Bush Pimps Cellulose Ethanol From Unproven, Still Unscaled Process

[hatrack]

Washington, D.C. — President Bush is pushing a new kind of ethanol - made from crop waste and wood chips, rather than corn - as a way to cut the use of foreign oil. "Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years," Bush said in his State of the Union message Tuesday.

Scientists have been working for years on economical methods of breaking down plant fiber, or cellulose, into the sugars needed for fermentation into alcohol. The technology also would make conventional ethanol plants more efficient, since it would be possible to make ethanol from the fiber found in corn kernels.

"We are excited about the president recognizing (ethanol) tonight. The renewables have really come of age," said Leon Corzine, chairman of the National Corn Growers Association. Bush called for federal money for additional research on cellulosic ethanol but didn't say how much more. "By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past," Bush said. The energy bill passed by Congress last year authorized as much as $1 billion in grants and loans for cellulosic ethanol projects. But the money still must be appropriated by lawmakers at a time when the budget deficit is squeezing federal spending. The legislation also authorized financial incentives to spur production of the first billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol.

"By using crop wastes as well as grain, we could be producing tens of billions of gallons of ethanol in this country every year and lessening our dependence on foreign petroleum," said Brent Erickson, executive vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization's industrial and environmental section.

EDIT

Emphasis added.

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060201/NEWS09/602010359/1001/NEWS

[applegrove]

1. Isn't crop waste used as fertilizer? Seems to me... doesn't agriculture

take more oil (in the form of fertilizer) than say wind power.

[phantom power]

2. Wind is good for generating electricity, but we also will need motor fuel.

For motor fuels, it's actually hard to beat good old-fashioned things like ethanol, CH4, Synthetic diesel, etc. They have high energy density, can be stored for a long time, safely, using established technology, they're easy to transport, and an internal combustion engine can run on them.

[applegrove]

11. Yeah. And you can fill 10 hydrogen fuel cell batteries off one wind mill

in certain areas. And each cell could drive a car around a city for a bit.

What I am saying is - is all this grass grown without fertilizer and is the grass not used to create fertilizer? Cause fertilizer is made with nitrogen that comes from opec crude oil.

So in the life-cycle of the grass - or corn husks.. how much oil does it take to get corn or husks?

[phantom power]

14. Farming ethanol will have a big environmental impact.

Building 9 million wind turbines will have a big environmental impact (9 million is the number I came up with, accounting for current grid load, and transportation energy requirements. Plus redundancy for wind intermittance).

The post-fossil economy is going to look very different than today. We've been getting our energy for free, agriculturally speaking. It was all grown 150 million years ago, and stored underground. From here on out, we don't get it for free. It's going to show up on our landscape. It will show up as a million wind-mills. Or a million acres of ethanol-farm. Or a thousand nuclear reactors. Or a thousand miles of wave-harvesters on the ocean.

It's going to be very, very big, and it will be in our face. And the landscape will be changed. It's going to hurt, ecologically, aesthetically, economically.

[applegrove]

15. I agree. What worries me is that turning husks into ethanol isn't

going to be oil newtral. So why invest there? Whereas - building windfarms is sort of revenue neutral since the life of a wind turbine is years and years and all those husks have to grow out of soil every year.

[phantom power]

16. Ethanol can be oil-free. What happens is loss of efficiency.

A significant fraction of the ethanol produced, is spent on producing more ethanol. The oil we use for fertilizer can also be done away with, but it means that we have to go back to letting land go fallow. So again, efficiency is reduced.

Clearly, that begs the question of how much ethanol we can get from a given acreage. Beats me. But sooner or later, it will all be done without fossil oil, for the very simple reason that it's going to be gone.

And then there's the disturbing question of how well anything will grow in the new biosphere, dominated by droughts, extreme storms, ice-age, etc.

I'm going to hate this century.

