Biofuel Production to Cause Water Shortages? 413
WED Fan writes "Scientists meeting in Stockholm are reporting that increased food and biofuel production will place higher demand upon irrigation and water resources." From the article: "Demand for irrigation -- which absorbs about 74 percent of all water used by people against 18 percent for hydro-power and other industrial uses and just 8 percent for households -- was likely to surge by 2050. Many nations are also shifting to produce biofuels -- from sugarcane, corn or wood -- as a less polluting alternative to fossil fuels. Oil prices at $75 a barrel and worries about global warming are driving the shift."
Well, assuming that's true. (Score:2, Interesting)
We're doomed. I'm gonna go hide under the bed. My Y2K supplies are finally coming in handy. Call me when its over.
Re:Well, assuming that's true. (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html [unh.edu]
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Re:Well, assuming that's true. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now consider that most cities today are not terribly choked by vehicle emissions. There definately is a higher concentration of pollution in urban areas, of course, but a large part of this is from sulphur and nitrates. Biofuels contain no sulphur and produce fewer nitrates when burned, so net pollution would still decrease (unless you're expecting a substantial increase in fuel usage in urban areas).
=Smidge=
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Maybe it's more of a physical defect. And maybe those "3nl/\rg3 Yr P3n1s" spams are actually coming from her.
Waste (Score:3, Insightful)
Not an issue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well then, it's a good thing water is a renewable resource, isn't it?
The only thing in danger is CHEAP water, really. Desalination can ramp-up to whatever volume you want, and most countries are located near an effectively unlimited source from which to draw saline...
Re:Not an issue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Using energy from what? Oil? I doubt that you could irrigate biofuel crops with desalinated water, use the biofuel to power desalination, and wind up with an excess of energy.
Re:Not an issue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Using modern technology, that would mean nuclear, coal or (in some areas) passive power (hydro, solar, wind, etc). The latter option isn't going to work everywhere, but building a nuke plant or two should solve the water problem rather nicely. In places where tidal power is available, you also have an abundance of salt water, though that does raise issues regarding transporting the desalinated water, or selecting our biofule agricultural land to be near the ocean. Using coal would contribute to gobal warming, but even then we get the economic benefits from using biofuel over oil, since coal isn't in short supply or in the hands of unfriendly nations.
Using probably future technologies, fusion would work wonders. Fusion plants scale up better than they scale down, which is exactly what we'd want for a desalination facility. Orbital solar is another possibility along the same lines. Even without such technologies, a more modern fission reactor design would be an improvement over using existing nuclear plants - something like an integeral fast reactor or a pebble bed reactor for instance.
Re:Not an issue... (Score:4, Insightful)
But this thread is about getting net energy out of biofuels. If you need to use fission to make water for fuel, then just use the energy directly. Battery technology is improving all the time. An intermediate liquid fuel may be required in some cases, but the direct use of electric power should take care of most urban requirements.
I don't think fusion is going to save us this time. It has been a long way off for a long time.
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My car is a bit too small for a fission plant, let alone the lake of water also needed.
What do you drive, again?
But still nowhere near the density and flexibility of liquid fuels, which is the main reason we don't already have electric cars.
Nobody burns biofuels for "most urban requirements". They'r
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Re:Not an issue... (Score:4, Insightful)
Conversely, with battery power, all of the energy has to come from some man made power generator. Solar panels could store the same energy per square meter of land used as biofuel crops, but then you're up against manufacturing costs, whereas plants are essentially self-assembling.
Plus, we'd use desalination plants and irrigation for a hell of a lot more than just biofuel production. After all, fresh water is a valuable resource regardless, and increasing our production capability can't hurt.
Perhaps, but it is easier to accept the idea of something like a nuclear economy if we work from the assumption that we're going to upgrade to fusion later. To draw an analogy, it's somewhat like renting while saving up for a home (this assumes there are no mortgages available, or that housing prices need to come down first). Fusion may be a long way off, but if we keep developing the technology, we'll eventually break even on it.
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I'm sorry, but there's no logical reason to believe that because the energy requirements of desalination for
Re:Not an issue... (Score:4, Insightful)
This statement doesn't make sense.
I said it elsewhere in the thread.
Energy on earth comes from one of four sources. Period.
A) "Fresh" Solar
B) "Stored" Solar
C) Nuclear
D) Lunar (Tidal)
That's it. If you're using energy on this rock, you're using one of those 4 sources. Everything else is illusion.
As far as I'm concerned, BioFuel, like Hydrogen, is a portion of the fuel cycle that "stores" energy much better than electrochemical batteries. BioFuel, like Hydrogen, is a mobile form of power storage. Nothing else.
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What about geothermal or hydroelectric power?
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Re:Not an issue... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not an issue... (Score:4, Funny)
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B) Riiight.
c) "...with objects that loop around our globe, and with others anchored on its surface, the astronomers have found other
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Who says? You're the first one who's brought the net-energy question up. Let me rephrase the problem so you might get it: biofuels are _not_ an energy source, they are an energy conversion. All of the recent studies show that ethanol production (one biofuel, but not the only one. This argument should be approximately right for biodiesel from plant oils.) produces more energy from burning the ethanol than it takes to (1) grow and harvest the
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We're working on solar desalinization using a passive lens system in order to irrigate crop fields. I imagine that we could grow biofuel crops, we're currently looking at citrus orchards.
Energy != Oil. Furthermore, Energy doesn't "come from" biofuel, either.
On this planet, energy is either a) stored solar, b) fresh solar, c) nuclear, or d) lunar (tidal). That's it. Everything else is a clever trick. Biofuel is about capturing solar energy; and that water you "feed" the biofuel has to c
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Consider: Desalination could be primarily powered by solar (ie: direct heating of the water by the infrared portion of the spectrum, while solar panels collect the visible spectra), with additional power being generated by tides, wind, etc. If a LOT of fresh water is needed, you can have the electrical generators as a grid-share system (plug 'em into the wall), so that production can be ramped up as needed, and excess during low-demand times can be sold back to the grid.
Meanwhile,
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It works in only one part of the world because Kuwait's energy reserves are so great that Kuwait is unique in using desalinated water for agriculture [wikipedia.org]
In other words they do it with oil.
Denmark is unique (Score:2)
Wind WILL be part of the solution, but Denmark cannot
Re:Not an issue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo!
There are so many ways to use tidal energy for desalination that our company doesn't know which "branch" to take beyond the feasibility study stage. We're not a big company, more of small tech house, and our lab floor is littered with scale model prototypes for tidal desalinization. 10 years ago, none of these things made economic sense. Now, the developing Arab nations most in need of desalinization cannot afford to use their oil domestically (more $$ in selling it). They take their oil money and invest it into technologies like ours; and we'll sell it world wide.
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Regarding the Law of Thermodynamics, what implications does tidal power have for the Earth on a grand scale? Energy is neither created nor destroyed, if we keep tapping energy out of the tidal movements, what would this do to the Earths orbit or spin over the course of thousands of years? (Assuming we kept using this energy source, of course...)
I started thinking of this while pondering the future o
Re:Not an issue... (Score:4, Funny)
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With a power source as big as the sun and 2/3 of the planet covered with sea water, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. Not hindered by any practical knowledge about this, I'd say that a few cans of black paint (to absorb solar energy) and a few huge sheets of plastic to catch condensation water would go a long way.
