Future fuel?
Farmed switchgrass can be grown on millions of hectares of marginal land ill suited for agricultural crops.
Credit: Image courtesy of USDA-ARS
Posted on 02/02/2008 10:39:14 PM PST by neverdem
Future fuel?
Farmed switchgrass can be grown on millions of hectares of marginal land ill suited for agricultural crops.
Credit: Image courtesy of USDA-ARS
On paper, making biofuels from switchgrass and other perennials that need not be replanted seems like a no-brainer. Use the sun's energy to grow the crop, and then convert it to liquid fuels to power our cars without the need for gasoline. But so far, experiments with these "cellulosic" crop-based fuels have only been conducted on small scales, leaving open the question of how feasible the strategy is. Now, the first large-scale study shows that switchgrass yields more than five times the energy needed to grow, harvest, and transport the grass and convert it to ethanol. The results could propel efforts to sow millions of hectares of marginal farmland with biofuel crops.
Previous studies on switchgrass plots suggested that ethanol made from the plant would yield anywhere from 343% to 700% of the energy put into growing the crop and processing it into biofuel. But these studies were based on lab-scale plots of about 5 square meters. So 6 years ago, Kenneth Vogel, a geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Lincoln, Nebraska, and colleagues set out to enlist farmers for a much larger evaluation. Farmers planted switchgrass on 10 farms, each of which was between 3 and 9 hectares. They then tracked the inputs they used--diesel for farm equipment and transporting the harvested grasses, for example--as well as the amount of grass they raised over a 5-year period. After crunching the numbers, Vogel and his colleagues found that ethanol produced from switchgrass yields 540% of the energy used to grow, harvest, and process it into ethanol. Equally important, the researchers found that the switchgrass is carbon neutral, as it absorbs essentially the same amount of greenhouse gases while it's growing as it emits when burned as fuel.
A final significant finding, Vogel says, is that yields on farms using fertilizer and other inputs, such as herbicides and diesel fuel for farm machinery, were as much as six times higher than yields on farms that used little or no fertilizer, herbicides, or other inputs to grow a mixture of native prairie grasses. That result contrasts sharply with a controversial study published just over a year ago in Science that suggested that a mixture of prairie grasses farmed with little fertilizer or other inputs would produce a higher net energy yield than ethanol produced from corn (Science, 8 December 2006, p. 1598). Instead, the current study--published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences--shows that switchgrass farmed using conventional agricultural practices on less-than-prime cropland yields only slightly less ethanol per hectare on average than corn. "The bottom line is that low-input systems are not economically viable," Vogel says.
"This is a really important paper," says Christopher Somerville, who directs the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. The impressive yield numbers, he adds, will likely serve as a baseline for future studies, because agricultural scientists are making rapid strides at creating new, higher-yielding switchgrass strains.
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Get energy independence, tax foreign energy and stop farm subsidies, especially corn derived ethanol. The effect of the latter is making a number of foods more expensive.
God gave us oil,we buy oil from people that hate us and our God.Lets drill our own friggin oil please...
NHTSA Probes Headlight Glare It's an old link, but someone was kind enough make a link to the NHTSA to complain in comment# 83. I hate driving at night now.
Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list. I added two groups to this ping because of the political and governmental aspects these topics touch, "global warming," energy independence, politically incorrect hygiene headaches and stem cells.
corn derived ethanol. The effect of the latter is making a number of foods more expensive.No, it's not. Crude oil pushing $100 a barrel, and well above $70 a barrel for the better part of a year is what is causing food prices, and all other prices, to go up.
Let’s do it all for energy independence, whether it’s ethanol from switchgrass, biodiesel from algae, drilling in and around the U.S. for oil and gas, methane clathrates from the ocean, solar, wind, coal, shale oil, tar sands and nuclear. What did I forget? Put an excise tax on imported energy. Get serious about it, and we can export Alaskan oil for hard currency.
