200 comments on DrumBeat: August 6, 2007
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200 comments on DrumBeat: August 6, 2007
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Wow, all that biofuel noise from the 1970s during the last oil crisis didn't happen? All that research that led to nothing just didn't occur?
Whatever you say, scout. Keep whistling past the graveyard.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Oh right, I forgot there has been no advances in biotechnology since the 1970's!!!!! my bad!
Here are some links, if you want to learn more about it.
I posted this story, which sounded hopeful, here, last year:
http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/10/13/local/doc452eb9efc0fc6435...
And this, is from the National Sorghum Producers (includes some good articles):
http://www.sorghumgrowers.com/SORGHUM-to-Ethanol
The key here, IMO, is "Ethanol from sorghum can replace MTBE as an oxygenate in gasoline, providing a cleaner, safer environment." In other words, it is being used to fulfill the mandate, same as corn ethanol.
If you read about the process, they tend to gloss over the energy intensive logistical problems, requiring more research. EROI? It requires less rainfall than corn--that is good. Also, note that there are different types of sorghum discussed in these articles, short-grain sorghum, and taller sorghum being bred with little grain.
This is nothing new. It's been around for decades.
Seriously this is goddamn plant and corn are pure bullshit.
One bushel of A produces as much as one bushel of B.
woo! woo!!!! .... boo.
You are just replacing corn with corn-lite. If this plant required much less nitrogen, then i would be happy(moderately so).
but still this entire line of thinking is a zombie, the walking dead, it is supported by gov mandate, and could not survive on it's own. Brazils ethanol infrastructure only survives because of manual slave labour (boost the eroei) and the fact they can grow sugarcane!
EROI, EROI, why hast thou forsaken us?
The ethanol sacred cow needs to be tipped ... into a wood chipper. Its a big, fat scam that wastes time, money, and energy.
Biofuels? Great! Biofuels that can't even break even? Not so great.
Not until properly processed by the aforementioned bull....
(Sorry. Couldn't resist. Won't happen again.)
the underlying physics will never change, the plants have not gotten more efficient, and our understanding of fluid dynamics is still very poor.
we still cannot come close to the entropic minimum of energy expenditure for converting sunlight into ethanol (put another way, the theoretical maximum efficiency)
the only thing that has changed in biotechnology is our ability to rapidly do automatic genetic tests such as PCR and other magnification/purfication. tell me how this helps, or better yet offer some advances which address the issues, ie potential solutions or methods of attack to the navier-stokes equations? How to best scale up small reactors to ponds? how about HTSC(High Temperature Superconductors)? The only real progress has happened in materials science(carbon fiber), and solid state device manufacturing (PV).
Our understanding of practical fluid dynamics has gotten significantly better since the 1970's and reasonably good realistic numerical modeling is possible in some regimes thanks to intense, slogging, difficult development.
Most of those regimes relate to military-like things.