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Irrigation should use recycled water.. and they can probably treat and use the solids as fertiliser too (current fertilisers are made from oil too, right?). Save desal for potable water, neatly avoiding the whole cringe factor issue of drinking recycled water. Given that irrigation is 74% of use, then it should be a while befo
Re:Not an issue... (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear is safe. You're touting Chernobyl as an example of how unsafe nuclear power is? Get real. Chernobyl is an example of stuidity of mankind in its most extreme. Your argument makes as much sense as saying dynamite (the basis of most modern techonological infrastructure) should be banned because some idiot terrorist strapped it to himself and blew some people up. Simple fact is, dynamite is one of the safest explosives we have. And yes, idiots do blow themselves up with it. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
Fact, Chernobyl would have never been allowed to be built in the US (even in the 50s, or any other country in the world) as it failed to meet the most basic of safety standards. Fact, Russia suffers from penis envy (compared to te US) and considers its people to be disposible; thusly they knowingly created a very, very dangerous reactor. Fact, Russia has a long history of ignoring safety at the expense of their population (comparisons to civil terrorism would not be unwarrented). Fact, it had little to no containment shielding to begin with. Fact, what failsafes they had in place had been disabled. Fact, with a skeleton crew, making them unable to react to any emergency, they decided to operate their reactor outside known safe parameters to observe what happens. Guess what, they acted like terrorists strapping dynamite to themselves and the world is shocked. Gasp! Chernobyl is an condemnation of Russia, Russian politics, and Russia's complete disreguard for humanity; however, it is not a statement about nuclear power.
In the final analysis, only an absolute idiot would use Chernobyl as a posterboy for how unsafe nuclear power is. Why do I sound so harsh? Simple, because anyone that attempts to use Chernobyl for anti-nuclear reasons obviously doesn't know anything about the details and are running scared. If you insist on attempting to make an anti-nuclear, fear mongering position, please build a case based on facts rather than ignorance and stupidity. If you're using Chernobyl, obviously you have no facts and come off sounding like an absolute, raving, tree-hugging, loon. At best, you're simply ignorant, parroting fear.
Simple fact is, nuclear power, based on current designs, is very, very safe. Simple fact is, newer, modern nuclear designs are safer yet. One can certainly argue the economic merits and the finite duration nuclear power is an option. Nonetheless, nuclear is one of the safest sources of power on earth. Anyone with the slightest inkling of knowledge of the subject matter is forced to conclude, nuclear is safe. Period.
safe nuclear designs (Score:4, Informative)
Simple fact is, nuclear power, based on current designs, is very, very safe. Simple fact is, newer, modern nuclear designs are safer yet. One can certainly argue the economic merits and the finite duration nuclear power is an option. Nonetheless, nuclear is one of the safest sources of power on earth. Anyone with the slightest inkling of knowledge of the subject matter is forced to conclude, nuclear is safe. Period.
Yes, the design of nuclear power plants are such better, safer, today than they were before. However there's still the problem of where to store the wastes for the period of tyme needed to become harmless. In the US the only place being looked at for this is Yucca Mountain in Utah. Two problems come to mind here, one is that it is within ancient Shoshone lands and the Shoshone have been fighting to prevent nuclear from beeing stored there. A second problem, which as far more reaching ramifications is that Yucca Mountain is a siesmically active region with a number of earthquake faultlines and a volcano in the area. In the 1970s a government building at Yucca was damaged in an earthquake, with another one in 2002, Quake reported near Yucca Mountain [cnn.com]. And Bush wants to store nuclear waste there?
At one tyme I was against nuclear power but with today's designs if a way to safety store long term the wastes, and they were operated in a true freemarket then I would support them. However I doubt anyone would want one if they had to operate it in a freemarket, there are laws that protect the nuclear industry from lawsuits and the industry gets subsidies.
FalconRe: (Score:3, Informative)
If all Iran wanted was nuclear power, A, B, and C, would not even be on the table for discussion. And frankly, the would wouldn't care nearly as much.
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Perhaps this is more about steering UN and IMF project money towards localized water purification solutions rather than big infrastructure projects like damns, etc.
So make biofuel from kelp, no freshwater needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Seawater is pretty cheap. Why not use it directly instead of using freshwater biomass and then needing a supply of freshwater for it?
