268 comments on DrumBeat: September 19, 2007
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268 comments on DrumBeat: September 19, 2007
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GAIA Host Collective
Alternatives like switchgrass grow well in arid or inhospitable regions, where grain cannot be grown, and produce quite acceptable quantities of ethanol for the effort entailed in their groth.
Proof for this please? In the form of links showing plants that are running making industrial quantities.
How about plants that make industrial quantities year over year? Because any biomass scheme that fails to return to the soil what it extracts is doomed to failure as well.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Right. Apparently there are huge yield differences between growing alternatives like switchgrass on agricultural land with plenty of water and natural gas based fertilizer from what you would get in arid regions without fertilizer. However, the former conditions have used in most estimates of switchgrass production. Also you need to consider how growing it on marginal lands, year after year, without added nutrients would deplete the already poor soil.
Thousands of years of tallgrass prairie formed some of the richest soils in the world, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota for example. To say that copious amounts of switchgass or any other warm season grass will be produced on degraded soils is BS, but once established, the soil will get more fertile even with an annual harvest of the biomass. This is more the case with a diverse prairie planting than a monoculture.
"...the soil will get more fertile even with an annual harvest of the biomass."
No. You would have to graze and burn it/prairie circa
1865 to get that.
You're taking and not giving back.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens