----- 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
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