Make biofuel from kelp biomass and no freshwater irrigation is needed. Grow it in situ or pump the seawater into a shoreline kelp farm, and harvest the biomass.
Jeez, do I have to think of everything for those environmentalists?
Priority Management (Score:5, Insightful)
Good grief! The only solution that the shotgun approach gives is for all humans to go live in caves--with the caveat that 5 billion or so of us dissappear (remember that farming and ranching contribute to global warming as well).
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/w [washingtonpost.com]
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Indeed, I can't see how we can please all the environmentalists when it comes to energy production:
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Until you do the maths and realise that they are talking about 2500 km^2 (50kmx50km). And they did not mention 'efficency' anywhere - can 50% be achieved? Does that make it >5000km^2?. When expressed like that, you realize that solar power will neve
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I don't think any one technology can "solve" the energy needs of a country, but if everyone covered their roof with photovoltaic cells then it would significantly reduce the total amount of energy needed to be produced by powerstations. This is, of course, assuming you can produce the photovoltaic cells efficiently enough.
At the moment, photovoltaic cells are reasonably inefficient. But the thought occurs that you could layer photovoltaic
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Well, many of the more fundamental environmentalists see humankind as a a plague that is scrourging an otherwise perfect earth (mother nature). It is a modern version of the old Gnosis, where the whole creation was evil, and only the Sophia was perfect.
First nuke (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear power is not yet at a stage where it is an answer if your major goal is to generate electricity. Up till now we've seen it mainly as a spin off of a weapons program, as a way to run military vessels without frequent refueling, as an energy source for an island nation worried about a naval blockade and as a way to power systems in spacecraft that cannot use solar panels (eg. kosmos series of soviet spy satellites that spent portions of their orbit in the uppe
Wrong! (Score:4, Insightful)
And you are right, we will all end up in caves, the few that survive, if we don't all take this serious and START DOING OUR BIT. No of course I don't believe the bit about caves, but one way or the other, we are all going to have to face up to this problem. Not just the government or 'these environmentalists'; it is some thing we all must take part in, both by saving resources in our own households, but also by putting pressure on our governments, businesses and farmers.
And that, I think is the message from 'these environmentalists'.
Living on starvation (Score:4, Insightful)
If there was no biofuel, the fuel consumers would be forced to change their lifestyles. The way things are, we won't, and the starvation toll is going to rise accordingly. Currently, it stands at 27000 - or 8 times 9/11 as I like to call it - per day. (Source: WHO)
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The current price hike has nothing to do with capacity and everything to do with fear. Even OPEC doesn't understand why prices are so high (despite their gain from them) and fears
Re:Living on starvation (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the long term outlook is big shortfalls, it's called "peak oil" and the only debate amongst credible scientists is when it occurs, not if. I'll give you a hint, the most optimistic estimates are for around 2035, with most realistic estimates coming in at about 2010. Unless you consider 20 years to be long term (I wouldn't) then it's not right to say the long term outlook is of a surplus.
That's correct, but then, it's always been correct. The worst we've ever had is a plateau of production, but that's actually all we need to create price rises because demand constantly accelerates. In fact oil production can still rise year on year yet there can still be shortages, if demand rises faster.
Increasing capacity? Where did you get that idea from? The tar sands and oil shales are largely uneconomic to extract - the costs being bandied about by Shell are simply wild guesses that have a history of being totally wrong. So that seems to largely rule Canada out, unless they develop some radical new techniques. Gulf of Mexico was largely wiped out by Katrina so you'd expect increasing capacity there, but it's simply catching up to what it once was. Meanwhile Mexican production itself is slacking off as Cantarell continues its downwards slide.
Well, I disagree. I say maybe $10 per barrel of the current cost is speculation. The rest is supply/demand in action. OPEC know full well what is going on, but they are known for lying out of their backsides about anything to do with hard statistics - they still claim they have has much oil in the ground as they did in the 70s. 30 years of constant production and their claimed reserves have never even moved! Internal Kuwaiti reports indicate that the true figures are far, far worse than the published figures.
