On 12/7/2006 Michael Bailes wrote:

"A US Department of Energy report released on Friday 7 July said that biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol could displace 30% of the fuel consumed in US transportation by 2030."

I am sure there would be a lot of N Queensland cane farmers<http://forums.hypography.com/#>happy to grow biofuels.  We (& the Poms) already produce a lot of rum in Bundaberg and there is a lot of bagess left unused. Some are marketing it as garden mulch.



Michael Bailes answered:

Maybe you're right
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060710/full/060710-4.html
What if we used the woodchips we are sending to Japan?
How does Brazil manage?


Morris Gray responded:

Thanks for your input Toby. Your calculation is very interesting and probably a bit more considered than any of the powers to be have done.

Here is a web site that gives yields of ethanol and biodiesel per acre from selected crops.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/7/12145/81957

I calculated that using corn, which the Americans have much of:) the figures are thus: On the daily figure I gave before of their usage of 320,500,000 gallons of gasoline per day would make their yearly usage 116,982,500,000 gallons per year. Assuming that 10% of this was replaced with ethanol made with corn, that would be 11,698,250,000gal divided by 354 per acre would make it 33,045,903 acres needed.

Like the Victory Gardens of WWII every household could have their own little patch of corn.

Get you a copper kettle,
Get you a copper coil
Cover with new made corn mash,
and never more you'll toil....

You'll just lay there by the juniper,
While the moon is shining bright
Watch them jugs a fillin' in the pale moonlight....



Toby Fiander replied:

Yes!

I vaguely remember reading somewhere quite recently that someone was working on crops whose straw degraded to alcohol as soon as it was dead.  It was a research project still and I thought it was an Australian idea.  I have been looking at academic profiles in recent times, but I do not remember where it was.

The rumen bacteria are a good start, but you need a digestor and then a fermenter to go on that journey, whereas single vessel would be required in theory for something that degraded to alcohol as soon as it was dead.

What price a yeast that (a) breaks down the cellulose, and (b) ferments it to alcohol?  After you distill off the alcohol (or a goodly part of it), cool the mash and start the yeasts going again . . . and again . . . and again . . .

Yeah... like that... one vessel.

Of course, if cattle were to eat the degrading straw, that might have some interesting side effects.



Morris Gray noted:

If I remember right from my sourdough bread making days one of the major bye-bye products of fermentation is carbon dioxide. Has anyone calculated how much CO2 per litre/gal is generated?

The multitude of cooperative little beasties have yet to be exploited, yet I can't get it out of my mind you can't get something for nothing.

While few people would argue that perpetual motion machines are possible they happily continue to believe that we can get more out of nature than we put in. Unfortunately the vast number of parameters that have to be considered are far beyond the mental age 15 that most publications aim at.

For example, a recent survey found that most of those surveyed refused to believe that nuclear reactors in power plants did nothing but boil water for the steam engines that ran the generators. When the researchers (falsely) admitted that nuclear reactors generated electricity directly they were satisfied.

So while the average citizen is considered a 15 year old male both for science understanding and movie revenue we have no hope other than knowing......we're all going to die!


Morris Gray retorted:

On 13 Jul 2006 at 20:48, Toby Fiander wrote:

> Probably, but unless I have missed the point here, this carbon is
> taken by plants from the atmosphere.

When God designed the conservation of carbon dioxide I doubt seriously that he contemplated that anyone of his creatures would plant and ferment 33 million acres of another one of his creatures to create the Sodom and Gomorrahish mind altering drug alcohol, either to pour down his 'cake hole' or into the fundamental orifice of an SUV

> I have always thought it was highly desirable to get something for
> nothing. For example, I bought lotto tickets again this week. If I
> win, you are not going to know, no one is.

I wouldn't tell anyone either if I won. Unfortunately your belief that you could win is falling in with the belief in the Law of Infinitesimals vs. Unbelievable Rewards. This Law states even though one knows the chances of winning are impossible the rewards, in comparison to the investment, should one win (impossible though it be) , would offset the investment. Of couse this is true, were it true.

> But, as I understand it - and I may not - photosynthetic processes are
> not particularly efficient collectors of solar energy, but there is
> no real competition.

Photosynthetic processes can hardly be considered inefficient considering they are responsible for all life on earth.

While you, as man, can revel in your intelligent efficiency of killing that life, and as rotting vegetation and blood and bone litter the country side, you can start counting your ill-gotten gains of winning an impossible game of chance fostered on your inmature mind of an abstract value system called money.

Money which you seldom see these days, have no idea how to describe it, and yet should it be plucked out of your life, would cause great distress to your materialistic world view.

I admire your tenacity at clinging to lost causes when you know....
we're all going to die!


Alan Emmerson added:

Some one remind me please. Don't the organisms responsible for fermentation actually grow/reproduce/generally-become-more-of in consequence of their activity?

This may be ok with a ginger beer plant but what do you do with the mass of organism you finish up with after producing gigalitres of alcohol..

and:

When a hydrocarbon is oxidised, burned as a fuel say, the products are heat, water and CO₂.

eg 2C₈H₁₈ +25O₂ = 16CO₂ +18H₂O +4million? BTU

ie 0.23kg petrol + 560 litres oxygen = 360litres CO₂ + 400 litres water vapour

It is fashionable to worry about the CO2 entering the atmosphere, but what about the water?

