----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Bell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 6:31 PM Subject: [wastewatts] Real cool!
I picked up these two items from the web. Normally I would ask "And what are you going to do with the rest of the plant?" but in this case they seem to have thought of that! Michael Hemp car to make record 10,000-mile trip Friday, April 20, 2001 By United Press International A hemp-fueled car scheduled to begin a record-breaking 10,000-mile trip around North America July 4 debuted Thursday in Washington at a conference devoted primarily to legalizing marijuana. The car is a white, modified 1983 Mercedes diesel station wagon festooned with colorful hemp-related logos and the Virginia license plate "HEMPCAR." It is the creation of Grayson and Kellie Sigler, who plan to use roughly 400 gallons of hemp biodiesel during their trip. The trip will take the Siglers through 40 cities over three months, to the West Coast and then back east through Canada. The drive should set a world distance record for a vehicle using hemp for fuel. Hemp oil converts into a biodiesel fuel fairly simply once mixed with caustic lye dissolved in methanol, a technique which makes the oil less viscous and more combustible. "Hemp oil can be burned directly, but this is much cleaner," explained environmental defense attorney Don Wirtshafter, proprietor of the Ohio Hempery, the Athens, Ohio-based company providing the oil. "You get fuel and glycerine from the process, and the glycerine can be used to make soap or candles. We like to use potassium hydroxide as the caustic agent, because it results in a beautiful fertilizer." Biodiesels can be made from any vegetable oil or animal fat and burn in any unmodified diesel engine. The only modification made to the hemp car was the replacement of rubber hoses with synthetic rubber tubes - biodiesels erode rubber. "Hemp oil has the same energy as diesel," Wirtshafter said. "Whatever your car does on diesel, it'll do on hemp. It's even possible to process hemp for a gasoline engine, but it's more complex." When asked why one should use hemp for fuel, Wirtshafter responded, "What humanity is doing on a massive scale right now is pulling carbon out of the ground in the form of fossil fuels and spewing it out as carbon dioxide gas, adding to global warming. Biofuels, hemp included, give us the chance to grow our fuel, thereby living off the energy from the sun rather than spending our 'savings bank' of hydrocarbons. At the same time, like all plants, hemp would absorb carbon dioxide as a natural life process." Hemp is legal in some 30 countries, including all of Europe, Canada and China. As a crop, its fiber yields textiles such as paper, cloth and rope, while its oil is used for paint, varnish, lubricants and highly nutritious food. Cultivating hemp has been illegal in the United States since 1937, because marijuana is made from hemp's flowers, buds and leaves. This ban was briefly suspended during World War II, when the United States could not import hemp fiber from the Far East for use in rope. Page | 1 | 2 | Continued on page 2 Hemp car to make record 10,000-mile trip Continued from page 1 Hemp legalization advocates argue that the plant is ideal for biofuel use. "It yields about four times more seed oil than soybeans," Greyson Sigler said. "It grows widely in all climates with little fertilizer or pesticides needed than most crops. It's cheap, drought-resistant and very easy to cultivate. Hemp is, in my opinion, the world's most prodigious renewable resource. It could help California out with its power problems and keep the U.S. from drilling for oil in Alaska." Sigler added that biodiesel releases 80 percent less emissions on average than gas. "There are no sulfur byproducts, although there are slightly increased nitrogen oxide emission, most of which can be tuned out," he said. Sulfur and nitrogen oxides are pollutants and common byproducts of combustion. While the conference at which the hemp car debuted was more focused on legalizing marijuana for responsible adult recreational use, the meeting's director, Allen St. Pierre, stressed the hemp legalization debate should expand to include the plant's industrial applications. "It's just so hard to get beyond the giggle, the public trivialization of this," said St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "We call it the 'rope vs. dope debate.'" "But I have great faith that the pragmatism of big oil companies will move legalization forward," he added. "You'll start to see a cultural eraser - it's not the hippies in the park that are asking for it to be legal, but people who will note at least six or seven of the founding fathers were prolific hemp growers, including Jefferson and Washington." The hemp oil used for the record-setting trip comes from Canada. Though hemp oil currently costs some $50 per gallon, Wirtshafter hopes legalization could drive the cost down in the United States to as low as pennies per gallon. "We're not going to be economical until we're able to produce hemp oil without our handcuffs on," he said. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws gave $1,000 to subsidize the hemp car and may sponsor more funds in the coming months. "We were very impressed. We thought they were very well-versed and serious-minded. They weren't full of hyperbole, and they weren't na•ve - they knew this was going to be difficult." The Sigler's car is not the first hemp-fueled vehicle. In fact, Gatewood Galbraith, who ran for governor of Kentucky in 1991 on a pro-hemp platform, drove around in a retrofitted Mercedes Benz during his election campaign. The Siglers expect to get a warm reception during their trip. "Most people are really happy about it," Grayson Sigler said. "We got truckers blowing their horns and people flashing their lights on the way here. We even ran into some police officers who think it's fun." St. Pierre noted that the only distinctive side effect bystanders may experience from the car is "a funky odor. Most people who are familiar with the smell of burning seeds of marijuana will sniff and say, 'Hey, it's an odd smell.'" Copyright 2001, United Press International All Rights Reserved ENN is a registered trademark of the Environmental News Network Inc. Copyright © 2001 Environmental News Network Inc. ........................................................................... Plant power - fuel for the future 16 Dec 89 Plants are a benign source of energy. But lack of investment has hindered their development as a modern fuel. The threat to the global environment from fossil fuels could change all that AS ADVERTISERS vie to promote this or that fuel inthe media, the attributes of one unassuming formof energy read like a copywriter's dream. This fuel doesn't add to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and could actually help to halt global warming. It creates little or no pollution, but could solve pollution problems around the world. It provides the US with as much energy as does nuclear power, but without the hazards. It is also potentially infinitely renewable. The fuel is called biomass. We have burnt biomass for the past 150 000 years, and even today, more people rely on it for their domestic needs than on any other fuel. Furthermore, the energy stored by plants each year is equivalent to 10 times the world's consumption of primary fuels. And yet biomass is almost absent from world energy records. Biomass is the stuff that plants are made of. The term biomass energy, or bioenergy, embraces all fuels that are derived from plants, notably wood and residues from the agricultural and forestry industries, and dung. Green plants and some algae use the Sun's energy to create simple sugars from carbon dioxide and water. Plants store the energy in molecules of glucose, starch, oils or lignocelluloses. When biomass fuels are burnt, this energy is liberated, and the carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere. As biomass is composed of carbohydrate polymers consistingof mainly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, there isvery little pollution if all the fuel is completely burned. Furthermore, if the biomass harvested for energy is replanted,there is no net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide: thecarbon dioxide released on burning the fuel is taken up bythe growing plant. Around 2.5 billion people, about half the world's population, rely on biomass for virtually all their cooking, heating and lighting. Most of these people live in the rural areas of developing countries. According to David Hall, professor of biology at King's College in London, biomass accounted for 14 per cent of the world's energy consumption in 1987, the equivalent of 1257 million tonnes of oil (Mtoe). He calculated that, as a group, developing countries derive 35 per cent of their energy from biomass, or 1088 Mtoe; in industrialised countries, biomass accounts for only 3 per cent of energy budgets, but this still amounts to about 169 Mtoe every year. Biofuels are varied and versatile. They come as solids,gases and liquids that can match and replace any fossil fuel. Biomass can be burnt in its crude, raw state, or converted tomore convenient forms . Sources for bioenergyrange from biomass that is freely available at the side of theroad to biofuels that are cultivated in state-of-the-scienceenergy plantations. The great advantage of crude biomass, such as wood, cereal straws, rice husks, coconut shells, coffee-bean husks and animal dung, is that it can be scavenged. The main disadvantage is its bulk, which makes it cumbersome to store and expensive to transport. Fresh biomass often also contains a high percentage of moisture, which reduces its heat value. Transforming the raw biomass to more convenient solids, liquids or gases can overcome these difficulties. The combustion of crude biomass is by far the most common way of using the fuel. The way the biomass burns depends on its chemical and physical make-up. Chemistry determines both the heat content of the biomass, and the readiness with which the various components burn. Physical properties include the density, moisture content, shape and size of the pieces of fuel. Small, dry particles tend to burn quickly and produce a hotter flame than larger, moist lumps. In practice, this means that the skilled operator of an open fire controls the heat by burning a particular size and species of wood, and maybe altering the size of the fire to the dimensions of the pot. At the other end of the technological scale, a furnace is designed for a particular biomass fuel. To achieve the most effective combustion, the biomass is made as uniform as possible: wood is dried and chipped, and residues are compressed into briquettes. Initially, combustion involves heating the fuel to drive off water vapour. As the temperature rises, the celluloses and lignin begin to decompose into a complex of gases, tars and solid charcoal, which then oxidise to give, ultimately, carbon dioxide and water. In the US, more wood is used as fuel than to produce lumber, pulp or paper. Figures from the United Nations show that the US is the fifth largest producer of wood fuel, after India, Brazil, China and Indonesia. Electricity companies are installing wood-burning generators in several states; California already has more than 500 megawatts on line. By the end of the century, biomass could meet 10 per cent of the US's energy demand. The European Community consumes about 5.5 Mtoe of fuelwood per year: more than 7 million tonnes of wood, about 2.5 Mtoe, are burnt in French hearths alone. Marginal land fertile for biofuel Harvesting in neglected woodland could boost the use of fuelwood still further. France and Italy have 5 million hectares of unmaintained coppice that they are gradually restoring. If the European Community revises the Common Agriculture Policy and reduces the subsidies that encourage farmers to cultivate land that is not very fertile, some experts estimate that this would release 10 million hectares of 'marginal' farmland. Farmers could turn this surplus agricultural land into energy plantations where they could cultivate fast-growing, high-yielding coppice species, mostly willow, poplar, aspen and alder. France has around 400 hectares of experimental plots across the country where it is investigating these 'short-rotation forestry' techniques. In Northern Ireland, which has the largest area of marginal agricultural land in Britain, the Horticultural Centre at Loughgall is investigating short-rotation coppice on poor soils. Biomass in the form of chipped willow wood costs less than one-third of the oil it replaces for heating greenhouse crops of early tomatoes. In Sweden, the government aims to plant a minimum of 10 000 hectares of 'energy forests' every year for the next decade. As supplies of fuelwood disappear in many areas of the developing world, the poor respond, as did their counterparts in England and the US at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, by falling back on agricultural residues and animal dung. The World Bank estimates that at least 800 million people are now wholly dependent on residues and dung for their domestic energy. On the lowland plains of India, China and Bangladesh, dung and residues account for 90 per cent or more of domestic fuel. The average heat value of air-dried agricultural residues and dung is 13 gigajoules per tonne, which is only about 15 per cent less than that of wood. For cooking on open fires, people prefer to use the slower-burning woody residues such as corn cobs, coconut shells, jute sticks and the stems from the pigeon pea plant. These give better control over the heat and are easy to collect. Straws and husks from rice and other grains are not ideal as they burn too quickly, and are difficult to collect and store. Another option is the bacterial digestion of vegetable and animal waste in biogas digesters to produce both fuel and fertiliser. People often prefer the compost to the original dung because the digestion process kills pathogens and the seeds of weeds; it also has a sweet odour. Unlike dung, the compost does not deteriorate during storage. Dung is the main waste fed to a biogas plant, and the two countries with the most experience of biogas also have large numbers of stabled animals; China with pigs, and India with cattle. The first biogas digesters in China in the 1960s were unreliable. Since 1980 the government has laid down strict standards for their design and construction, which has improved the performance of the plants considerably. Today there are around 4.5 million small domestic digesters operating in the country. India is keen to expand its network of 25 large digesters, which are serving communities nationwide. At the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, a team of scientists, led by Amulya Reddy, director of the Centre for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas, has helped to build a community plant in the nearby village of Pura. The villagers have two biogas digesters, which supply compost to farmers and biogas to power an electricity generator. The electricity is used to pump water to a reservoir, which serves eight public taps. Excess electricity powers domestic lights. Pura is now thinking of building a wood gasifier to provide 'producer gas' to supplement its supply of biogas. This would mean growing trees to feed the unit. Worldwide, tree planting schemes have generally been a dismal failure. Fuelwood is regarded as a byproduct, so trees are rarely planted specifically for fuel. By providing Pura with clean water and lighting, however, biogas has raised the villagers' standard of living. Reddy is confident that villagers will grow trees to power the gasifier to maintain their new lifestyle. While biomass gases are an excellent source of energy, liquid energy is more convenient to use, store and distribute. As a result, several developed countries have programmes for making bioethanol from sugars and starches. The US fermented3 billion litres of fuel ethanolin 1987, mostly from surplus maize. About 30 per cent of the country's petrol has some alcohol mixed with it, usually in a 9-per-cent blend. The European Community is also looking to bioethanol as a means of reducing food surpluses, while the International Energy Agency says that ethanol made from surplus sugar alone would satisfy 2 per cent of the petrol market. Zimbabwe has pioneered the fermentation of fuel alcohol in Africa. The distillery at Triangle in southeast Zimbabwe has been operating for nine years. The only problem is the weather. Drought has curtailed the growth of sugar cane this year, limiting the quantity of alcohol that Triangle can produce. The alcohol is mixed in a 12- to 15-per-cent blend with petrol, a ratio that could double when more alcohol becomes available. The success of the alcohol scheme in Zimbabwe has eased the way for other liquid biofuel programmes in Africa. Malawi has built a plant at Dwanga that regularly produces about 9 million litres a year. Petrol is blended with 15 per cent ethanol, but there are also plans to run cars on pure alcohol. An economic biofuel substitute is available for diesel, which powers a large part of the world's agricultural vehicles, road freight trucks, rail locomotives and electricity generators. Vegetable oils extracted from the seeds of annual plants such as sunflower, rape, hemp and soya, or from perennials such as coconut and oil palm, are the most promising alternatives for diesel. With the same energy value as diesel, they are richer in energy than other liquid biofuels. Oil-bearing seeds from annuals are easy to harvest, transport and store. The oil is easily extracted, and the residue, or oilcake, is often valuable as a protein-rich feed for animals. Although diesel engines run well on vegetable oils for a short while, the neat oils are more viscous than diesel and leave the engines clogged with carbon residues, or 'coked up', after a few hours' running. One promising line of research to overcome this difficulty involves heating the oils with alcohols in the presence of a catalyst. This converts the triglycerides, which make up vegetable oils, into less viscous methyl or ethyl esters. Diesel engines have run on methyl esters without problems for well over a thousand hours. Some plants produce hydrocarbons that are suitable for making liquid fuels. An oil-like latex from Euphorbia lathyris, a shrub that grows in semi-arid lands, can be converted to afuel similar to petrol. For the moment, 'euphorbia oil' is uneconomic to produce, but there are around 2000 speciesof the plant and work continues in several countries to findhigher yielding varieties. Asclepias speciosa, the milkweed that grows in the US, also produces latex. Pittosporum resiniferum, a tree that grows in the Philippines, bears fuit that people burn for fuel. Alternatively, after hydrogenation, the oil from the fruit produces a fuel similar to petrol. Other trees, such as those of the Copaifera and Croton genera that grow in tropical climates, produce oils similar to diesel. Some researchers have discovered that they can put the sap from Copaifera multijuga straight into the tank of a diesel vehicle. At the other end of the plant kingdom, Botryococcus braunii, the freshwater algae, consists of up to 85 per cent oil; it is the oil that appears to keep the algae buoyant. Processing this oil gives mostly petrol, some aviation fuel and diesel, and a small amount of heavy oil. Even with our limited knowledge of how useful plants can be as a source of fuel, it is clear that biomass is as diverse and as versatile as fossil fuels. But the cultivation of energy crops instead of food harvests has prompted serious criticism of biomass. With many millions of people dying of starvation every year, how can it be right not to grow food on precious farmland? Biomass protagonists argue that globally we regularly harvest more than enough food to feed the world. Hunger today is essentially a problem of poverty. We need both food and energy, but our neglect of biomass could make the provision of energy even more of a problem than feeding the world. After all, a cold cooking pot is useless. Ironically, concern over the global environment could provide the impetus for determined research and development of biomass. We could halt global warming resulting from carbon dioxide by planting trees over an area the size of India. This may sound fantastic, but it is about the area we need to plant anyway to ensure fuelwood for a growing population into the next century, and to stop soil erosion and to restore watersheds ruined by our relentless destruction of vegetation. Ultimately, we all depend on plants. * * * How to turn raw biomass into something special THERE are four ways to convert raw biomass into a more convenient fuel: pyrolysis, gasification, anaerobic digestion and fermentation. Pyrolysis involves the thermal decomposition of raw biomass in the absence of oxygen. The pyrolysis of wood, for example, produces solid charcoal, liquids that include methanol and tars, and gases. The proportion of gases, liquids and solids depends on the temperature, the rate of heating and the length of time the biomass undergoes pyrolysis. Heating quickly to high temperatures produces more gases, whereas slow, steady heating over longer periods gives a high proportion of solid charcoal, which has about twice the energy value of wood of the same weight and burns more uniformly. Gasification involves the complete thermal decomposition of the biomass in the presence of regulated quantities of air or oxygen. Air gasification of wood gives 'producer gas', a mixture of 50 per cent or more of nitrogen, 20 to 25 per cent carbon monoxide, and smaller amounts of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane. Producer gas can be burnt to produce heat or to power modified petrol and diesel engines. Gasification with oxygen gives 'synthesis gas', a mixture of mainly carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Synthesis gas is used in the chemicals industry to make ammonia, methanol and synthetic petrol. Anaerobic digestion uses a cocktail of symbiotic bacteria to break down organic matter in stages to produce mainly carbon dioxide and methane. The bacteria involved are commonly found in the guts of ruminants, so the addition of cow dung to the digester is sufficient to start the reaction. The function of the digester is to provide an environment similar to that found in the stomach of a cow: warm, dark and oxygen-free. The final composition of the biogasis between 50 and 80 per cent methane, between 15 and 45 per cent carbon dioxide and around 5 per cent water. Fermentation of sugars to produce ethanol involves, unlike digestion, just one specifically cultured yeast