The main problem is that the world crude supply is starting to shift towards heavy sour (the undesirable, hard to refine stuff) away from the easy to refine light sweet. This tends to show up in newspaper reporting etc as a "refinery bottleneck" when in fact it's to do with the changing composition of the original supply as we exhaust the easy to obtain oil. The other problem is very rapidly increasing demand from Asia, and the Asian countries are routinely now locking in supplies from new fields like Yadavaran, effectively taking that oil off the world spot markets. Combine that with increasing internal demand in places like Saudi Arabia and you have a recipe for more demand and less supply - therefore higher prices. Which is what we're seeing.
Re:Living on starvation (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. [radford.edu] We are not running out of oil. People have been saying that for decades. What we are running out of is cheap oil that is relatively easy and inexpensive to extract. That's been the case for years. As technology improves we are able to extract oil from places we previously thought impossible or to expensive to be feasible. As the price of oil increases thereby increasing oil companies profits they are able to further invest into research and development to come up with new and improved ways to get to the oil reserves we know about but have previously been unable to tap. In addition, as the price increases it becomes possible to tap previous reserves that have not been heavily tapped because the return on investment wasn't there with prices being low. The Canadian Oil Sands [yahoo.com] are a great example.
The bottom line is that we are not running out of oil and will not run out of oil anytime soon. What we are running out of is the cheap and inexpensive oil that we are used to. However as technology advances and/or prices increase we will be increasingly be able to tap into reserves that were previously impossible or simply cost prohibitive to tap.
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Alright, I'll give you that, but it's just playing with semantics. If it is uneconomic to work a field, then that may as well be called a 'shortage'. You are right to consider the price of oil to be the most important thing and that this can rise even as we open new, previously uneconomic fields.
The main problem with the idea that technology increases the amount of oil we can recover is that it doesn't seem to be true. Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technology, the main innovation in the past 30 years, allow
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However, the price of crude oil is rapidly approaching the point where it becomes an elastic (demand sensitive to price) commodity--any higher and the demand will start to fall, which means if OPEC overprices oil they could end up holding the bag on too muc overpriced oil.
Also, at current prices there is huge incenti
yes (Score:5, Interesting)
etc., etc., etc...
finding ANYTHING wrong with an energy source is not a valid point. weighing the trade offs of one energy source's negatives against another's IS a valid point
and in a world where chinese demand fuels increased petrol prices, and in a world where petrol dollars fund islamic fundamentalist militants, and in a world where petrol fueled global warming creates hurricane katrinas, then whatever downside to biofuels you find to throw at me doesn't even begin to tip the scales. because it's not about choosing some magic energy source that has no downsides. it's about picking the energy source with least downsides that we can adequately foresee
i don't blame post-world war ii planners and politicians for making us so dependent on the internal combustion engine and the diesel engine for so much of what we need in our lives today. they didn't, and couldn't, foresee the problems in today's world
but if we're still largely dependent on petrol we dig from the ground in 50 years, then yes, i would blame today's politicians and planners. for whatever doom we would then be neck deep in, we are only knee deep in now. and any fool can see continuing to be so dependent on petrol is so dunderheaded wrong for so many reasons: security, environment, economics, etc
i say revive nuclear, and bow low before the mighty country of brazil for showing the rest of the world the way to a more secure, less polluted, and cheaper world of biofuels
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At least we still have time to plan ahead. We do have at least 20 years of oil remaining, and we are able to engineer one or more better fuel cycles. I think hot places like Australia and Africa will wind up with a mostly inorganic fuel cycle based around hydrogen and methane, while temperate areas will go for agriculture and biofuel.
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Brazil just happens to have a special ecosystem, which makes this so easily possible for them. Not only do they have sugar cane, but also gigantic rivers they draw much of their power from. Perhaps if we dam up Niagra falls, and The Grand Canyon, we could use a lot less coal and oil too.
