WHAT? Bio-ethanol and other biofuels NOT CO2 free?

[danlisa]

Biofuels are %100 CO2 free, at least B100 grade is.

What is not free, as they have now found by actually thinking about it, is the damage caused by the felling of natural resources to aid in the production of Biofuels.

The solution is to develop technology that uses waste/used oils or esters instead of trying to grow/develop a dedicated 'crop' that will provide the performance people require.

I still think Biofuels are the way forward but we must develop the tech from the 'other side' of the equation.

[joea]

It's combustion of course it creates CO2 the point is it is supposed to be a closed circle. Pyrolysis is actually carbon negative compared to conventional biofuels. Well look at my post here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...27&postcount=6

First gen biogas has a big disadvantage of competing for land with food crops, which is partly responsible for driving food prices up lately. Not good.

There is a new process called pyrolysis, actually an old method called slash and char used in Europe and apparently in the Amazon rain forest. Pyrolysis is the decomposition of organic materials by heating in the absence of oxygen. You can convert biomass or waste (even urban organic trash) into bio-oil and bio-char. Biochar is just charcoal bascially, inert and can increase the fertility of soils and ... serve as a carbon sink. So this is a carbon negative process. The bio-oil can be refined to make fuels, both for transport or heating (this is a good process on small scale for farms etc. as well as industrial) and as stock for plastics etc.

Check out the links in my post above. Pyrolysis is the way forward.

[seafarer]

Well, many people still think hydrogen is the ultimate answer. This despite the fact that most of hydrogen (in NA at least) is extracted from Natural Gas, using electricity that comes primarily from coal and oil fired generating plants. Even if you do use sea water, the energy to extract hydrogen has to come from somewhere, and that almost assuredly means electricity demand.

There is no free lunch when it comes to energy. Every form of energy we have or are working on has some costs (environmental, social, economic, whatever) that come with it. The thing is we've just been blissfully ignorant of having to face the costs, but now the crunch is here.

[peterloo]

I know, combustion always gives out CO2, but now, the problem is that

TO GROW CROPS FOR ETHANOL, the farms use fertilizers, machines which requires energy to run, and clears out forests for farmland

And the CO2 created in the process is affecting the environment, making biofuel twice dirty as gasoline. Despite these facts politicans, and business entrepreneurs still avocate the use of biofuel, for VAST PROFIT

I know that my topic is a bit misleading, yet I can't change it. Can anyone tell me how to modify it?

[peterloo]

Originally Posted by joea

It's combustion of course it creates CO2 the point is it is supposed to be a closed circle. Pyrolysis is actually carbon negative compared to conventional biofuels. Well look at my post here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...27&postcount=6

First gen biogas has a big disadvantage of competing for land with food crops, which is partly responsible for driving food prices up lately. Not good.

There is a new process called pyrolysis, actually an old method called slash and char used in Europe and apparently in the Amazon rain forest. Pyrolysis is the decomposition of organic materials by heating in the absence of oxygen. You can convert biomass or waste (even urban organic trash) into bio-oil and bio-char. Biochar is just charcoal bascially, inert and can increase the fertility of soils and ... serve as a carbon sink. So this is a carbon negative process. The bio-oil can be refined to make fuels, both for transport or heating (this is a good process on small scale for farms etc. as well as industrial) and as stock for plastics etc.

Check out the links in my post above. Pyrolysis is the way forward.

Pyrolysis looks promising. It would be better if no heating is required due to advent of new technology. At this moment, as what the word suggests, pyrolysis needs energy input to heat up and break down the waste to "biochar".

fermentation of manure and other waste produce methane and it is absolutely green if no additional inputs are required. Yet, methane is a greenhouse gas and it causes problem if leaked to environment. Hope that this problem can be eliminated as our technology improves

[seafarer]

One summer during college, I worked in the lab of our local sewage treatment plant. They use anaerobic digestion for tertiary treatment of the sludge - and they use the methane produced to heat the whole plant, and keep the digesters at optimal temperature in the winter (this was southeastern Ontario).

