Hi Martin You often get this kind of picture (your first link) from the top-down view. Like the amount of land it would require to produce enough biodiesel to replace all dino-diesel use in the US - not feasible.
I've posted several messages on a rather different sort of picture that emerges if you consider micro-niche production at the local level rather than the usual centralized production model. It includes a rather large amount of fuel that, in several ways, could be produced without using any farmland at all, as with the huge amounts of food (food, not commodities) produced worldwide by city farms, for one example. A thorough study of this by people accustomed to working at this local level rather than number-crunchers in Washington or academics sitting in various ivory towers would reveal much more opportunity here than I've thought of. I also said small integrated mixed farms (sustainable farms in other words) could produce much or all their own fuel needs and perhaps more than that from a changing variety of by-products and waste products without impinging on actual crop production, thus in effect also not using any farmland at all, as far as the figures are concerned. It's easy to build such arrangements into cropping plans. I'm glad you put the word "waste" in quotes. Is there really such a thing as "waste"? Not something ever found in nature. Doesn't it just mean human inefficiency, or incomplete technology application? Or an immature economics? In some of the old Chinese traditional villages in Hong Kong, and of course elsewhere, you still find people who have not at all come to grips with the concept of non-biodegradeability. This leads to some strange sights. I saw an orchard which had been divided up, the old guy died and the sons got it I guess, maybe not too long previously, because everything was much the same on either side of the new fence. There were laichee (litchi?) trees there, on both sides, just a few feet away from each other, same size and all, planted at the same time. Both were deeply mulched in the leaf-fall area, as usual. There the similarities ended. The tree on the left was mulched with rice straw, old reed matting gone rotten, bits of cotton cloth and so on, looked nice. The tree on the other side was mulched with just as much care and attention, but with tin cans, old plastic sandals, dead torch batteries, plastic bags, toothpaste tubes, empty plastic dishwasher bottles, dead cassette tapes. Very bizarre sight, quite shocking to the eye. But those villagers couldn't see the difference. What's no use anymore you put under a tree, we've always done it that way. Is a modern city landfill any the less bizarre? I don't think it is. We've allowed this situation to develop because the way economics has been rigged allows such "costs" to be externalized more "economically" than any other method. That's far from an absolute, unchanging law of physics. For the last couple of decades, the forces of change, that will inevitably change it, have been mounting, ever more strongly. The polluter-pays principle, environmental cost accounting. The precautionary principle. And more and more hard evidence of the REAL costs to society of these allegedly cheap externalizations has emerged. Right now, about the only thing we recycle really efficiently is gold, pretty useless stuff. We're going to have to learn to recycle everything as efficiently as we now recycle gold. Economics will change and be rigged, if necessary, to make this the most economical method. A lot of garbage will be transformed into energy and fuel. Some already is. I always question the idea of turning crop wastes into ethanol. They are not wastes, even if they're currently treated as wastes. Removing them depresses the soil's nutrient economy. It has to be paid for one way or another. It can be paid for, and that taken into account, but not by treating it as valueless waste. When I started studying, and doing, appropriate technology for small farms I very quickly started putting a value on wastes, a sliding scale of values, and a completely different picture emerged. I know you can get a lot of "free" fuel that way, without depressing the soil economy, or even enhancing it sometimes. So I don't think it's going to be a choice between ethanol and forests. Or at least it needn't be. Unless it's all planned and executed by those same wonderful folks who brought us Big Oil. >I've always had the dream that a process like this could be profitable - >or just feasible if you used all the 'waste' products for something, and >produced all raw materials from other 'waste' products and highly >abundant sources. i.e. energy from natural sources [water, wind, sun]. >Almost makes me want to be a chemist. >I found some interesting pages: > >Ethanol from cellulose, and a depiction of the worst case scenario: >http://www.daviesand.com/Perspectives/Forest_Products/Ethanol/ > >Natural chemistry processes: >http://cator.hsc.edu/~kmd/caveman/ This Caveman Chemistry site is excellent. Thanks once again to Lori for putting such great stuff in our archives. regards Keith >-----Original Message----- >From: Keith Addison [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 11:57 PM >To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com >Subject: [biofuel] Re: Fuel Ethanol Faq > >I was also trawling the archive, and came upon this interesting piece >on alcohol via other routes than fermentation/distillation, from Mark >Radosevich of Standard Alcohol Company. Note the last paragraph, on >lignocellulosic conversion - a bit of a damper. Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