You might as well say we should bow before Icela
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Perhaps if we dam up Niagra falls, and The Grand Canyon, we could use a lot less coal and oil too.
Er... it has already been done decades ago.
Re:yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Biofuels have at least two really significant challenges that I know of:
1) It takes a lot of cropland to produce fuel. While some of that may be established cropland, lots of it is created by destruction of existing habitats.
2) It encourages industrial-scale farming, with all the concomitant problems, including the need for large volumes of water, large quantities of toxic biocides and fertilisers that cost a lot of energy to produce and bugger up the local environment, the tendency to monoculture with all its attendant risks (remember the Irish potato famine, anyone?), etc etc.
I know that technology is a useful tool to help us solve the problems we face, but we continually seem to forget that humanity has seen dozens of societal collapses through environmental strain which technology has as often exacerbated as it has prevented.
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Ordinarily I'd agree but I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that there is only enough raw material for that for another 30 odd years anyway.
Here's a wild idea, why not us in the West stop being so damned selfish and start to make real cutbacks in our obscene energy usage to buy our kids extra time to solve the problems we've made for them?
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Ordinarily I'd agree but I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that there is only enough raw material for that for another 30 odd years anyway.
Only if this foolish resistance to breeder reactors continues. Most so-called nuclear waste still has over 90% of it's energy content. Run it through a fast breeder and you wind up with additional fuel (which is unfortunately easy to refine into bomb fuel) and a smaller amount of more intensely radioactive waste. Yes, that smaller amount of waste is hotter but it
Re:He's right you know.. (Score:2)
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Basically we have discovered and used up an energy source which was finite, and it's downhill from there. It's called the earth, and it's nearing or past breaking point, even just from the point of view of global warming we really should stop
There's only one way out of this (Score:2, Funny)
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Recycling (Score:3, Interesting)
(plus dependent on the location, it could have an added benefit of recharging local aquifers)
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Re:Recycling (Score:4, Interesting)
Thermal depolymerisation? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a process, which apparently nobody appears to know or care anything about, that will convert pretty much anything containing long-chain hydrocarbons into, roughly, crude oil, natural gas, potable water, and assorted minerals. Check out thermal depolymerisation [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia. There's a pilot plant in the US that currently runs on turkey guts --- it's producing oil at about 400 barrels a day, at about break-even prices.
The real bonus? It's an energy-positive system. That is, the process itself produces all the energy it needs to run itself, plus a bit.
The system needs to be specialised for a particular input material; you can't (currently) build a plant that can take all feedstocks. That said, it ought to be entirely possible to build a giant TPD plant that takes raw sewage as its input feedstock. If you do this, and plug it into the sewage output from, say, New York, then you should be able to have it produce drinking water and biodiesel more or less for free (minus fixed running costs). After all, the feedstock's not costing you anything --- you're just throwing it away...
Even if it turns out that sewage contains too much water for the system to be power itself, it'd most likely still be worth doing simply as a sewage treatment system. TPD fully sterilises the input feedstock; it can break down prions and dioxins, remove heavy metals, and so in, and what's more, can do it in bulk. The fact that the output is saleable can be treated as a bonus.
I just seem to be amazed at how little interest there is in this...
Re:Thermal depolymerisation? (Score:5, Informative)
I think a lot of the reason it hasn't caught on is cited in your Wiki link. Its a classic case of NIMBY.
Its a town in the middle of a big farming state, its residents should be used to the smell of animal processing. All of a sudden theres sometihng new, and almost too good to be true, and they start smelling 'new' smells and begin pointing fingers.
The biggest hurdle to any new energy source is public acceptance. This is getting even harder in the States with a public that is rejecting science and accepting of short-term politically driven decisions.
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Its a town in the middle of a big farming state, its residents should be used to the smell of animal processing. All of a sudden theres sometihng new, and almost too good to be true, and they start smelling 'new' smells and begin pointing fingers.
