Vinod Khosla says of the energy/climate situation, "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." I like it. Of course there's the common saying that the Chinese character for crisis combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity" but unfortunately this turns out to not be true. Khosla, however, manages to capture the same sentiment. He says we need good biofuels. Certainly taking Richard Lugar's advice and dropping the insane tarrif on Brazil's delicious sugar ethanol would be a good idea.
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02 Jul 2008 01:07 pm
Comments (24)
Matt, get yourself to Johnny McGuire's Deli, 700 E. Cooper St. for some of the best sandwiches in Aspen.
Dropping the Brazilian sugar ethanol tariff would probably encourage more production. Where are they going to grow all that sugar...in the amazon. Sounds like a double edged sword.
Right, because importing Brazilian ethanol is sooo much better than Canadian oil. Come on Matt, do some freaking research.
Dropping the Brazilian sugar ethanol tariff would probably encourage more production. Where are they going to grow all that sugar...in the amazon. Sounds like a double edged sword.
Yeah, it's trading one problem for another, bigger, nastier one.
Jim Kunstler is correct when he asserts all the contortions we plot to continue driving cars as much as we please will bury us in the end. Strategies to drastically reduce consumption of all fuels, as opposed to merely substituting a barrel for barrel trade off with biofuels, are rarely bandied about. A significant reordering of priorities is needed. Instead we want trees and weeds and corn to become our new petroleum and go about business as usual. Somebody wrote a book recently, different subject matter but an apt title nevertheless, hmmmm, "Heads in the Sand", was that it?
That sugar ethanol tariff is not so insane from the perspective of Archer Daniels Midland, the corn farmers of Iowa and Illinois, and the banks that loan them money (the last player being probably the most important lobby for price supports and other agricultural subsidies since they guarantees them making money). Neither do the politicians who represent them and who are also acting in their rational self-interest to keep their most important constituents happy and themselves in office see this tariff as insane. The result is bizarre, but not insane.
The horse and buggy may be making a comeback.
I'm all for importing Brazilian ethanol, and I can be convinced that it has an environmental downside, but I don't believe that cutting down the Amazon is one. Brazilian sugar comes from central/southeast, and northeast Brazil: states like Goiania, Sao Paulo, and Bahia. I don't even know if you can grow sugar in the Amazon. (aka North and West Brazil).
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
From this report: www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/Brazil/braziliansugar.pdf
"Brazil has two distinct sugar producing regions—the Center-South and North-Northeast..."
I'm all for importing Brazilian ethanol, and I can be convinced that it has an environmental downside, but I don't believe that cutting down the Amazon is one. Brazilian sugar comes from central/southeast, and northeast Brazil: states like Goiania, Sao Paulo, and Bahia. I don't even know if you can grow sugar in the Amazon. (aka North and West Brazil).
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
From this report: www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/Brazil/braziliansugar.pdf
"Brazil has two distinct sugar producing regions—the Center-South and North-Northeast..."
I'm all for importing Brazilian ethanol, and I can be convinced that it has an environmental downside, but I don't believe that cutting down the Amazon is one. Brazilian sugar comes from central/southeast, and northeast Brazil: states like Goiania, Sao Paulo, and Bahia. I don't even know if you can grow sugar in the Amazon. (aka North and West Brazil).
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
From this report: www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/Brazil/braziliansugar.pdf
"Brazil has two distinct sugar producing regions—the Center-South and North-Northeast..."
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
Here's one that I came across a couple of days ago...
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2010
"As it becomes a major agricultural zone, the Amazon finds its fate increasingly tied to global markets for food and biofuels, with rising prices providing an incentive for forest clearing. Many factors feed the spike in burning and land clearing. Among them are the recent run-up in commodity prices driven by rising international demand for agricultural staples; climbing meat consumption in developing and emerging markets, which buoy demand for grain as feed; and surging interest in biofuels, fed by record high oil prices and U.S. subsidies for corn ethanol."
I'm all for importing Brazilian ethanol, and I can be convinced that it has an environmental downside, but I don't believe that cutting down the Amazon is one. Brazilian sugar comes from central/southeast, and northeast Brazil: states like Goiania, Sao Paulo, and Bahia. I don't even know if you can grow sugar in the Amazon. (aka North and West Brazil).
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
From this report: www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/Brazil/braziliansugar.pdf
"Brazil has two distinct sugar producing regions—the Center-South and North-Northeast..."
I'm all for importing Brazilian ethanol, and I can be convinced that it has an environmental downside, but I don't believe that cutting down the Amazon is one. Brazilian sugar comes from central/southeast, and northeast Brazil: states like Goiania, Sao Paulo, and Bahia. I don't even know if you can grow sugar in the Amazon. (aka North and West Brazil).
