Switchgrass & More to Ethanol Solution Found?

[Tom_H]

This rare bacterium discovered by U. Md. seems to eat anything and might have the potential to turn switchgrass and any cellulose waste into green fuel. Will the day come when we no longer have to be tied to unstable foreign countries for our energy needs?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/09/AR2008030901983.html

 

[MossRoad]

This rare bacterium discovered by U. Md. seems to eat anything and might have the potential to turn switchgrass and any cellulose waste into green fuel. Will the day come when we no longer have to be tied to unstable foreign countries for our energy needs?

washingtonpost.com

There was a very interesting article a couple month's ago in National Geographic Magazine regarding fuel and biofuel. It looked like sugar cane has the most bang for the buck. Something like one unit of carbon based fuel to extract 8 units of biofuel from sugarcane. Corn was something like 1 unit of carbon based fuel to extract 1.3 units of biofuel from corn. They also said that if the ENTIRE U.S. corn crop was used for fuel instead of food, it would only replace about 20% of our oil usage and we would have no corn to eat, make corn sweeteners(which is in just about all processed food) and no animal feed. Ethenol from corn is not the answer and does nothing but drive up fuel and food costs for everyone. They also mentioned switch grass and other cellulose conversion methods and the micro organisms that can convert them to biofuels. Very good article. Go to the library if you can and read it. A real eye opener.

 

[Robert_in_NY]

This was in an e-mail from Hay and Forage magazine I received a couple days ago.

On average, it costs $60/ton to produce switchgrass for cellulosic ethanol production, according to a joint research project conducted by USDA-ARS and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The project gathered on-farm cost data after contracting with 10 farmers in Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota to commercially grow switchgrass for five years, starting in 2000 and 2001. The farmers recorded all costs for producing switchgrass biomass, tracing seed and fertilizer expenses to labor and equipment costs. Total baled biomass yields were recorded for each farm.

Two farmers with previous experience growing switchgrass were able to limit production costs to $39/ton. They were among a group of five farmers who held production costs to $50/ton or less. The researchers suggest other farmers might be able to achieve similar production costs as they gain experience with the crop. Based on the $50/ton figure, and assuming a conversion efficiency of 80-90 gallons per ton, the on-farm production cost of cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass would be about 55-62 cents per gallon. The researchers also speculated that production costs may further decrease as new, "ethanol-friendly" varieties are developed.

The study was designed as follow-up research to an energy analysis paper in which the research team reported that switchgrass, when used for cellulosic ethanol, yielded over five times more energy than required to produce the fuel. The most recent findings are in USDA-ARS Bioenergy Research at www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr.

Research Reveals Switchgrass Production Costs

 

[RonMar]

Yep, every conversion has a cost. Traditional Ethanol production(converting biomass and thermal energy to ethanol), like traditional Hydrogen production(converting water and electrons to hydrogen and O2), is extremely energy intensive. The only place it can really work reasonably are places like argentina, who have an over abundence of biomass for conversion to ethanol, and an extremely cheap supply of hydro electric power. They don't have much domestic oil, but they do have these other resources, so they can convert their hydro to a burnable auto fuel at a reasonable cost.

Why is your food getting expensive? Because farmers are getting larger government subsidies to grow for ethanol production than grow for food. "let the market solve the energy issue" That will never happen as long as the market is artificially skewed by govt subsidies.

I think other bio-fuels have much more potential than Ethanol made the traditional way. If this can be made to work, it would sure be a lot better than the direction we are currently going with Ethanol.

I am glad to see someone working at marketing a diesel hybrid. I personally think bio-diesel has far more promise than ethanol production in it's current form. If we can just keep the EPA from casterating the diesel that is...

 

[SimS]

I'm glad to hear that folks are finally realizing that this corn to ethanol is another political fiasco. Wait till they fix our healthcare. Anyway, besides switchgrass and sugarcane there is a company (Coskata) that has developed a process to convert carbon based materials into ethanol. I believe they gassify the input stream and feed it to some super duper bacteria that pees ethanol. Got to love the ingenuity of the biologic minds at work. They claim about a 7 to 1 energy conversion factor. The promising thing is that they claim they can produce around 100 gallons of fuel from a ton of trash. It will also also work for biomass and farm waste. America will solve it's energy problems a lot sooner if we can just get around all the political and "special" interests. Geez, we haven't built a new oil refinery or nuclear power plant in over 30 years. Does that makes any sense at all? We are going to need nuclear if we hope to use hydrogen for fuel. My $.02

SimS

 

[srossman]

It's funny that this topic came up. There was a goop show on the Modern Marvels last night regarding green energy. Switchgrass was a biomass that was brought up as a much better source of bio-fuels than corn and maybe even sugar cane. One thing that I found interesting was that the original car engines designed by Henry Ford were designed to be run on ethanol. Things are just coming full circle.

 

[Luremaker]

There has been a lot of research in bio fuels and corn. Most researchers agree that using corn to make ethanol is actually doing little to solving the world's energy problems. Here in Ontario the provincial government has buried all the studies about switch grass while mandating corn ethanol in all gasoline sales sold in our province. At the same time the province is subsidizing large corn ethanol plants at great expense to Ontario's residents. My understanding is switch grass can be grown on lower quality farmland and with fewer inputs than corn, leaving high quality farmland for food production. All Ontario's politicians are doing is buying "green" votes by promoting corn ethanol.

 

[billbill1]

Hopefully something will take place in the near future, there will be "full time jobs" just changing the gas station price placards!! Price jumped a full dime yesterday.

 

[ToadHill]

I saw a similar article in Northern Woodlands but the bacterium was being used to digest wood chips with some good results. If this stuff eats anything then we can use any scrap to produce fuel, old pallets, and anything that's biodegradable that we now throw out in the trash, paper products, food scraps, old clothing, the ideas are endless.

 

[riptides]

People need to look at the market speak coming from Brazil

Using sugarcane, 40% of their non-diesel fuel use, exports something like 900 million gallons a year.

Do a google on brazil and sugarcane for biofuel.

Prepare to be curious on why we are focused so specifically on corn.

-Mike Z.