Green Gasoline Could Power Future Cars and Jets

[jpak]

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=52115

Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of "green gasoline," a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.

Chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute have recently announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components.

At the same time, James Dumesic and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced an integrated process for creating chemical components of jet fuel using a green gasoline approach. While Dumesic's group had previously demonstrated the production of jet-fuel components using separate steps, their current work shows that the steps can be integrated and run sequentially, without complex separation and purification processes between reactors.

While it may be 5 to 10 years before green gasoline arrives at the pump or finds its way into a fighter jet, these breakthroughs have bypassed significant hurdles to bringing green gasoline to market.

<more>

[gasperc]

1. until we fullly understand the impact on farming

I doubt that this will be any kind of breakthrough solution.

[wallwriter]

2. This is patently ridiculous in a number of ways

Using agricultural products as sources for fuels has negative effects on land and food prices. Plus, anything that is "identical to standard gasoline" is still going to be filled with pollutants and greenhouse gases as it burns. It might be renewable, but there is nothing green about it. The stunningly uncritical nature of this leads me to think it's corporate PR.

[GliderGuider]

3. I note that the article is pretty skosh on details

And we all know where the devil is, don't we?

So many of these "brave new world" breakthroughs look lovely all scrubbed and airbrushed for their press release. I want to see them with skinned knees and dirt under their fingernails once they've been doing real work for a year or two. Till then, hey - look at that guy, he's running his car on WATER! Or those guys over there -- they say they have a real perpetual motion machine that WORKS and they'd let us see it today except the have this little issue with friction...

[iiibbb]

4. Biofuels are "Green" because the carbon is recently sequestered

it's basically a more closed loop. The carbon in the greenhouse gasses that are produced came from the atmosphere... compared to oil which came from the ground (the loop is open) is carbon that was sequestered eons ago.

However, the issue of using food crops for energy is a problem. Food crops really aren't ideal. Hopefully the cellulose based fuels will start to make some headway. It would make forest land more valuable. More forests would be a good thing because they provide other ecosystem benefits.


I would also tend to think they mean "identical" to gasoline in energy content, not necessarily byproducts.

[GliderGuider]

5. The problem with cellulosic ethanol from "forests"

is that once you start using forests for fuel they stop being forests. They become coppice poplar plantations or some other such simulation, and that's the end of yet another natural ecology. We won't create "more forests" for this little project, we'll make better forests, to our own human specifications.

Any natural biome that comes under human exploitation ceases to fulfill its previous function. Doesn't matter if it's a forest or an ocean or a switchgrass meadow - when humans fuck with a biosystem, it's effectively dead.

When will we simply suck it up and say, "OK, maybe enough is enough">

[iiibbb]

7. Not true

Not talking about utilizing current forests... talking about reclaiming land that's already been converted to agriculture.

If the choice is between a corn field harvested year after year... and a pine plantation harvested every 20 years... or a hardwood forest harvested every 50 years.

What is your choice?


And this suggestion isn't made in the absence of changing our energy consumption habits.



We're going to have to face facts and make some decisions. The population is growing (perhaps too much but who are you going to say can't reproduce). Humans are going to continue to consume energy. The energy either comes from the ground or somewhere else. Solar won't do it by itself. Tides won't do it by itself. Hydrogen isn't going to do it by itself.

Managed forests have place.

If you ask me, any economic situation which increases the value of having marginal land in forests instead of forcing it to grow agricultural crops... is good.

[GliderGuider]

8. Pine and hardwood plantation/forests won't cut it for energy use.

The turnover isn't nearly high enough. That means we'll use coppicing or maybe bamboo, or switchgrass, or whatever. The two main characteristics such a plantation must have are speed of growth (for maximum energy capture), and uniformity of content (for maximum harvesting efficiency). That means you've got some sort of a biomass monoculture, so you really haven't changed the ecological quality of the "reclaimed" land from its previous agricultural use. Why not just keep using the land to produce food, and get your motive power from some other source, like magic supercapacitors fed by the grid?

The key to a true forest is biodiversity (it's a climax ecosystem after all). Biodiversity is inherently incompatible with human industrial exploitation. If we want biofuels in any quantity, we'd best stop kidding ourselves that it can be done at no cost to the biosphere.

Regarding population, you're absolutely right. There are too many of us, and all of us (including those sainted Bangladeshis) are doing too much to make us acceptable citizens of the planet. There need to be fewer of us, and we all need to be spending a lot more time sitting still. I have no problem directing people to have fewer kids. I've claimed that moral high ground since I'm childfree for that very reason and have been shooting blanks for over 20 years. But nobody is going to listen to me, and I won't become an autocrat in this lifetime or the next, so I'm happy to leave the population reduction to the Four Horsemen, and the "sitting still" part to Peak Oil. I have great faith that those forces will team up to fix our shit in short order.

