Butanol Advance

Butanol is the simplest alcohol and is nearly equivalent to gasoline in terms of energy density. It is also a lot less hydroscopic, allowing it to be blended with other fuels and then shipped by pipeline. This is not possible with ethanol for that reason driving corrosion. Ethanol’s energy density is only two thirds that of gasoline while butanolis in the plus eighties.

The problem of course is biological yield. Ethanol will work up to nearly 120 plus gram per litre while this product does 15. Thus an increase to 30 is welcome and impacts the economics hugely.

Of course, both brewing processes need a marvelous unique way to preferentially separate out the product in a continuous manner that wastes little energy. We can all dream.

It might be possible to brew both at the same time and then extract a natural blend that may then be adjusted to spec. That would lift the combined yield and possibly make it easier to concentrate since specific separation becomes unnecessary.

In the event, butanol will continue to resist exploitation, but its value as a convincing alternative replacement for gasoline will drive research.

Researchers Boost Production Of Biofuel That Could Replace Gasoline

by Staff Writers
Columbus OH (SPX) Aug 24, 2009

http://www.biofueldaily.com/reports/Researchers_Boost_Production_Of_Biofuel_That_Could_Replace_Gasoline_999.html

Engineers at Ohio State University have found a way to double the production of the biofuel butanol, which might someday replace gasoline in automobiles. The process improves on the conventional method for brewing butanol in a bacterial fermentation tank.

Normally, bacteria could only produce a certain amount of butanol - perhaps 15 grams of the

chemical for every liter of water in the tank - before the tank would become too toxic for the bacteria to survive, explained Shang-Tian Yang, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State.

Yang and his colleagues developed a mutant strain of the bacterium Clostridium beijerinckii in a bioreactor containing bundles of polyester

fibers. In that environment, the mutant bacteria produced up to 30 grams of butanol per liter.

The researchers reported their results at the American Chemical Society meeting Wednesday in Washington, DC.

Right now, butanol is mainly used as a solvent, or in industrial processes that make other chemicals. But experts believe that this form of alcohol holds potential as a biofuel.

Once developed as a fuel, butanol could potentially be used in conventional automobiles in place of gasoline, while producing more energy than another alternative fuel, ethanol.

Yang said that this use of his patented fibrous-bed bioreactor would ultimately save money.

"Today, the recovery and purification of butanol account for about 40 percent of the total production cost," explained Yang, "Because we are able to create butanol at higher concentrations, we believe we can lower those recovery and purification costs and make biofuel production more economical."

Currently, a gallon of butanol costs approximately $3.00 - a little more than the current price for a gallon of gasoline.

The engineers are applying for a patent on the mutant bacterium and the butanol production methodology, and will work with industry to develop the technology.

This research is funded by the Ohio Department of Development.

Peggy Korth on Celluose and Cattails

Some excellent commentary on the conversion of cellulose into glucose and thence onto ethanol.. I have not been overly optimistic on cellulose conversion, but recent work is progressing well enough to make one somewhat more positive.

Without question, every agricultural process produces a large amount of waste cellulose. Cheaply converting this into a viable feedstock for at least the production of ethanol must be a priority. If the farm gate price were only sufficient to cover the cost of the labor then the whole industry would be radically changed. input.

I have no doubt that cattail culture will emerge as a mainstay of the agro business world. Peggy’s work is going a long way toward making it practical and showing us how to construct production paddies.

I have also mentioned before that this is a natural crop for the boreal forest. It is also a likely fodder crop for cattle. Thus we have a viable agricultural protocol for the millions of acres of northern wetlands.

Some comment is also made regarding mosquitoes. In the boreal forest, the trick is to do spring fieldwork early and harvest after the first frost. Else where, it becomes appropriate to produce bat sheds at strategic locations around the fields and harvest the guano. Of course you keep up a water flow and encourage natural enemies, but after that you need airborne eating machines and little surpasses the bat.