Use of corn-burning stoves are on the increase, this last year's sales increased 4X.
Corn for burning is selling for around $275.00 a ton on the east coast.
Wood pellet producers can't keep up with demand, pellets sell as soon as they hit the sales floor.
Some retailers are refusing to sell pellets by the bag anymore, they will only sell ton size lots, and regular customers come first.
I guess it might be more accurate to simply say "Energy Prices" are affecting all other prices.
Likewise, congress failed to continue tax breaks for wind turbine generator farms.
Investment fell by 75%, a real disaster for the still struggling industry.
( What I read only mentioned wind farms specifically, I don't know whether other alternative energy ventures were affected as well. )
Likewise, clean coal technologies are getting the NIMBY treatment in some areas, and getting funding withdrawn by the feds in others.
( To be fair, the Energy Dept. had some valid concerns, and still plans to proceed with some smaller scale projects that will only be partially fed funded. )
This may be indicative of a larger problem, a sociological shift in priorities, some realistic, others perceived.
Thing is, this is an election year, and public perception becomes politically correct action in a bid for career survival.
I would guess politicians are looking at the distinct possibility of having to fund a massive national health care system on top of everything else.
That's done with taxes.
High Energy Prices result in greater tax revenues.
$5.00 per gallon gas will go a long way towards funding health care.
“Use of corn-burning stoves are on the increase, this last year’s sales increased 4X.”
Which wasn’t that hard.
“Corn for burning is selling for around $275.00 a ton on the east coast.”
Speaking of problems which solve themselves...
are you nuts,do you know how simple that would be?lol
That's only part of it. Corn that fed folks and critters is now being diverted to ethanol. Corn fed critters has driven up the the price of milk and meat. There only so much acreage that can be farmed economically. Other acreage devoted to other crops is now being diverted to corn derived ethanol. Those other crops are now more expensive.
Calming ethanol-crazed corn prices
The front-month contract for a bushel of corn (56 pounds) on the Chicago Board of Trade has jumped from $1.86 at the end of 2005 to over $4 today, said Flynn.(January 30 2007)
“millions of hectares” is a drop in the bucket.
the problem with burning the bioshphere for fuel is it isn’t dense enough.
We once tied up almost 30% of agriculture for transportation - horses.
Thats why denser hydrocarbons - not crops - were more efficient.
It’s really not feasible to get any appreciable percentage of fuel from plants.
About what? Excise taxes are an American tradition. Why should we fund folks overseas who don't like us and wish us ill?
I’m only interested in not having to pay terrorists for our fuel. The sooner the better as far as I am concerned.
It says an acre of switchgrass makes 1150 gals of ethanol/year. The average driver uses 1100 gals of gas/year. So if we had a car that ran on 100% ethanol it would take an acre/year to run one car/year? I don't do math. Is that right? Wiki says there were app. 250 mil registered vehicles in the US in 2005. Seems like a very small expensive drop in a very large bucket to me. They also don't mention the air pollution findings, conveniently. I went looking around and found this:
For corn ethanol to completely displace gasoline consumption in this country, we would need to appropriate all U.S. cropland, turn it completely over to corn-ethanol production, and then find 20 percent more land for cultivation on top of that.
Ethanol Makes Gasoline Costlier, Dirtier
I say drill our own oil and build refineries. I think using food to run cars is immoral. Sorry for the long post.
That's how Britain does it. $4/gal tax and it's not enough.
This study is good news.
I would love to heat my house or run my vehicle off of pellets made from crop stover, waste wood, and consumer paper waste.
I used to have a wood stove where I lived and heated my house mostly with junk-mail, cardboard boxes, and broken pallets.
It looks like organic hippie farming methods loose out to modern methods again.....Doh!
Sounds great but there is one things I'd like to know, corn is sold by the bushel, how is this switchgrass measured for sale?
Switchgrass is measured by the Big Round Bale, which is often abbreviated on the web as BRB....you see it mentioned in chat-rooms a lot.
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