[iiibbb]

9. That is a generalization

Some of these managed systems have as much or more biodiversity than their climax counterparts... and I still come back to the fact that managed forests on marginal lands are more desirable from an ecosystem services standpoint than corn or cotton on drained wetlands. There is no comparison with regards to the level of management intensity. You get way more bang for your buck (or carbon credit) by utilizing forest biomass.

I'm certainly not one to say that bioenergy is the be-all-end-all solution. Hardly. But people are going to use the land.

You and I could go round-and-round on this an never reach an agreement because we are making different paradigm assumptions. You might be west coast, I am east (where more land is privately held). Here you need to provide economic incentives for people to put their land into forests. Right not people are making the choice to put land into corn or soybeans. They've got 0 incentive to put their land into forest.

It's also a fact that the intensively managed forests are shrinking in land base, although overall production from these forest has continued to increase due to improved silvicultural practices. More wood from less land. Overall a win for everyone.

[GliderGuider]

10. Actually I'm "North Coast" - in Ottawa.

I'm coming at this from a Deep Ecology perspective that says we've already visited too many insults on Gaia. The thought of doing the planet more injury, or perpetuating the ones we've already committed, or doing anything except trying to fully heal the damage we've caused, is anathema to me. I'd much rather we Just Stopped.

So that's what I promote -- instead of beavering away to keep the party rolling a little longer by brewing different booze, accept that the party is over. It's over already. It's time to stop partying, we've trashed the house and the police have been called. Time for everybody to stop and go home.

[iiibbb]

11. We'll have to agree to disagree about Gaia

Gaia only accepts subsistence paradigms, which aren't attainable voluntarily. It's the opposite end of the spectrum. Gaia is fine for the people that already own land or live in underpopulated areas.

Really... if one subscribes that much to Gaia, then sterilization really isn't going far enough. We should be drowning ourselves in the ocean by droves.


Meh... this gets depressing.

[GliderGuider]

13. You may be over-interpreting my use of the term "Gaia".

I just use it as a loose and slightly colourful metaphor for "the interdependent planetary biosphere". In my usage there are no "intelligent organism" implications, though I guess using the word alongside the phrase "Deep Ecology" opens the door to that interpretation.

I agree that sterilization (at least the voluntary variety like I've done) doesn't go far enough to address the problem. There's no need for us to drown ourselves as an act of penance however, though that might be blackly amusing to watch. No, in order to arrive at the best possible outcome for the planet, what we need to do is just to keep on doing exactly what we're doing today.

We need to keep on making babies, spreading our cities, increasing the complexity of our industrial civilization, burning the oil, gas and coal, farming all the arable land we possibly can, sucking up all the fresh water we can use, damming the rivers, fishing out the oceans, mining the metals, discharging our pollutants into the planetary commons. Doing that guarantees the quickest resolution of the problem, as we are sure to arrive at the first critical limit to our activities in the shortest possible time. Doing anything else merely stretches out the process, allowing us to approach some other limit as we draw down more of the the planet's capacity in a more uniform manner, thereby leaving fewer intact resources behind for whatever comes along later.

In a sense I'm making a virtue of a necessity, because humanity is showing precious little inclination to solve the underlying problem. So given that we won't/can't do anything effective to solve the real problem, I'm actually in favour of partying on till the cops get here. The kindest thing we can do for the planet may be to let the Horsemen sort us out.

[iiibbb]

14. Well it's complicated....

We have the same goal... some sort of sustainable (which is a term with too many meanings) existence.

Unfortunately the environment is way too complicated for most people to get. Hell, I have a PhD in the field and it's still hard.

My general philosophy is that you can't expect people to just do the right thing (I hate to be cynical about that, but it's human nature). So, I think we need to come up with economic incentives to do the right thing. If we can get people to grow forests and make money... that's desirable.

[GliderGuider]

16. OK, but my objections cut a bit deeper.

My general philosophy is that you can't expect people to be able to figure out what the right thing is in the first place. That is because most people have an intensely limited and subjective perspective on that question, and everybody's personal drivers are different.

If "doing the right thing" doesn't include reducing the human load on the planet by over 90% within the next 50 years, then it really doesn't matter what else you try to do for our physical situation. All the economic incentives in the world won't make a dent in the face of the overwhelming ongoing planetary load we represent, especially with the damage we've already done to the ecosphere.

I know this all sounds hopelessly downbeat and fatalistic, but I don't see it that way. I'm convinced we're simply asking the wrong questions. The question we need to answer is, if we can't get off the physical path we're following enough to matter, what should we be doing instead of trying to steer the cruise ship with a paddle?

The answer I've come up with is, "We ought to be bending every effort to help as many people as possible become as self-aware as they can in the time remaining." Unlike energy, metals or other physical resources, human wisdom and self-awareness is the one resource that: is useful at any scale; can be developed at no cost to the ecosphere; has applications no matter what situation we find ourselves in as a species; produces good outcomes more reliably than bad ones; and might therefore help us fix our shit and keep us from making more planet-killing mistakes in the future.

Humanity is the primary "effect multiplier" on the planet. Rather than try and find different effects for us to multiply, why not try developing the wisdom to use the effects that remain at our disposal for the benefit of all life? Wisdom is the one resource that is in shortest supply, and is the one resource that might be within our grasp to augment.

[jpak]

19. *ahem* Carbon-Negative Biofuels from Low-Input High-Diversity Grassland Biomass

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5805/1598

Carbon-Negative Biofuels from Low-Input High-Diversity Grassland Biomass

David Tilman,1* Jason Hill,1,2 Clarence Lehman1

Science 8 December 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5805, pp. 1598 - 1600

ABSTRACT

Biofuels derived from low-input high-diversity (LIHD) mixtures of native grassland perennials can provide more usable energy, greater greenhouse gas reductions, and less agrichemical pollution per hectare than can corn grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel. High-diversity grasslands had increasingly higher bioenergy yields that were 238% greater than monoculture yields after a decade. LIHD biofuels are carbon negative because net ecosystem carbon dioxide sequestration (4.4 megagram hectare–1 year–1 of carbon dioxide in soil and roots) exceeds fossil carbon dioxide release during biofuel production (0.32 megagram hectare–1 year–1). Moreover, LIHD biofuels can be produced on agriculturally degraded lands and thus need to neither displace food production nor cause loss of biodiversity via habitat destruction.

1 Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA.
2 Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA.

<end>

[GliderGuider]

20. Wishful thinking?

I note from the comments to the article:

Tilman et al. (Reports, 8 December 2006, p. 1598) argued that low-input high-diversity grasslands can provide a substantial proportion of global energy needs. We contend that their conclusions are not substantiated by their experimental protocol. The authors understated the management inputs required to establish prairies, extrapolated globally from site-specific results, and presented potentially misleading energy accounting.

Tilman et al. suggest that LIHD plantings could provide a sustainable source of harvestable biomass for fuel production, but they reported sample yields from an experiment in which nearly all the biomass was burned in situ, not harvested. Although several plant nutrients are lost from burned vegetation as gases or particulates, most cations are returned to the soil (2). With mechanical harvest, all nutrients are removed. Although legumes can replace nitrogen, nutrient replacement will be an important requirement for many marginal, and especially acidic, soils if yields are to be sustained. Limestone additions would be required to maintain symbiotic N2 fixation on soils with poor pH buffering capacity. Liming represents a major energy input (3, 4).

More seriously, the experimental approach of Tilman et al. is a form of double accounting with respect to carbon. The authors estimated harvestable biomass from small samples taken in late summer, then burned the remaining biomass on the plots the following spring . Combustion of this sort is incomplete, so some, if not most, of the soil C sequestration they measured is almost certainly due to charcoal additions that would not have occurred with harvest for biofuel production. Burning also has multiple, and often unpredictable, effects on prairie plant ecology. In general, burning reduces the presence of woody species in mixed stands, as the authors observed (1), but also helps control other undesirable species and may increase root biomass, tillering, soil temperature, and nitrification (2). With the exception of the decline in woody species, these benefits would not accrue with mechanical harvest of herbaceous perennials.

Now, Tilman et al put up a robust defense to the criticism, but the debate indicates that Tilman's conclusions are still a ways from entering the canon.

My concern is that the careful management required to maintain his rosy picture is quite likely to go out the window when oil supplies are down to 40 mbpd. As I said in other posts, anytime we bring another biome under human exploitation it ends up degraded. I have no reason to expect our behaviour will be any more exemplary in this case, so I will retain my hard-line skepticism until we have operational proof that my concerns are unfounded.

[jpak]

21. Wishful thinking??? Nope - here's Tilman's "spirited response"...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5831/1567c

Russelle et al. (1) raise several technical concerns that lead them to question our conclusions about the energetic and environmental advantages of biofuels derived from diverse mixtures of native perennial prairie plant species over biofuels from high-input annual food crops such as corn (2). The nature of their comments suggests that research results well known in ecology may be less familiar to those outside the discipline. Indeed, our approach stands in marked contrast to that of conventional high-input agriculture. Each of their concerns, addressed below, is refuted by published studies of the ecology of high-diversity grasslands, and none of them has substantive effect on our original conclusions.