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
From this report: www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/Brazil/braziliansugar.pdf
"Brazil has two distinct sugar producing regions—the Center-South and North-Northeast..."
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
From this report: www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/Brazil/braziliansugar.pdf
"Brazil has two distinct sugar producing regions—the Center-South and North-Northeast..."
Here's another item from the article:
“We see soy prices going up partly because less soy is being grown in the U.S. as corn expands to meet the surging demand for the emerging ethanol industry,” added Dr. Daniel Nepstad, director of the Woods Hole Research Center's Amazon program in Belém, Brazil. “Similarly, as sugar cane expands in southern Brazil, soy production is heading northward, encroaching on the Amazon.”
I'm all for importing Brazilian ethanol, and I can be convinced that it has an environmental downside, but I don't believe that cutting down the Amazon is one. Brazilian sugar comes from central/southeast, and northeast Brazil: states like Goiania, Sao Paulo, and Bahia. I don't even know if you can grow sugar in the Amazon. (aka North and West Brazil).
Do you have a cite, Micah and BFR?
From this report: www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/Brazil/braziliansugar.pdf
"Brazil has two distinct sugar producing regions—the Center-South and North-Northeast..."
Sorry. I have no idea what's going on with these multiposts. I hit the button only once, I swear.
Sorry. I have no idea what's going on with these multiposts. I hit the button only once, I swear.
I think it might happen if you hit refresh on the 404 page as well. If you hit the post button, you just sort of have to trust that it'll work eventually.
Can the Atlantic please change its comment system so that comments actually, you know, work? People have only been leaving comments at websites for about fifteen years, after all.
Reiterating a post from a couple of weeks back: While researching the feasibility of biofuel production in Hawaii, three or four years ago, I came across a paper that addressed Brazilian sugarcane ethanol production in detail: Thermodynamics of Energy Production from Biomass, Tad W. Patzek, David Pimentel, 2005 (a 1.8mb PDF download).
The upshot: Brazilian costs were low because they weren't adding nutrients. They planted and harvested until soil wore out, then moved on. In essence, they were mining the soil. Therefore, their current practice was not sustainable.
Even if Brazilian ethanol were "perfectly" green, I'm also concerned about energy security. It isn't really secure unless it's home made. If we make imports cheaper, it reduces the incentives to crank up domestic production, whether from corn now, or algae and switchgrass later.
The upshot: Brazilian costs were low because they weren't adding nutrients. They planted and harvested until soil wore out, then moved on. In essence, they were mining the soil. Therefore, their current practice was not sustainable.
We get a large chunk of our fertilzer from natural gas. At some point we are going to have to adjust to not using energy that's been stored up over millenia.
It's the Platform, Stupid: Baby steps are the way to energy independence.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080606_005036.html
Cars are the key to U.S. energy consumption. The dominant automotive platform here, whether you drive a truck, a car, or a motorcycle, relies on gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines. That's the platform we are unlikely to change quickly. So how do we leave that platform intact and unchanged, ask nobody to significantly sacrifice, yet still achieve the noble (and Nobel) goals of lower fuel consumption, lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower pollution levels, dramatically lower oil consumption, lower cost, and lower geopolitical vulnerability for our country? There's only one way I know to accomplish this: change the fuel.
This happened to a certain extent in Brazil during the '70s and '80s by embracing ethanol. But ethanol has less energy per gallon so fuel consumption goes up and mileage goes down. Ethanol can't be shipped in pipelines also used for oil. Cars have to be modified to run on it and even then there are issues about internal corrosion. Ethanol is far from perfect. What's needed is a replacement for gasoline that looks and feels and tastes just like gas to your car but isn't made from oil. Then the platform could remain completely unchanged yet my 1966 Thunderbird (and the world) could benefit starting with the very next tankful.There is such a fuel, developed by a husband and wife team of scientists working in Indiana in cooperation with Purdue University. This new fuel, called SwiftFuel, is right now intended for airplanes, not cars, but the lessons are the same.
Piston-powered airplanes have a unique fuel problem. Their high-compression air-cooled engines require higher-octane fuel to avoid destructive engine knock. This higher octane is achieved through the use of tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive. Remember lead was outlawed from car gas in the U.S. more than 30 years ago to good effect: we all have significantly less of the toxic metal in our bodies than we used to. But lead is still used in aviation fuel, which accounts for an infinitesimal portion of total U.S. gasoline consumption. Lead is on its way out for aircraft use, too, with international treaties scheduling its demise in 2010.