[applegrove]

17. Well - fallow sounds fine to me. About time we started using that word

again. Apparently "fallow" was what gave Britian/Europe the technological advantage to take over from the middle east. And I'm all for such technological advance that can increase the health of the planet. We may have to import food from Africa and the like - and I'm all for that. Those people need to be involved in something they have ecnomic comparative advantage at.

[hatrack]

4. Indeed - what happens when we take 1/3 or 1/2 of corn stover from a field?

How do we replace that equivalent amount of biomass which would otherwise reenter and enrich the soil?

Hint: "artificial fertilizer" isn't the right answer.

[applegrove]

12. That is what I mean. Surly if you take the husks away to make fuel for

cars more artificial fertilizer will be needed.

[NickB79]

6. Yes, crop wastes are usually plowed under

And left to compost until spring to renew the soil, along with liberal applications of manure and usually chemical fertilizers.

I guess one could truck whatever is left from the ethanol production process back to the farm and redistribute it on the fields, but you will still have lost organic matter as well as used fuel in the vehicles and tractors to bring back the waste.

That is a very worrying proposition, removing billions of tons of additional organic matter from fields on top of what we remove for food production. Currently there are many parts of the US that have fields on basically fertilizer life support. The topsoil has been so badly eroded and drained of nutrients by years of monoculture cropping and soil erosion that they are dependant on fertilizers to grow anything more than weeds. With natural gas prices going up, fertilizers are going to become very costly to apply, and diesel for the tractors will cut into farmer's profit margins as well.

Ugh, the more I think about it the more it seems like we're just treading water, not moving forward.

[applegrove]

13. And Bush proposed it. Makes you wonder if he really wants this

"idea" to work. Just like with the Drug plan. Sometimes he does policy to innoculate against other policy that the public demands. But which would hurt his corporate friends.

[amandabeech]

22. Actually, corn stover is left on top of the field to rot during the fall

and winter. It helps control erosion both from wind and rain. A few farmers will disc it in a bit and sow a cover crop like rye or perhaps some clover into the stover.

The stover contains NPK and it also decomposes into hummus which improves soil texture, creates the right environment for helpful soil organisms and improves soil moisture retention.

No so many farmers use manure anymore. The concentrated feeding operations wash the animal waste into a tank underneath the enclosure resulting in a soupy mess. It can be knifed or squirted into the soil using specialized equipment and a tanker, but it can't really be spread on a field--it would be too easy for the manure to flow into nearby streams should a rainstorm come up.

Fallow generally is no longer used, but sometimes you will still see hay fields. Crop rotations still exist for some crops, like soybeans and corn, but most farmers don't use 4-5 year rotations. As a result, some pests are becoming resistant to current pesticides. Very few animals are pastured anymore, including dairy cattle. They just stay in the barn and eat corn and soybeans.

Artificial fertilizers cover nearly all the plant's needs these days. Fertilizer not only means nitrogen (which is currently made almost exclusively using natural gas, not oil) which can be grabbed from the air anytime, but also non-renewable elements like phosphorus and potassium. The U.S. has a 70 year supply of phosphorus. After that, we'll have to import, if we can, from Morocco or the Middle East. Our potassium mostly comes from Canada.

I strongly favor using animal wastes, processed human wastes and all the composted organic matter that we can on our fields to cut down on the use of artificial fertilizers and to increase the organic matter in our soils, so that we can continue to feed ourselves through Peak Oil and Global Warming.

[Strelnikov_]

18. Switchgrass Seems To Be The Holy Grail

http://www.westbioenergy.org/july98/0798_01.htm

Drought resistant, grows on the marginal land of the high plains, perennial that lasts 10 years between plantings.

Build wind energy on high plains, where there is a lot of stranded capacity, use this energy in ethanol processing, therefore converting wind energy into a liquid fuel (67% of corn ethanol energy input is used in processing, cellulosic ??).

As has been pointed out, efficient cellulosic ethanol is still developmental.

[Coastie for Truth]

3. Years ago - (okay 7 years ago) - I attended a seminar about

both bacteria synthesized MeOH/EtOH from cellulose and enzyme synthesized MeOH/EtOH.