Russelle et al. (1) question the ability of low-input high-diversity (LIHD) prairie biomass to grow sustainably with low nutrient inputs. U.S. corn, in contrast, requires substantial inputs: 148 kg/ha of nitrogen, 23 kg/ha of phosphorus, and 50 kg/ha of potassium annually (3). Leaching and erosional nutrient losses are much lower for perennial grasslands than for annually tilled row crops such as corn; hence, much lower inputs are needed. Moreover, we recommended harvesting prairie biomass when senescent in late autumn because this would "both yield greater biomass and decrease ecosystem loss of N, P, and other nutrients" . Replacing nutrients removed by harvesting would require about 4 kg/ha of P and 6 kg/ha of K, should they be limiting (5, 6). LIHD mixtures needed no N fertilization because N fixation by legumes more than compensated for N exports in harvested biomass. Also, unlike some cultivated legumes, our native legumes grow well and fix N on acidic soils without liming (7). Moreover, several studies have shown that biomass yields of high-diversity grasslands are sustainable with low inputs. Annual hay yields from high-diversity Kansas prairie (8) showed no declines over 55 years despite no fertilization. Similarly, hay yields increased slightly during 150 years of twice-annual biomass removal in high-diversity unfertilized plots of the Park Grass experiment (9, 10). In total, nutrient inputs sufficient to sustain LIHD biomass production are an order of magnitude lower than for corn.

We showed that the dense root mass of LIHD prairie led to high rates of soil carbon sequestration (2). Russelle et al. (1) express concern that fire may have caused carbon storage through charcoal formation. However, published studies show that annual accumulation of charcoal carbon in frequently burned grasslands was <1% of our observed rate of soil carbon accumulation (11, 12). Similarly, fire had no effect on soil black carbon levels in a 6-year study of mixed-grass savanna (13). The concern about effects of late autumn mowing versus burning is also unfounded. Annual mowing and burning have similar effects on prairie biomass production (14, 15), and mowing does not cause prairie yields to decrease (8).

We proposed using mixtures of native prairie perennials for biofuels in part because, contrary to the assertion of Russelle et al. (1), such mixtures are easily established and require low or no inputs for maintenance. Indeed, prairie readily reestablishes itself from seed and displaces exotic plant species during natural succession on many degraded agricultural lands in the Great Plains (16). Prairie restoration, such as on the 6000 ha restored recently in Minnesota by The Nature Conservancy, is performed using agricultural machinery, not manual labor as Russelle et al. suggest. Our hand-weeding was done to maintain monoculture and low-diversity treatments. In contrast, the LIHD treatment led to rapid competitive displacement of exotic weedy and pasture species. LIHD plots were strikingly resistant to subsequent plant invasion and disease (17, 18). In portions of LIHD plots for which weeding had been stopped for 3 years, only 1.7% of total biomass came from invaders, which themselves were mainly native prairie perennials, and this invasion did not impact energy production.

and much more....

[GliderGuider]

22. It's good that the debate is happening.

They're still arguing about experimental plots and methodologies, though. Corn ethanol had its strong proponents in the early days too, from what I recall. Humanity seems more adept at making bad choices than good ones (that little problem with wisdom...) so as I said above I'll retain my skepticism for the time being.

[kristopher]

6. Needs and solutions should be considered by sector

The personal transportation sector has not need of liquid fuel, battery electric is going to work for that. Land cargo can shift more too rail and end point distribution by smaller trucks that can also use batteries.
Heavy equipment, ocean shipping, and aircraft however, are probably going to require the energy density of liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. It would be nice to have a carbon neutral fuel like this for those applications.
An infrastructure to support such a distribution wouldn't tax our other resources (land, water) nearly as much as trying to make the entire transportation sector work on the same fuel.

[NNadir]

12. "Green" "Gasoline" "Could" "cars" all in one sentence.

It's a classic bit of yuppie brat wishful thinking.

[Systematic Chaos]

15. You forgot "pie"

I like pie. :)

It never seems to stop. I suppose someday when the oceans go Canfield on us we'll be raving about how "green" it is to refine and burn all that algae floating on the top.

[GliderGuider]

17. Regarding biomass as a human resource is an example of the thinking that got us here

"If it grows it's ours and we can to do what we want with it." What breathtaking arrogance.

[Nihil]

18. Agreed

To me, the idea of "developing green gasoline" is somewhat analogous to
that of "developing green defoliants" or "developing peaceful weapons".
:crazy: