lots of unused potentials in my home country and a fair ammount of mature or almost mature technology that can be implemented now or within a few years.
I am confident that the local research that shows a usable net energy gain from a number of locally growable biofuels is accurate. Its not a new field, there has been research and fiddling with it for more then 20 years.
Applying more nitrous fertilizer is part of the solution mix, the problem is not to make the fertilizer since we can fall back to using electricity for making it when natural gas gets expensive. The problem is if it can be applied to fields and forests withouth hurting the marine environments further.
And electricity is not a probem since we can expand nuclear power, hydropower, wind power, combined heating and electricity production and save power. I advocate doing all of that and export the "excess" to Denmark, Germany and Poland displacing coal power.
Crop improvements add valuble productivity on the margin of systems that aready produce noticable ammounts of fuel.
Now if only I somehow could figure out how to realy encourage these investments to make a slurping noise in the diesel tanks and within a few years hear that change into a slurping noise in the ethanol, methanol, RME, methane and DME tanks while the alternatives prove their colours on the market.
And all of this needs to be packaged into ideas that encourage good legislation and election winning politics. Details are confidential for my employer, the moderate party.
because it would give that farmer a competitive advantage over other farmers. He doesn't need to purchase fuel (the major expense on a farm) instead he grows it and saves money.
This suggests the romantic notion that locally produced biofuels are more effective then mass-produced when the reverse will be true. Large-scale esterfication or fermentation is more efficient then otherwise.
Why use electricity to create fertilizer to grow biofuels to power automobiles when a more reasonable solution is to electrify our transport system. You have effectively taken the fertilizer out of the fossil fuel equation, externalized the energy cost, and so skewed the eroei equation. This confuses issues.
Unspecificed crop improvements (I assume based on the biotech fairie?) can not be counted on to mitigate a peak oil transport dilemma happening now.
what?
I doubt that even today fuel is the major expense on the farm, try debt service, chemicals, seed, equipment depreciation and fertilizer for starters.
No doubt, but you've also got to take the round trip from farm to processing plant back to farm into account. As energy prices go up those transport inputs will be considerable.
Any farmer with a processing plant right next door would be an idiot to try to press & use his own oil. On the other hand, if the nearest processing plant is clear across the state, a point might come when the transport costs are just too high, and then you look for alternatives. Small scale farm based SVO production to fuel agricultural equipment is certainly suboptimal compared to more industrial-scale operations. But it is an appropriate technology for niches that are just out of reach (in terms of distance or cost) from the industrialized system.
Because we don't know how everything will play out in the future, some of us believe that it would be prudent to do as much R&D as we can into these types of appropriate technologies, just to make sure that as many people and places as possible have as full a "toolbox" as possible to cope with as many contingencies as possible. Like every full toolbox, a lot of the tools it contains will be rarely if ever used, but some will be absolutely essential in the right situation.
He doesn't need to purchase fuel (the major expense on a farm) instead he grows it and saves money.
No he doesn't, selling the primary ingredient (whatever it is) will (currently) bring more money than the "savings" of howebrewed fuel.
Furthermore this is irrespective of percentage of the expenses related to fuel procurement.
Numbskull, Eh?
You've been shown with the example of "the mass conversion from firewood to oil heating in the Swedish countryside when it paid better to sell the firewood to a paper mill and buy oil and using oil were simpler" that's it is just the opposite but still it doesn't get thru.
Real thick!
Fuel has not been the major expense and it still probably is not for manny farms. My guess is that workhours and capital cost often are the largest costs and making your own fuel requiers capital and work. I bet that some farmers in the 60:s dident even feel it worthwile to give fuel its own column in the bookkeeping as it were a minor post in misc costs.