Cattail Histhings
May 2009


Water Assurance Technology Energy Resources
40 Sun Valley Dr., Spring Branch TX 78070
FAX (830) 885-4827; Cell: (512) 757-4499
Email: rpk@gvtc.com


Cellulosic processing Question/ Answer from JC: Cattail Histhings often repeats excerpts from correspondence to build our newsletters. Thank you everyone for your input. Messages may be edited so that the intent helps others understand a lesson. “Many people are just like you--they want to know what to do and where to go for help”.



PK Explains: Any natural fiber can be used in cellulosic processing. The scraps from cotton milling may be cheaper and easier to break down. The ratio of lignin to higher potential starch construction within the cells impact cellulosic processing (and pulping when processing paper). Cellulosic processing is not difficult. It is simply expensive.



With enough acid, you can turn most any biomass into glucose. Depending on the lignin content, you will have varying degrees of success. At this time, cellulosic processing is not a part of our cattail conversion interests. Having lost a small fortune backing cellulosic processing technology and understanding the next generation of GMO’s confirms skepticism. At this time STS advisors and consultants serve community projects and farms. We are not currently addressing industrial markets. Cellulosic processing may become cost-effective when oil reaches $200 a barrel. Enzymes are an alternative to the expensive use of acids. Each feedstock requires a different mix. Cattail projects use natural sugars and starches.



An African Contact, SK, Discusses Facility Design and Cost: The context I'm focused on now is the Lake Chad basin, where there are somewhere above 25000 sq Km of cattails desiccating a continent. This is Typha Australis, with a much larger rhizome (perhaps for longer droughts) and hopefully larger yields. I see both large company and village scale use, both for ethanol and for biogas & charcoal.



PK Comments: Work-force costs will influence distillery design. The expense of automation may not be as important in an economy that wishes to employ a greater number of low-wage workforces. Strategically placing production units close to resources saves time and money.



Cattail as Food: SK states… I'm hoping that its food production capacity will also be exploited. Just clearing it will make irrigation work more effectively, and greatly reduce their flooding problems. Keeping the lake and its tributaries clear is what I hope to make profitable through ethanol. Right now, there are clearance efforts in several Nigerian states. As far as I can tell, none of the biomass is being collected and used, so the never-ending nature of its clearance will eventually bankrupt them.


PK Applauds: Yes, yes, yes! The food aspect needs to be re-discovered. It is the harvesting that makes it so very difficult to use natural stands of cattails. Cutting the stalks below water level is the best way to ‘clear’ an area. It may take several cuttings to control/ obliterate a stand.


My unique methodology for growing and harvesting cattails changes the dynamics of using the crop for food, fuel, and fiber/ pulp. Perhaps I will even be recognized for this some day. Since I am not (nor have I previously) made money for my fourteen years of effort, then perhaps, I should be awarded a world peace recognition. Please read the past copies of the newsletters. They are full of practical information to jump start the new enthusiasts.


Beyond Wastewater Remediation to Desiccation: SK Continues… Similar problems are occurring in India, and probably China. Recent contacts in Punjab and Kashmir confirm the role of Typha in their desertification process. My beloved cattails are a desiccation machine.


PK Comments: There are many botanicals filters that remove chemicals or break complex chemical chains. Cattails are one of those miracle workers as are certain mushrooms (fungi). Our work with healthy forests and watershed restoration includes chemical reduction.


RK Likes our Field Pictures: Thank you - that is a good looking field. I believe that one place this will work very well is in the boreal forest. That begs the next question. Have you caught wind of any Russian efforts from past years? This is just the sort of thing they would have been doing and it would be worthwhile to read any of their literature. Regards, Bob


Comment: Please share your stories and knowledge of cattail application. What is happening in Russia?


Rob Asks: I would like to hear from someone who is already producing ethanol from cattails. My question is, how do you control the mosquitoes? I mean, won't acres of stagnant water attract droves of the little disease-ridden pests?