I do, however, feel that building the plant in the city centre was possibly not a sensible move.
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We need tattoos .... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think humanity should have little bio-hazard symbols tattooed on our collective foreheads!
All kidding aside, though our problems have several parts:
We are moving slowly into developing technologies that sip, rather then guzzle energy. Rising energy prices help drive an economic decision in this direction. The addition of microcontrollers and wily engineering can help achieve this goal.
However I think that more distributed production of local needs is an important part of a less energy strategy. Economies of scale help a lot in some areas, but may be harmful in other ways. The large electrical power plant is a one off deal as an example.
Suppose we decided to use a distributed approach. Here, some oil crop like canola is used as the primary solar capture. Treating the seeds gives an oil that can be used for a foodstuff, and a biodiesel feedstock. The protein cake left over can be used as food either for humans or livestock or both.
The biodiesel is used to run a small engine that generates power fed into an electrical grid and process heat for cottage industry and home heating.
Plant and animal wastes are composted and aged to eliminate pathogens, then used to support the oilseed crop. I think you get the systems idea...and some kind soul's left entries in the wikipedia.
Consider, also, that we still used mass production techniques to make the tools we need. We just spread the results out more!
We have to figure out how to make a no-waste society work. That means thinking up cheap friendly ways to repurpose or reclaim the stuff we want after its' end of life. We have started to do this already, but it will take ingenuity to make it work. RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) is a good start. Is their any way we can use biological systems to help do the work for us?
Understanding how to arrange biological systems to be effective partners would help. No sense trying to make a lawn in a desert, except as a demonstration of bad taste and poor judgement. Understanding the soil foodweb is a start. Developing understanding and engineering of micro climates and micro ecologies might make a lot of tough problems less so.
False pride in humanities accomplishments is a major problem. Just because we can build something doesn't mean it is the "right thing". On the other hand, denegrating our abilities doesn't help either. There is a balance point, it is just hard to find. ... nervous.
Further, having society run by warring experts makes me
Finally, the way we account for things, systems and resources is suspect. If you wish to make a difference, then change the tax law for corporations. Choosing to reward stewardship rather then rapine and pillage means that the financial systems will put their money for the best value proposition. Think Warren Buffet....
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In some areas this is true, but unfortunately in others exactly the opposite is true. For example, whilest the new generation of CPUs is way more energy efficient than the last generation, we're still using way more energy than the 286/386 era processors. Sure, we get a lot more processing power from that, but we're burning all that extra power on shiny GUIs, etc - i.e. the net energy used to do a particular *job* has in
Perpetual motion eco-friendly system (Score:2)
This just in (Score:2)
Some people/groups won't be happy until humans are gone and use nothing at all...
biofuel != no CO2 (Score:2)
Oil prices at $75 a barrel and worries about global warming are driving the shift.
Aargh! Where do people get the idea that any alternative to petroleum will help reduce global warming?
Any process that generates energy by burning a hydrocarbon procudes CO2. That most certainly includes biofuels.
(In other news, unless you can find a place to mine hydrogen fuel cells, "hydrogen-powered cars" will also not necessarily reduce total CO2 emissions. Those fuel cells have to be charged up somehow.)
Re:biofuel != no CO2 (Score:4, Informative)
biofuel != no CO2
True but it is also true that biofuel != NET increase CO2.
A biofueled economy would put CO2 in the atmosphere at the consumer end of the cycle but it takes it out of the atmosphere at the production end of the cycle. Over time, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will not increase due to biofuels.
Re:biofuel != no CO2 (Score:4, Informative)
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I see you are missing a very important piece of information, which is misleading your entire judgement. I'll explain.
Petroleum is a fossil fuel (and coal, for that matter). When fossil fuels are uses the carbon which was stored and trapped beneath the soil is again being released into the a
Nitpick (Score:3, Insightful)
Demand for irrigation -- which absorbs about 74 percent of all water used by people against 18 percent for hydro-power and other industrial uses and just 8 percent for households -- was likely to surge by 2050.
