I feel like Jed Clampett....sitting on a gold mine of grass that I'll sell to the highest bidder. U.S. Army Retired |
Posted on 01/11/2008 8:07:03 AM PST by tobyhill
Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.
Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).
Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."
But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciam.com ...
“Carried too far, this would conewrn me:”
At least it wouldn’t stune your beeber.
Whether you use grass or corn, it causes more CO2 to be released into the atmosphere to manufacture ethanol than to just use gasoline. Not that CO2 released into the atmosphere makes any difference to anything.
Spent Liquor gasification. Uses a byproduct of paper making to make bio fuels.
Do a search on it.
DUH, I guess this is result of millions of dollars of government funded research.
www.gasification.org/Docs/2006_Papers/27LAND.pdf
There is a plant that is about to be (started on) constructed at NewPage paper corp in Escanaba Mi.
They are in the initial stages of planning at this time.
Google moonshiners still, Same thing! http://homedistiller.org/photos-moonshine.htm
Just more expensive because of the meddeling of the government in price supports and land & water use restrictions. Sugar Cane produces more potential Kcals per acre than grass or corn, but artificial economic factors make it more expensive.
...but growing the corn or switchgrass removes the CO2 from the atmosphere.
Has anyone ever brought a commercially viable product to market?
A common large power supply used in plasma cutting and plasma spray systems can require up to 140Kw of input power to sustain a 6" stream of plasma.
I found my own answer, it appears there are lots of waste reprocessing systems around, but I can't see how you could get one to produce more energy then it consumes creating and sustaining the plasma.
http://www.solenagroup.com/html/images/plasma.pdf
I believe there are probably better ways to create biofuels, but after 10 minutes of reading I'm wondering why most large cities aren't building one of these plants to dispose of their municipal waste and generate some electricity.
| I feel like Jed Clampett....sitting on a gold mine of grass that I'll sell to the highest bidder. U.S. Army Retired |
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