Sorry, I meant local as in not imported from Brazil and fit to grow in the Swedish climate zones. There are proposed small about 50 000 m3/year ethanol plants that also could qualifie as local but the only truly local as in short transportation distances fuels suitable for large farms and clusters of farms are RME and biogas. There are a handfull of miniature RME plants more or less setting a floor for the large scale plants bids on rapeseed. The biogas trend seems to be some plants in most municipialities and the limiting part is the gas quality upgrading equipment.
All building and proposed ethanol plants are to be integrated with waste heat sources or low grade wood biomass burning togeather with district heating and sometimes electricity production and the waste products are to be used as animal feed or biogas raw material to get an ok system efficiency.
You are getting it! It is partly another way of turning electricity into wehicle motion. In reality we need both. We need plug-in hybrids, hopefully even electrical wehicels, local electrified mass transit and more train traffic. (All of the major lines are already electrified. )
Sweden is a fairly large country where electricity only wont fill the needs and it would be very bad for our to amlarge degree rural culture if town people could not reach the countryside and it would become hard to live in the countryside. And we also need liquid fuel for chansaws, worksite macinery, aeroplanes, forestry machinery, tractors and so on.
Eroei is not relevant when you include the sun and the electricity from hydro/nuclear/wind/biomass power. Then the relevant measuremet is economical return on investment including the machinery to make the electricity from the original power source.
Advanced biotech could speed it up but it is relevant since we are in this for the long haul. Now we need to improve the seeds for the 2030 - 2080 forest biomass harvests and the field crops for the 2010:s and so on. This will become relevant within the life lenght of the biomass to fuel plants being built now. Untill then we need to fertilize smarter, use more of the unused land area and increase the ammount of cultivating work.
All this biofuel will of course not make wehicle fuel cheaper then the $10 per gallon or whatever they will cost since nobody will sell cheaper then the market price. But it will keep the rural economy ticking making the fuel affordable for a fair number of people. Most of the adaption will have to be thru better efficiency in wehicles and habits and using electricity. But if other countries fuck up their adaption and their demand disappears the prices will fall. An it is nice to have our own very expensive but sustainable "oil well" to get a less rough ride as things settle down on the fossil oil production downslope.
Sorry, late night rambling. I am trying to adapt myself to my new job of prepairing information for parliament members while bouncing as a hot rubber ball between different interests trying to puzzle it all togeather to sort our bad ideas and encourage good ideas. Its a very fun place to be as an energy and technology nerd since such analysis is genuinely usefull. The parliament members in my party want hard facts and synergies and help in recognizing bullshit.
There are good efforts underway. One of my favorites is a reduction of red tape for companies by 20% counted in the time needed to handle paperwork. It seems to be doable and would be good for all kinds of efforts and hopefully it will be enough to turn the state regulation tide. It is sweet too se that it is a serious effort. We got to get rid of all kinds of things that limits investments withouth rushing it so hard that we neglect environmental care. Its probably a question of applying the current knowledge in a more efficient way.
How do I get a job like that?!
Would that there were more obvious interest in this on this side of the Atlantic.
I dont realy know how I got this job. Its probably due to patient low level work in municipiality politics togeather with years of burning for these issues and a fair generel knowledge in environmental and technical issues.
My advice with my very limited knowledge of USA is to try your best to work togeather with your neighbours in politics. You will then get some small fraction of your society to work a little better. If you respect other people and their businesses and try to base what you do on science you will probably contribute even if you start out with faulty ideas. If this works well you probably have both a political sphere and a business sphere that looks for new talent to put to work on a higher more influential level.
The dumbest thing you can do is probably to try to invent a new political system or economical system in an already unstable situation. Its the right time to get such things to happen but historically such endauvours mostly end in disaster. USA has impressive social and economical ideals that probably can be but to good use again.
My guess about US federal politicians is that they probably are good people that are swamped. They are trying to manage a continent sized country and it is perhaps not possible to get such a large colossus to move fast enough. Most of the political global warming and peak oil work might work best on the state level and below down to the municipiality level. A large fraction of the environmental work and investments in Sweden is being done on the municipiality level.
Magnus, what I think we the USA needs is better science education. The politicians are just doing the will of the people.
We can use more "for the common good" and less "I got mine- that's the only person I care about" but I got mine is everywhere.
Given that I am an engineer and orginated this thread - and a couple of others have alluded to the same theme - I will presume that this was partially directed at me. It needn't be. I have been critical of most biofuels for a very long time. And this book is not a book on "How to Grow Our Way to Sustainability." It is an explanation and review of renewable diesel options. That's it. It is not an endorsement. It is not a recommendation. It is merely a review of the status quo, as well as the pros and cons of our current renewable diesel options. This sort of work exists for biodiesel, but to my knowledge not for the broader category of renewable diesel.
Take palm oil, for instance. It is a fact that palm oil exports are providing a cash crop for 3rd world farmers. On the other hand, it is also true that Indonesia is destroying rain forest at an alarming rate in order to plant new palm plantations. My chapter looks into those kinds of issues: Here's palm oil. Here's what's good. Here's what's bad. But what I do not say is "Here is how we can make it work." I present facts.
Now, if that wasn't directed at me, others have directed similar comments my way. I find it rather amazing that people are so quick to jump to conclusions based on so little information. This is one reason I stopped posting here as much. It became annoying to have a bunch of critics no matter what I posted. Even when I mentioned the fact that I had been approached with a very novel cellulosic ethanol process - here came a bunch of critics. Never mind that they didn't know a single detail. They were quite willing to jump to conclusions.
I'm an engineer, electrical engineer. My knowledge of farming, chemistry, and internal combustion engines is below average on this thread. Way below average.
In the news today, somebody with a patent on a water powered car was arrested for securities fraud. On another blog I was called a moron for not believing the oil companies did this to protect their windfall profits. The person who called me a moron not only votes but was elected to something.
There is nothing wrong with debating palm oil vs. sunflower seeds vs. whatever among ourselves, but let's keep in mind the mentality of the folks who are out there and not on TOD.
I am sorry Robert. One could easily confuse "It is a fact that palm oil exports are providing a cash crop for 3rd world farmers." with an endorsement. But that was not my point.
My point is that would be physically impossible to power an industrial fermentation system with the fermented byproduct of that process and still expect enough liquid fuel to leak out and drive mom and the kids to the mall. That would be thermodynamic hoodoo.
The only conclusion I ever jump to regarding biofuels is they are a nasty diversion from the hard work at hand--powering down this petroleum madness gracefully and electrifying this world with solar, wind, and wave systems if we have the time. Which we don't.
Not quite a reply; I see the biodiesel and renewables supply primarily as a way to keep the necessary service of society running.
Like the rationing schemes in WW2. Fuel was authorized based on need.
Just how much fuel was needed for necessary services and travel, versus before and immediately after the rationing period? I am thinking is terms of gallons per vehicle per week or similar figure?
One could easily confuse "It is a fact that palm oil exports are providing a cash crop for 3rd world farmers." with an endorsement. But that was not my point.
Sure, if they willfully ignored "On the other hand, it is also true that Indonesia is destroying rain forest at an alarming rate in order to plant new palm plantations." That's my point. People read only what they want to read and jump to conclusions. Stating facts should not be confused with an endorsement. And if it is, I don't think I am responsible for such comprehension issues. I think what I am writing is clear. There are reasons we are doing what we are doing. There are reasons palm oil is scaling up. What are the factors involved? What are the negatives? Who benefits? But this is not a how to manual.
I am also going to open up with a calculation demonstrating that it is simply impossible to grow our way to energy independence. So the tone will be set up front. Biofuels - in certain situations - do have a part to play. But they are not going to replace petroleum. I think only a combination of solar, wind, and conservation can ever do that. And that may be a stretch.
I think only a combination of solar, wind, and conservation can ever do that. And that may be a stretch.
More than a stretch, a plain impossibility.
Don't you think that many at TOD have recognised that?
And I am not speaking of the ideologically blinded like ANewLand (wishing for the "good 'ole days" ROFLMAO).
Impossible?
Total US energy consumption is now running about 105 quads/year, or 3.5 TW average from all sources. The estimate of available land-based wind power in the lower 48 is ~1.2 TW, and the off-shore on the continental shelves is another ~0.9 TW. That comes to ~2.1 TW, or 60% of total current US energy consumption... and it's ALL electric, with no conversion losses. You could run everything with a bit of efficiency improvement (at worst).
Solar PV is another thing entirely. The US has over 100,000 km² under impervious surfaces. If you can put 12%-efficient PV (e.g. "string ribbon" cells) over 50% of this and it receives an average of 1000 kWh/m²/yr, that's another 6 trillion kWh/year or about 0.68 TW continuous. That's about 150% of current electric consumption right there.
Want to spell out for me exactly what's impossible?
Want to spell out for me exactly what's impossible?
It is impossible to "replace" fossil fuels up to the current consumptions levels not because of any "theoretical" infeasibility (total solar energy inputs, thorium reactors and breeders and blah! blah! blah!) but because of the practical impossibility to muster all the required ressources within the remaining time span (before fossil fuels availability drops too much).
All this because of financial, political and sociological stumble blocks.
You are definitely an engineer!
LOL
Okay, then. Instead, assume that we remove all the guzzling personal trucks from the roads and insulate our buildings to gain some breathing room. Also assume that the current exponential increase in wind capacity follows the logistic curve (won't reach an inflection point for some time yet), rail displaces trucks for more freight transport, and we start getting serious about PHEV's.
In other words, assume measures well short of what the public took on to meet the challenge of WWII. What then?
Instead, assume that we remove all ... etc...
Seems you didn't get my point.
In other words, assume measures well short of what the public took on to meet the challenge of WWII.
The "challenge of WWII" is an easily understood threat by any "naked chimp", PO & GW are not, didn't you see any denials of these recently? :-(
I got your point. What you missed is that all the changes I pointed out as necessary are already under way, if not yet at the speed we require.
PO and GW may be deniable today. But one more hurricane season like 2005, or killer heat waves, or worsening drought, will convert people who would otherwise not think about it.
It became annoying to have a bunch of critics no matter what I posted.
This isn't directed at you, it's the case of anybody in every forum about anything!
LOL : Flame Warriors.
May have something to do with not wanting to be paid a visit by the BATF?
Be that as it may, there has always been considerable ethanol production going on in some rural areas, but for different purposes than to fuel vehicles!
;-)
I'm interested in the various feedstock crops. How they will scale, agronomic issues and EROEI. What are the uses and energy credit for the byproducts.
Few people grow rapeseed. It would be Canola (Canadian Oil Seed). Rapeseed with the toxic glucosides bred out. Rapeseed used alot of N fertilizer, how does this affect its' EROEI? Canola is also prone to scerotinia rust, fungicides often have to be used for its' control. How does this affect the economics?
What I would like to see, is a simple end-to-end do it yourself explanation. It doesn't have to be massively detailed; just something like "5 acres of this crop, a greenhouse to produce sugarcane, and a still to make alcohol, Mix and store thus. Yield is roughly Z gallons annually." Kind of like a guide for an individual who may have 5-10 acres of land, and is willing to produce his or her own fuel.
I have a little under 7 acres of woodland, and foresee myself eventually having to convert some of that to biofuel production, as I will not live in the city under any circumstances, and when the fuel situation gets really bad, there will be no gas to run a vehicle and no mass transit in my area, although I am sure I will still need to visit a grocery store on occasion. So what do I do then, move into a little cubicle in the city? I'd sooner die!
A little section on what a rural individual can do, end-to-end to produce his own renewable fuel would be very very helpful.