If we aren't going to retire all the little airplanes in America -- force a total platform change -- we'll have to come up with a replacement for tetraethyl lead. The additive used most for this is ethanol added to gasoline to bump up the octane number. But ethanol does a number on seals and hoses typically used in aircraft to an extent that it is specifically prohibited by the Federal Aviation Administration from being used in certified aircraft. At the same time, U.S. energy policy is moving toward the mandated use of ethanol in ALL motor fuel, meaning there may be nothing available two years from now to fuel your Piper Cub.
Enter SwiftFuel, the Splenda of motor fuels because it is made from ethanol yet contains no ethanol. SwiftFuel is the invention of John and Mary Rusek from Swift Enterprises in Indiana. To your airplane SwiftFuel looks and tastes just like gasoline. It has an octane rating of 104 (higher than the 100 octane fuel it replaces) yet contains no lead or ethanol. SwiftFuel mixes with gasoline, can be stored in the same tanks as gasoline, and be shipped in the same pipelines as gasoline. It is made entirely from biomass, which means it has a net zero carbon footprint and does nothing to increase global warming. Its emission of other polluting byproducts of burning gasoline are significantly lower, too. SwiftFuel has more energy per gallon than gasoline so your airplane (or your car) will go 15-20 percent further on each gallon.
Oh, and based on an average $1.42 per gallon wholesale cost for the ethanol used as its feedstock, SwiftFuel costs $1.80 per gallon to produce, meaning that it ought to be able to sell for $3 per gallon or less no matter what happens in the Middle East.
Heck of a deal.
The ethanol used to make SwiftFuel can be any type, according to Mary Rusek, president of Swift Enterprises. The pilot plant they are building in Indiana will, interestingly, make ethanol from sorghum, not corn. The Ruseks claim that sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn, turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. China, the third largest producer of ethanol after Brazil and the U.S., is switching entirely to sorghum for its ethanol production.
The FAA is already testing SwiftFuel with the goal of approving it for use without modification in all aircraft, leaving the platform unchanged while improving its impact on almost any scale. Hopefully by the 2010 cutoff for tetraethyl lead SwiftFuel will replace the 1.8 million gallons of 100LL aviation fuel used every day.
"But what about cars?" I asked Mary Rusek. "We don't say much about that," she replied. "The aviation fuel market is tiny and has a real need we can fulfill so everyone wants us to succeed. Cars are different and we don't want to make any enemies."
Of course there's the common saying that the Chinese character for crisis combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity" but unfortunately this turns out to not be true.
Actually the Chinese word for crisis does combine the characters for danger and opportunity. 危机 (weiji), crises is formed from 危 (wei) which means danger and 机 (ji) which when used as 机会 (jihui) means opportunity.
I can't believe all the comments about growing something to produce another biofuel - let alone something above like SwiftFuel being concocted by first batch fermenting ethanol as a magic ingredient somehow... ?
What the world and the bloggers do not realize is anything about the basic chemistry of petroleum hydrocarbons OR biodegradable fuels (not necessarily biofuels like bio-diesel). The element of farmed feedstock products like corn, switchgrass, sugar cane, sugar beets, wheat, milo, forestry leavings which produces a new upcoming biofuel is simply Carbon.
There are other sources of basic carbon which are far cheaper to access whereby you don't have to grow one annual harvest of anything. The trick here is to look no further than society's wastes such as garbage and sewer sludge or even to coal or to ground tires for a source of elemental carbon building blocks. However, a must is to change the chemistry sets in order to isolate this elemental carbon atom from wastes and recycle it as an abundant and very low cost building block. Finally, the secret of biodegradability is to simply add an elemental Oxygen atom derived from boiling water (even seawater) into steam. The result will be a new oxycarbon fuel or higher grade alcohol blend than people of heard about or thus sampled...
This result will be something akin to what SwiftFuel's people are attempting BUT far cheaper, and manufactured by a continuous process which runs 24x7 and co-generates it's own electricity for it's process technology with essentially nothing left to re-landfill.
A sleeping green giant is quietly awakening now. Wait and see what is emerging. It's already underway yet couched under a different label as key investors have tricked the gov't into sponsoring grant funds for prototypes.
Pleasant Dreams,
Gary
Look to the Enron model for how democratic capitalism functions: under the guise of dealing with a crisis, politicians siphon massive amounts of public money to contributors of the politicians.
We don't deserve this wonderful planet.
Comments closed July 16, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Has anyone calculated the acreage required to replace fossil fuels? Using Current techniques (I'll take sugarcane)? Future techniques?
I know that no one is talking about completely eliminating fossil fuels but the enormity of the issue bears pondering when looking at conservation vs new fuels.
Posted by Scott Ferguson | July 2, 2008 1:13 PM