Also, both Penn State and Univ of Illinois faculty have published on liquid fuels and CH4 from cellulose -- biological routes.

[kenny blankenship]

5. what happened to hydrogen!?!?! Did we skip over the hydrogen economy

while I was asleep?

All right someone please tell me the truth: is it ethanol or hydrogen that's going to save us because now I've been promised BOTH and given NEITHER.

[phantom power]

7. I can tell you what *my* magic-8-ball says...

Hydrogen/fuel-cell technology isn't the future. My 8-ball feels especially confident that hydrogen will not be a motor fuel. It might be a time-shifting fuel for the grid.

The future of motor fuel will be something much more prosaic, like synthetic diesel (or biodiesel), ethanol, CH4, etc.

And when BushCo talks about hydrogen, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the viability or non-viability of the technology. They like to talk about H2, because it's in the future, and so it absolves them from actually doing anything.

[kenny blankenship]

8. I tend to think the talk about ETOH from shrub is just like his talk on H

a lot of methane blasted out of his red monkey ass.

[phantom power]

10. Yes, their rhetoric on ALL energy or environmental policy is empty.

Their data stream is easy to treat; ignore it, as it contains no information. If Bush gets up in front of a camera and says "I want more wind power." That is technically a sentence I agree with, but it doesn't signify, because he will not translate his sentence into meaningful action.

[JohnWxy]

19. point very well taken.

Corn based ethanol is a practical alternative fuel produced right now, cheaper and cleaner than gasoline. We can scale THAT up quite quickly, if people became familiar with it. No R&D expenditures needed just investment in expanding production facilities.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x40697

[NickB79]

9. Hey, I'm still waiting for the flying car I was promised

And that was 15 yrs ago!

Seriously though, we will most likely see the rise of multi-fuel vehicles in the future (assuming we can still afford to drive vehicles and Peak Oil doesn't hit within the next few years). Fuel will have to come from a variety of smaller sources: electricity from solar, wind, coal and nuclear, biodiesel from soybeans, ethanol from crops and waste, hydrogen from the same sources as electricity. Vehicles will most likely have to be engineered to run on two or more different fuel sources, to use whatever is cheaper in that particular region. For example, hydrogen may be more common in areas where solar and wind are readily available, while ethanol could be more common in the Midwest where crops are grown.

On that note, does anyone know if it's possible to build an internal combustion engine that can run on ethanol/gasoline and diesel interchangeably?

[Vogon_Glory]

20. Oil Business Connected Republicans Know That...

Republicans connected with the oil business know that the ideal solutions for dealing with dwindling petroleum supplies are the mortal enemies of incremental, workable steps to shift away from the petroleum economy. That's why Team Shrub started touting hydrogen instead of hybrid automobiles, solar water heating, and fuel cells that run on methane or other sources. That's why Team Shrub is touting so-called "clean coal" instead of trying to push policies to drop the costs of solar voltaic cells and develop better batteries. That's why Team Shrub is pushing this cellulosic ethanol process instead of looking at corn or sugar cane, for that matter, as alternatives.

Connected Republicans know full and well that the corporate media are stupid, arrogant, lazy, and suffer from permanent attention-deficit disorder. There's little chance that the cable news networks are likely to call the GOP on their energy policies unless they were dragged kicking and screaming by the net or a swell of citizen anger of tsunami proportions.

[rfkrfk]

21. Why do environmentalists oppose renewable energy ?

the US is not the whole world

oil prices, are a burden on poor economies
any ethanol produced,is money that stays in the country

there has been some progress,lately,in inprovements
in turning cellulose into fermentable sugars

----------------

environmentalists oppose using trash trees as
supplemental boiler fuel, too 'polluting', lets face it,
every place on eart is close to {if 3000 miles or so is close}
to Nimbys

harvest seaweed, OF COURSE NOT, what will the fish have to eat

why waste valuable land on switchgrass? seems unnatural