or bacterium and three types of raw material. The first type contains carbohydrates in the form of simple sugars with 6 or 12 carbon atoms, such as glucose, fructose and maltose. The fermenting microorganisms act directly on these simple sugars to produce ethylalcohol. Simple sugars are found in feedstocks such as sugar cane and sugar beet,molasses and fruit. The second type of feedstock contains more complex, starchy carbohydrates. They include cereals, such as wheat and maize, and tubers such as potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and cassava. Before fermentation can occur, enzymes or acids must break down these starchy carbohydrates to simpler sugars. The third source of feedstock contains cellulose, such as wood, straw, various crop stalks and waste paper. Again, enzymes or acids must first break down the celluloseto simple sugars before fermentation. Lignocellulose is cheap and widely available. If we could break it down economically, biomass could replace all the oil we use to produce energy and chemicals. One promising line of research involves the fungus Phanerochaete chrysoporium, which naturally breaks down dead wood on the forest floor. At present, however, the cultivation of edible mushrooms on wood and straw residues is the only commercially successful use of raw lignocelluloses. * * * An organisation with ambitions to make the most of biomass BIOMASS is the single, vital element that links hunger, poverty, fuel shortages, mounting debt and environmental destruction in the developing world, and nothing short of a new resolve to promote its cultivation and use can now help poorer countries. This is the view of the Biomass Users Network (BUN), an organisation of developing countries that believes its ideas are at last receiving serious attention, three years after the body was created. Members of BUN are sure that they can tackle the complex problems of development where so many others have failed. In a world teeming with development gurus, what makes BUN so confident? The network is convinced that the quality of life remains low in most of the developing world largely because those countries have failed to take advantage of their greatest asset: the wealth available from plants. BUN focuses its work in four key areas. First, the protection or restoration of degraded land through revegetation, and the development of land that is difficult to farm to produce food, fuel, animal feed or natural chemicals. Secondly, BUN is continuing the campaign it has run since its inception to encourage the sugar industry to switch its emphasis from sugar production alone to the development of products that can be sold for more money. The idea is to do for sugar cane what the industrialised countries successfully achieved for soya beans, peanuts and corn. Although farmers began to grow those crops for profit only within the past 50 to 100 years (more recently than sugar cane), industries now make 10 or 15 readily marketed products from each. BUN's third aim is to produce biofuels in programmes tailored to the environment, and national and local needs. The energy needs of the poor, usually fuelwood, will not disappear. Biomass, however, also offers an opportunity for the local production of high-quality, gaseous and liquid fuels. Finally, BUN is seeking non-polluting uses for agricultural and forestry residues, which are often regarded as wastes. Better use of sugar cane is a primary target. About 150 years ago, sugar was such a lucrative commodity that it earned itself the title 'King Sugar'. Sugar remains the largest industry in the tropics, with a highly developed infrastructure. It provides a livelihood for 50 million skilled workers. Al Binger, BUN's Jamaican-born president, argues that by concentrating only on making sugar, much of the potential of sugar cane is wasted. The fibrous residue of sugar cane, bagasse, is mostly treated as waste even though it has approximately the same energy value as wood. One estimate suggests that, worldwide, the sugar industry could burn bagasse to produce around 50 000 megawatts of electricity. BUN is currently involved in a Jamaican scheme in which four sugar mills will produce a total of 70 megawatts of electricity from bagasse for the national grid. The first plant should start to generate electricity early in 1992. BUN is also involved in similar schemes in Costa Rica, and a study undertaken by BUN says that electricity generated from bagasse could also play a part in helping to diversify the sugarindustry in the Philippines. In Zimbabwe, BUN is helping the sugar industry to produce fertiliser by usingenzymes to break down boiler ash andother factory wastes. It has also broughtto Zambia a technology for making paperfrom bagasse that was originally developed in Cuba and India. Ethanol fermented from sugar can also be convertedto ethylene, a feedstock for the chemicalsindustry. As far as BUN is concerned,King Sugar may be dead, but citizen caneis alive and raring to go. Peter de Groot is a freelance writer and researcher based in London. PETER DE GROOT >From New Scientist magazine, vol 124 issue 1695, 16/12/1989, page © Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 2001 Steve Spence Subscribe to the Renewable Energy Newsletter: http://www.webconx.com/subscribe.htm Renewable Energy Pages - http://www.webconx.com Palm Pilot Pages - http://www.webconx.com/palm X10 Home Automation - http://www.webconx.com/x10 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (212) 894-3704 x3154 - voicemail/fax We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. -- ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Small business owners... 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