PK Replies: With or without cattail there are pesky insects; A balance with flowing water helps.


The Eternal Student: Cattails are a weed that can grow in many different environs. The study done by my mentor as a DOE ethanol project is given in the book Cattails to Ethanol. During the past season I have been analyzing a cattail environmental literary review at the University of Texas Coastal Studies Labs on various cattail issues including salinity selecting from thousands of academic papers. To access studies, most state-owned university libraries allow citizens to use their reference resources as well as hiring an IT person to assist in search and operating the systems. The lab manager recommended Google Scholar as another good resource. Most studies are from three to thirty pages long. I filled several notebooks and thumb drives with information to site in grant writing and funding documentation.


There are many misconceptions about cattails. Cattails grow best in a swale or gently moving small flow. They are highly invasive and support their entire life cycle/ food chain in a natural habitat. We plant ours as a farm crop and recommend using wastewater from a municipal flow or animal feed lot if possible or diverting a contaminated waterway (possible mining small flow) through beds that are designed to make harvesting easier. Fish and amphibians eat mosquitoes.


I do my best to answer questions. However, it would be better to find references through your academic resources. Recently I found thousands of references from the pier reviewed journals in university library Internet reference guides and saved dozens as academic references. Extremely detailed information can be found in Typha (cattail) studies done over the past thirty plus years. Although some funding sources expect recent references, older ones may offer in-depth analysis. Some of the newer ones simply quote the older study.

Proposal on control and exploitation of aquatic weeds by VS, Project Scientist, State Council for Science & Technology in India… This inquiry is with reference to an article on http://www.ethanolproducer.com regarding the subject cited above. VS states…You had mentioned production of ethanol from Typha (cattail). This is mentioned that we are having two species of Typha (Typha angustifolia and Typha elephantine) in huge amounts in our Punjab wetlands. I hadvecertain queries:

1. Is the extraction of ethanol possible from the species I had mentioned earlier (available here).


Ethanol can be made from any sugar or starch.


Answer: Yes, the four species of cattails tested in the pilot project all have significant ethanol production potential. However, it sometimes takes a plant several generations to acclimate when moved to a different climate zone. Some species acclimate by the second season.
2. Is this weed a threat to biodiversity (as it inhibits growth of other plantations).


Answer: One of our wetlands experts does not include cattails in their riparian habitats because it can be difficult to control. Because we intend to plant the cattail as a farm crop in flooded fields and harvested with standardized farming equipment, we are not planting marsh land in which the plant would overtake other species. Blown seeds can take hold in most any wet soil.


3. Is it advisable to root out all the Typha available in our wetlands despite that birds use this as a hiding and roosting place.


Answer: You could never root out all the plant. Re-growth will come from an eyed rhizome, a basic unit of vegetative reproduction and blown seeds. However, you could significantly decrease habitat and that may not be wise. Clearing a path in alternating rows every other year should allow wildlife cover and re-growth if you have equipment to harvest the roots in the natural habitat. Uneven stands of plants have greatest biological diversity
4. What kind of machinery is required for ethanol extraction?


Answer: I would recommend a grinder for the rhizomes and a specialized juicing press for the stems. What equipment is available for YOUR scale of production at this time?

5. Do we need some special training for extraction of ethanol from Typha.


Answer: Most likely not if you are already familiar with distilling. You may need special equipment to harvest the rhizomes and pre-process the biomass prior to making your mash. We intend to convert existing technology from the sugar cane industry for the juicing and heavy duty grinding for the rhizomes possibly similar to sugar beet pulping.
Thank you TS for Checking In with Our Cattail Histhing Group. Dug up some rhizomes and found they have a fibrous shell around the starch. I made a couple attempts at processing them for a mash, but the stringy stuff clogs the system. It’s rudimentary right now, and the disposal (an improvised garbage disposal set up for grinding) worked good for potatoes and small chunks of rhizomes, larger chunks were a problem. It was super fun digging them up, really enjoyable on my knees, I need a better way. I have better ways and other options, just need to get to them.PK and the rest of us thank you and look forward to your ideas.


