Future includes many feedstocks for biodiesel

[Fledermaus]

Soy oil is used in about 60 percent of the biodiesel made in the United States today, but that is expected to change in the near future.

Dozens of potential feedstocks have been tested and many show promise.

With a grant from the Iowa Power Fund, Renewable Energy Group - an Ames, Iowa-based biodiesel company - tested 34 feedstocks.

The feedstocks included two types of algae, beef tallow, borage, camelina, canola, castor, choice white grease, coconut, coffee, corn oil, cuphea, evening primrose, fish, hemp, linseed, mustard, palm, poultry, rice bran, soybean, sunflower, used cooking oil and yellow grease.

Some lesser-known feedstocks were also tested:

Babassu oil - Extracted from the seeds of the babassu palm tree, the babassu is common in Brazil, Mexico and Honduras. The kernels are 60-70 percent oil.

Hepar oil - A byproduct of the heparin manufacturing process, hepar oil is derived from the mucosal tissues of animals, such as pig intestines and cow lungs.

Jatropha oil - From a shrub also known as the physic nut, jatropha is native to Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Paraguay.

Jojoba oil - An evergreen perennial shrub that grows in Arizona and Mexico, jojoba dehulled seeds contain 44 percent liquid wax.

Karanja oil - A medium-sized evergreen tree that grows in India, karanja seed contains 27-39 percent oil.

Fendler's bladderpod oil - Also known as Lesquerella, Fendler's bladderpod is used similarly to castor oil.

Moringa oleifera oil - Native to India, Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, South America and the Philippines, Moringa seeds contain between 33 and 41 percent oil.

Neem oil - A large evergreen tree found in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, Japan and tropical regions in Australia, neem kernels contain 40-50 percent acrid green to brown-colored oil.

Perilla oil - Cultivated in China, Korea, Japan and India, the perilla plant's seeds contain 35-45 percent oil.

Stillingia oil - From the Chinese tallow tree, stillingia seeds contain 45-60 percent oil. The tree is used to prevent soil erosion and grows on marginal land in eastern Asia.

Tung oil - From the tung tree, tung seed is similar to linseed, safflower and soybean oil.

“In our commercial operation, we're already doing some of the things the ‘Feedstocks Report' supports. It shows how you can use combinations of feedstocks to meet quality and economic targets for production,” said David Slade, senior manager of technical services for Renewable Energy Group.

http://www.farmandranchguide.com/articles/2010/03/12/ag_news/agri-tech/tech10.txt

[azul]

1. When I imagine that I run a little put-put on chickensauce or beefswirl,

I gather that I will no longer be a human being.

[TheMadMonk]

2. Now how well do these plants perform in monoculture?

What is their susceptibility to pests and disease?
How easy are they to propogate?
How fast do they grow?
How uniformly?
How suited are they to mechaised harvesting?

Ultimately how many hectares of growing land to support one average mid sized saloon for a year and at what cost?

[kristopher]

3. Portability is a characteristic of an energy carrier.

Your list represents part of range of relevant factors for producing liquid fuels. First however, it is good to consider the totality of our energy system and determine what characteristics of energy carriers and generating technologies go with what need.

In the case of liquid fuels, in general the primary advantage is high energy density by both volume and weight. While that seems pretty obvious, what isn't so obvious is how much of our present infrastructure developed around *other* characteristics of liquid fuel (I'm including in that compressed and liquified gasses).

First and foremost: the liquid fuel has historically been derived from petroleum. Petroleum was abundant, easy to recover and process for use, and above all, you got a lot more energy out of it than it required to get it to the point of end use. The fact that it had high energy density made petroleum useful across a vast range of applications. It was perfect for generating electricity since it was cheap enough to keep running all the time if you needed it (like coal), and flexible enough to shut down for even very short periods of time when you didn't need it (you have to go to natural gas for that because you can't do it with coal).

Then, of course, the energy density came into play for personal transportation and gasoline/diesel soon proved to be the hands down fuel choice. Concurrently our population expanded and along with that expansion we developed a sophisticated heavy truck distribution system that also ran of petroleum. Along with that came the agricultural sector, heavy hauling, heavy construction equipment, marine shipping, aircraft and even rail.

The oil embargoes of the 70s changed all of that and made us a bit more discriminating; not much mind you, but a bit. We switched from petroleum to coal for as much of our electricity as we could. The trains we continued to run, we electrified and powered with the coal plants that by design were so large they had to run 24/7. We started building natural gas plants for peaking power. We stopped using fuel oil to heat our homes and switched to electric heat, natural gas and often wood.

Of course none of this is 100%. We still get about 2% of our electricity from petroleum. Some people still heat their homes with fuel oil, etc, etc. But the energy infrastructure of society changed pretty dramatically.

Those are examples of places where the *characteristics of energy carriers* were evaluated and tradeoffs were made to have energy available to the end user so that they could put that power to work in their lives.