There was a news story a few weeks back about Pacific Gas & Electric and BioEnergy Solutions working with California dairy farmers to use methane from their herds' manure to feed into the natural gas pipeline distribution system. They are using controlled bacterial digestion of the manure on the farm to produce the gas and render the sludge for agricultural disposal (technically does not rate as a fertilizer, but as a soil conditioner). This process also avoids groundwater contamination from manure pile runoff. BioEnergy Solutions plans to provide 3 billion cubic feet of gas a year to PG&E (supposedly enough to meet the needs of 50,000 homes).

Some people are thinking truly creatively about energy.

[Sailor Steve]

I'm confused with all this talk about CO2. CO (Carbon Monoxide) is a deadly poison emitted by gasoline engines. CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) is what we humans and all other mammals exhale with every breath. CO2 isn't deadly, or dangerous, at all. You can't live on it, so if it's all you breathe you'll suffocate, but it's not poisonous. In fact, it's what plants breathe to live.

Yes, internal combustion engines do give of CO2, but isn't it CO that's the real danger?

I know I sounded factual, but actually I'm still just confused.

[Trex]

Most of what the man on the street calls ‘chemicals’ are made up of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), oxygen (O) and nitrogen (N), plus a bunch of other elements - C, H, O and N are the biggies. Depending on the chemical reaction and the way the various elements are combined, different things are produced.

If there is insufficient oxygen for complete combustion, one typically gets carbon monoxide (CO) as one of the products. This is Bad as it interferes with blood oxygen transport.

A typical product of even complete combustion (including animals’ breathing) is carbon dioxide or CO2. This is present in the natural air we breath, but at a very low level, say 0.05%. If that level rises to a given level, animals find it poisonous. Top tolerable limit (without dying, ie) is somewhere around 5% but effects are felt well below that and safety standards, depending on where you are, call for something on the order of 0.5% maximum. CO2 is happy juice for plants, which breath it and release pure oxygen (O2) – it’s a good relationship between plants and animals, ie.

CO2 is, significantly, a greenhouse gas, directly tied to global warming.

It might also be noted that while pure nitrogen (N2) comprises something like ¾ of the air we breath and is quite harmless, combustion products containing nitrogen are often Bad and contribute directly to the pollution we can smell and even see in smog.

This is why I am so impressed with the potential of hydrogen power. Burn pure hydrogen in the presence of pure oxygen and you get pure water, totally nonpolluting. As noted by Seafarer, there are problems in the way we make hydrogen at present, but the potential is there. Hypothetically, we could use sunlight as the power to break down water (H2O) into its components of hydrogen and oxygen. It’s not quite that simple as the infrastructure is going to be a pain, but it is possible.

But he’s right – TNSTAFL still reigns.

[seafarer]

I think one thing that we'll have to see in the future is more diversity in energy sources, and more regional variation.

Take Iceland for example - plenty of reliable geothermal power for the entire country's needs, and being a small island nation, that also makes hydrogen a great source of energy for mobile needs (vehicles, but also coastal craft, running fuel cells).

Here in the USA, there are regions that could be well served by wind power, others by solar, some by tidal, and so forth. If there was clean electrical energy, then battery powered cars and such become very viable in dense urban areas where travel is over short distances. In more rural areas, something will need to replace petroleum, but there could be hydrogen, or ethanol, or some such option.

I think we need to stop searching for one all-encompassing solution to replace petroleum. We can't plow under the entire planets forests to grow agrofuel crops, nor can we divert our entire agricultural production to ethanol crops. But we can implement those things on more a more selective basis.

The only all encompassing thing I see is a continued global demand for electricity - that's the one constant in energy that I see. But the days when a large utility can function on an erector set of identical plants all using the same source fuel is going. Electricity may be the constant, but the means to generate it are going to become ever more varied.

Unfortunately, a lot of people want a single, simple replacement for petroleum fuels - especially the politicians who simply can't handle things when you begin your assessment by saying that things are going to have to be more complicated then that (I swear, you tell a politician that they need to simultaneously think of two or more solutions to the same problem, and they just go slack jawed and blank, iike a 404-error just popped up on their forehead).