Comments Dragutin Dimitrijevic has made

Remember the 'Apollo' moon program?

That was essentially a vanity project for the purposes of increasing national prestige and to refine our ICBM technology. It's a pity that the same sense of urgency that we applied to landing a man on the moon is not being applied to cellulosic ethanol technology and self-sufficency in transportation fuel.

You know what would be cheap and relatively easy? Start planting biomass for cellulosic ethanol production now.

I live in Clark County, Nevada. In the center of the state there is virtually nothing but uninhabited desert wasteland, much of it under the control of the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management. It's government land in other words. Uncle Sam could provide a grant to one of the agriculture or chemistry or biology departments at a university in the southwest by next week. Start planting sagebrush (genus Salvia) or something similar. That genus thrives with very little water, fertilizer or human attention. It coppices well, comparable to willow which grows in wetter environments in the east and in Europe. Willow has been coppiced and pollarded for wood and fuel for centuries. Sagebrush could be harvested for biomass using the same techniques. The desert interiors of states like Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas are short of water and the soil and climate are poor for raising food crops. Those areas have supported very little food agriculture throughout the history of the United States. A large scale planting of biomass for ethanol production in those areas would not impose on traditonal farmland.

Pick a ten mile by ten mile area, i.e. 100 square miles, and plant it intensively with sagebrush or some other suitable native species. While all the arguing and dithering and floundering around by committees and study groups is going on we could at least be establishing a biomass plantation. Many more than one would even be better. The plants and plantations could be growing and maturing now while all the tortured decisions are being made. Then they're available for steady harvest in three years or five years or ten years when someone at government level decides to make a full commitment. If for some reason a full commitment is never made, the biomass plantations don't hurt a thing. In fact they improve the desert environment aesthetically and through increasing the water absorption capacity of the land.On Obama energy adviser Jason Grumet talks climate, coal, and transportation policy posted 1 year, 6 months ago 11 Responses

The process may depend on the location

The CE technology has already been proved workable but it seems to be a matter of deciding which specific process to pursue as the most efficient. That will probably depend upon the  location of the facility and feedstock considerations (availability, local agricultural impact, unique ability to grow on marginal land, etc.). The technique best suited to a particular facility will likely be decided by geographical location and the optimum feedstock for that area.

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Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

24 January 2008

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

....May Wu, an environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, says Coskata's ethanol produces 84 percent less greenhouse gas than fossil fuel even after accounting for the energy needed to produce and transport the feedstock. It also generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it. Corn ethanol typically generates 1.3 times more energy than is used producing it.

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New Method Rapidly Produces Low-Cost Biofuels from Wood, Grass

09 Apr 2008

George Huber of the University of Massachusetts Amherst....is making biofuels from cellulose, the non-edible portion of plant biomass and a major component of grasses and wood. At $10 to $30 per barrel of oil energy equivalent, cellulosic biomass is significantly cheaper than crude oil.

The U.S. could potentially produce 1.3 billion dry tons of cellulosic biomass per year, which has the energy content of four billion barrels of crude oil. That's more than half of the seven billion barrels of crude oil consumed in our country each year. What's more, biomass as an energy crop could increase the national farm income by $3 to $6 billion per year.

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Mascoma: Why all the different ethanol plants?

24 September 2007

.....That's three manufacturing facilities in three states [Tennessee, New York, Michigan] for a company that's not actually producing anything right now. These plants will also represent a drop in the bucket of America's fuel consumption. The U.S. consumes about 400 million gallons of liquid fuel a day. Mascoma's annual output from these plants is thus equal to about 40 minutes of the national daily fuel budget.

Eventually, the plants will be expanded. Plans call for the Tennessee facility to grow to 10 times the 5-million-gallon level and the same applies to Michigan. Still, why build in different locations?

The reason is that the company wants to experiment with different feedstocks, according to a spokesperson. The Michigan plant will concentrate on making ethanol from wood chips leftover from timber operations, while the Tennessee plant will experiment with making it out of switchgrass. Switchgrass requires little fertilizer or water. The plant in that state will be capable of consuming 170 million tons of switchgrass a day.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *On Saving ourselves means trench warfare, not waiting for breakthroughs posted 1 year, 7 months ago 16 Responses