Surely hydro-power doesn't "absorb" any water at all? Surely water can be used both for hydro-power and then irrigation?
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Dams contribute to evaporation of fresh water before it is used.
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The Amazon's demise? (Score:3, Insightful)
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This is a problem... (Score:5, Informative)
Your figures (Score:4, Informative)
cooling the fractional distillation towers and this is entirely recirculated. Most of the mashing water is also recovered in holding ponds. So your figure is nothing more than a little interesting not a indication of a problem as you suggest.
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Grow corn, soybeans, canola, rapeseed, sunflowers, even - this is Kansas, after all! Press the seeds for oil. What is left is seedcake. Mix with
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My wife and I decided to try out collecting roof runoff from our house in Phoenix, Arizona - we purchased a small storage "tank" (about 40 gallons) for this purpose, which was designed to collect runoff from the downspout, and hook up a hose to irrigate a garden. We figured we could use it for this purpose. We quickly found a problem with this method.
The biggest problem was mosquito production. While the unit we used ha
What Am I Missing Here? (Score:2)
So what am I missing? To me this seems to have ahuge advantage over petroleum, because the carbon dioxide from biofuels was in the atmosphere only a year or so ago, as opposed to millions of years ago as with conventional oil.
Plants consume water from two places; the ground an
Salt water algae? (Score:2)
What ever happened to algae that can be grown in salt water? Or does controlling the salt concentration require similar levels of water?
Go nukes! (Score:3, Interesting)
Nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar... (Score:3, Interesting)
We need to go electric as much as possible. Build more nuclear power plants. Wind power is also a good idea. Upgrade our hydroelectric dams with the most modern and efficient technology (building more has it's own consequences).
Then move to a hydrogen economy with fuel cell vehicles, use battery-powered cars for city use, and build a first-rate, modern, automated system of moderate-speed (~100 mph) electrified passenger and freight railroads. I'm talking about routing and switching being done by computer and having either unmanned or minimally-manned freight trains that are constantly tracked by satellite. Also, encourage businesses to locate in towns rather than on the highway strips and encourage the growth of medium-sized (~100,000 people) towns outside the major urban areas.
Our moving to this new economy will cost money, but it will also create jobs; and the US economy isn't doing great right now. With appropriate government stimulus, this project could be a New Deal for the 21st century.
-b.
Civilizations have collapsed from water shortages (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a real issue. Historically, water shortages have brought down several civilizations, usually those with failed irrigation cultures.
It could have been worse. A few years ago, there was much talk of "privatizing" the world's water supply. Enron entered the water-trading business. (Their web site for water trading was Water2Water.com [archive.org].) Fortunately, this didn't catch on, except in Australia, which does have water trading. [watermove.com.au]
Childish nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
To reduce the demand for irrigation requires a whole lot of technologies, some cheap and some not, but the situation is far from hopeless. This is not about environmentalists, it's about politicians finding the political will to do something concerted and practical. In the US, bioethanol is largely a porkbarrel project. In Europe and Brazil, it's about energy cost and so more practical. Growing the wrong crops in the wrong places and spending a fortune on irrigation is stupid. Moving the US economy to dry States and then irrigating golf courses is stupid. And your post is stupid.
On the other hand, working out a plan to find the best places to grow biofuels and then, say, providing tax breaks to make it happen might be a sensible option. What is clear is that politicians need to be talking to scientists and economists on the whole energy and water issue, not to lobbyists.
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I could name a hundred other issues with exactly the same solution.
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Actually, I've been thinking it might be sane to use ocean algae for biofuel production?
Some days ago there was a program on Discovery Channel which was discussing this exact thing. They dumped a lot of iron (salt) to a sea bed where there was no plantation at all. And after some months that area was 'blooming' with all the sea plantations and increased algae, more than they expected. The thing is, majority of the sea is barren because of lack of iron.
So I am quite convinced that work is going on in t
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