What about the nearly irreversible loss of atmospheric oxygen that becomes bound to carbon and hydrogen? No matter what the process, every kg of CO₂ that is produced ties up 500litres of oxygen and every two litres of water vapour consumes a litre of oxygen in its creation.

Is no one worried about that?


Peter Macinnis commented:

This is a negative comment, for reasons that are spelled out. Nonetheless, I believe the mooted lines of enquiry are well worth pursuing.

Michael Bailes wrote:

Cellulose can also be used for biomass

Not yet, Michael, though people are working on it.  See what I posted earlier.

You may not be aware that there is a certain style of "science communication" that is no more than PR flackery, and the article you cite is of this sort.  Truth is invariably a casualty, as some Great Person's wisdom in seeing a bright future is lauded in a very North Korean way.

We are told that people have made "major gains in reducing the cost of the enzymes needed to produce ethanol from cellulose" -- that is a standard ambit claim that really means "it is still ten times as expensive, but maybe we can get around that if we throw more money at it".

A "major gains" claim is about as valid as "shows promise as a possible cure for cancer".  I apologise for early-morning cynicism, but I get too many of these weasel pieces over my desk, most of them constructed by science-ignorant but wily journos from bumf fed to them by people with an axe to grind.

My grandfather used a hay-burner to get around.  It would be nice if we could return to a hay burner that did not, when in use, strew the streets with a by-product that is redolent of the aroma of that "news story".

The trees we send to Japan are not irrigated.

True, but the yield is reduced as a result.  If you want to maximise the biomass, you need to attack the limiting factors, one of which is water.  Of course, without care, phosphorus will soon become THE limiting factor, as it is in second-generation _Pinus radiata_ forests.  For some reason, nobody seems to think CO2 supplies will be a limiting factor :-)

Your comment about the woodchips makes me wonder if anything can be done with the lignin they contain, which is also a waste product from paper mills, or was, last time I looked -- I may be out of date there.


Peter Macinnis replied:

I did look at that one, and I just did so again to make sure.  There is not a single mention of cellulose in text of Danny Day's entire 54 pages.  The term shows up in a few places in the pictures and diagrams, but I have no regard for people who produce a fruit salad like that in a format where you can't rummage.

It looked rather more like idealistic polemic to me, all style and no substance.  I have no idea where it is intended to go, and my time is too precious to waste trawling through it for possible nuggets.

Recall that Thabo Mbeki learned "on the Web" that HIV did not cause AIDS, and used that as an excuse to deny AZT to pregnant women.  He had failed to recognise that you need a fully-functioning bs detector when you go to the Web for information.  It also says on the Web that global warming is a furphy created by scientists so they can get more grant money (the Crichton hypothesis) and that evolution is a fraud, but some of the crap is less blatant.

I hold in contempt those "science communications" which set out to make one particular viewpoint (usually a corporate one) look good -- like much of the stuff favoured by CSIRO management.  The pdf you cite may or may not be such a piece, but I also hold in contempt the confused-babble style of "science communication", and the pdf you cite is undoubtedly confused.  Perhaps it was better on the day, with somebody to take an audience through it, but in the absence of that support, it is just a waste of storage space.

Neither form actually communicates any science or anything about science.

The fact remains that cellulose is not, at present, able to be digested economically into material that can be converted to energy, and I suspect that using lignin is even further away, though I seem to recall learning many years ago about some slow-growing fungi (Basidiomycetes, possibly) which can digest lignin.  Yup: http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/may97.html

Also
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/60/8/2985
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf1984/kirk84a.pdf


which I found by going to http://scholar.google.com/ and setting the search string <digest lignin fungus OR fungi> (leave out the angle brackets).  This turned up 998 hits . . . none of them PR crap, one hopes.


Peter Macinnis replied:

Absolutely serious.  In my day, the students supported the brewery -- but he has it arranged so that the brewery supports him.

I put it down to my singing my children the song of Charlie Mopps (The Man Who Invented Beer) at bath-time.  They can't use GM yeasts, though, as no brewer wants the bad press that would come their way from the Great Unwashed.


Ray Stephens noted:

What price a yeast that (a) breaks down the cellulose, and (b) ferments it to alcohol? After you distill off the alcohol (or a goodly part of it), cool the mash and start the yeasts going again . . . and again . . . and again . . .

There must be a snag -- it all seems too easy.Quoting Peter Macinnis  --

G'day Peter and hello all.

I'd rather something was gentically engineered to reduce materials further than to burnable hydrocarbon and the carbon oxides which result.  Biofuels, after all, will only reduce carbon dioxide waste production (with a BIG maybe for that too, considering peripheral processes in cultivation, harvest, transport and processing) and simply provides some assurance that when the fossil fuels are gone we've got renewable substitutes for the old hazards.

*shrug* bit like sweeping the crud under the carpet IMO.

Anything biologically or potentially GE-able in the way of going all the way to graphite and hydrogen from raw hydrocarbon or carbohydrate matrial?

Probably not, but in a world full of High Hopes, one can dream the most irrational hopes, and if an ancient biology can make food out of sunshine, CO2 & water, then surely (If we really are as smart as we like to think we are) a bit of tinkering might make something equally as solar-power efficient to exhale hydrogen gas from domestic waste?

Biofuel is, so far, IMO merely simple economic desperation against the all too quick loss of its rich fossilised counterparts.

Hoping we can do better.