I wrote all of that not so much for you (you probably are well aware of it) but because there are a few of us that simply haven't given this aspect of energy much thought. We've grown up on fossil fuels and we've just never really considered what makes them useful to us in precisely the way they are.

For example, gasoline is great because I can move a lot of potential power around in a small light package. It has the drawback, however, of being in a not particularly usable form. Set a match to it and it burns either slow or fast. What kind of work can I do with that? If I want to turn it into something more useful I have to control the energy from the chemical reaction. I can induce it to explode and capture the mechanical energy to move things with. I can also burn it more slowly and either use the expansion of the gasses to drive a turbine or use the heat to boil water, make steam and use the pressure. With all of these I might do work directly or very often, I transform the energy once more and turn it into the most useful form of energy - electricity.

I think the point is clear. When we look at the actual work we have to do, things like personal transportation can be accomplished with a lot less energy input by using electricity directly. We are at the point where things like fuel cells and batteries are able to provide for our personal transportation needs. The has not yet, however, been a way found to eliminate the use of liquid fuels in the heavy sectors because even with the most efficient drive systems we can develop, even harnessing 100% of the power in the energy carrier, we still have to have the kind of energy density that only liquid fuels are able to deliver at any sort of reasonable cost.

THAT is the kind of need we are looking to biofuels to meet. We can generate electricity directly with renewables. With a full range of renewable sources and existing technologies for storage we can meet virtually all of our needs without liquid fuels. But where we need them, nothing else will do.

The final relevant point is that all liquid fuels are stored energy. Some of the input will come from renewable generating sources, and some will come from the sun via plant growth. But in the end, liquid fuels can't be considered an effective energy *source*; they are best considered more like a battery. And they are not going to be an inexpensive battery by the standards of today's liquid fuels.

The list of other considerations you raised gives a hint at some of the direct costs; other deal with factors that limit production and indirectly affect cost by constraining supply.

So, the upshot is that when we think of using technologies like the OP, we need to recognize that the need for them is actuall pretty limited in comparison to the entire range of applications that liquid fuels now meet. That is the production amount we are aiming for and that understanding is essential when you seek answers to the excellent list of questions related to the external costs and limiting factors that you posed.

[Fledermaus]

4. There would be no mono culture with so many different feed stocks

and there is no need to import non native feed stocks for biomass

INDIAN RICEGRASS

Establishment
Adaptation: Indian ricegrass is very winter hardy and has a broad climatic adaptation. It can be found at elevations from 2,000 up to 10,000 feet. It grows best in areas with average annual precipitation of 8 inches to above 14 inches. It has been seeded in areas with as low as 6 inches of rainfall and reproduced. It is also found on sites with precipitation well above 14 inches. It prefers sandy course textured soils in its southern areas of adaptation and can be found on sands, fine sandy loams, silt loams, clay loams, gravelly, rocky, to shale areas in the mid-northern areas of its adaptation. It does well on hot, dry southern exposures. In Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and locations to the south, ‘Nezpar’ does best above 6500 feet elevation and ‘Paloma’ does best below 6500 feet elevation.

http://plants.usda.gov/plantguide/pdf/pg_achy.pdf

this pioneer had witnessed American Indian women harvesting Indian rice grass. Local American Indians ground the seed into meal or flour and made bread from the flour. However, by the 1860s, this valuable food source became extremely scarce. Livestock grazing nearly eliminated this and other valuable food sources from the Utes’ traditional “hunting and gathering” range. Chief Black Hawk “forced by the starvation of his people” organized area tribes to raid pioneer settlements. Frightened Mormon pioneers retaliated with some horrific acts.

http://www.nps.gov/brca/historyculture/pioneerstory.htm

[NNadir]

5. One of the most important biodiesel feedstocks in the world, serving Germany's autobahn

and the useless stupid distributed energy cars driving on it comes from the palm oil monoCULTure plantations on Sumatra.

The land rototilled to provide this wonderful motor car fuel used to rain forest, habitat for Organtans, Sumatran tigers, Sumatran Rhinos and other things no where near as beautiful as a shiny Mercedes E500 running at 130 kph down the autobahn.

Heckuva job.

http://www.grida.no/publications/rr/orangutan/page/1275.aspx

http://www.cspinet.org/palm/

On the other hand, I'm sure we'll have "sustainable E500" drivers wearing Birkenstocks placing stickers on their bumpers saying "Powered by Orangatan blood free biodiesel" even though zero of them will have any idea where the fuck their biodiesel actually came from. The car CULTure is like that, big on denial.

Obliviousness, like ignorance and wishful thinking, kills, not just people, but their closest cousins.

Heckuva job.

[Fledermaus]

6. Mercedes and BMW use hemp fiber for composites in door panels, dashboards, etc.