JM and Others Get ready to Produce Ethanol: I'm looking for 6-10 gallons per hour. What part of the cattail does your machinery take?



Answer: A distillery can easily process the beer from a mash at 6-10 g/h. For most of our people mashing the cattail rhizomes is a toughest job. If you are using mature rhizomes, they are very tough and require stages of shedding or grinding. This summer we will be experimenting with new-growth rhizomes anticipating a much easier mashing process. We will most likely first break the rhizomes in a mulching machine. The small mulching machines sold for home mulching are not strong enough for tough old rhizomes--or so I'm told. One of our team members ran a saw mill for many years. I look forward to his practical suggestions. A tub grinder would be great for larger loads. Cutting the rhizomes into small chunks should allow a person to use commercial kitchen equipment.



Concerning the stalks, the only juicing process that I anticipate finding excellent results is thorough my associates that invented the system for pulping sugar cane. They are setting up three systems for the State of California this summer to run various feedstocks. We will send them a few cattail totes when they are set up so we do not have to cross the border into Canada with questionable biomass. I previously reported on the great pulping results from ratting cattails--a primitive way to process paper pulp. Our associate’s method will render a better pulp AND appropriately "juice" the stalks. And then I will report on the sugars in the stalks. We know they are abundant, but bind to the pulped cellulose through primitive juicing methods.



AirCore Progress: The AirCore small scale distillery series are intended to be scaled to meet the needs of the producer: On a small scale that can be multi staged anywhere between 2 and 24 L/h as can the larger units be scaled and operated in tandem. A single 25 g/h unit can be multi-set to produce in multiples of 25 g/h up to 500 g/h very economically, without expensive buildings or real estate. No matter the scale, if it is approached with common sense the cost savings are practical and purposeful. Various feedstocks can be processed.

Depending on the feedstock, availability, pilot project testing, etc. the units may be set up in tandem to produce optimum output and may be operated separately when small volumes are present. With a continuous feed system, you can run various feedstocks in different fermentation batches and COMBINE beer in the distillation process. One of the best parts of the modular concept; no matter the number of units, no matter the front end process, and the feedstocks, the different stages of production can be interchanged and the final product remains the same. Do you need engineering assistance? We look forward to your reply


CD in Canada Understands Sustainability: I just saw an article on the web about a proposal you made about working on cattails for ethanol production. I am very interested in this subject too, but I am having trouble finding good information on work that has already been done in this area. Would you happen to have a list of references or old proposals that could lead me to other information on the subject? I live on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, and even though I think there may be a good market here for ethanol as a transportation fuel, we don't have any producers within an economical shipping distance. If technology for ethanol production from things like cattails can be made economical, I would like to know more.


Survival Foods—Cattail Shoots and Bamboo: The following article may be of interest. However, the cattail rhizome does not require complicated processing as needed in cellulosically processing bamboo shoots. A reader Responds: I think we will be seeing many more suggestions such as this as per the recommendation of David Blume in his brix analysis of various natural vegetation. Bamboo shoots are a food and therefore have nutritive value as a natural sugar or starch. Any vegetation that supplies nutrients i.e. glucose will also be an energy producer


New method of producing bioethanol from bamboo developed in Shizuoka HAMAMATSU, Shizuoka -- A research team at Shizuoka University has succeeded in developing a new technology to efficiently produce bioethanol from bamboo.


The woody grass grows faster than trees, and doesn't cut into food sources like sugar cane or corn, making bamboo an attractive alternative for producing the fuel.


The team, led by biochemical engineering professor Kiyohiko Nakasaki, has developed a method of rendering bamboo into an ultra-fine powder; which, at 50 micrometers, is 10 times finer than that produced by previous methods.


To produce ethanol from bamboo, its plant cell's major fiber component, cellulose, needs to be broken down into glucose, a simple sugar, before fermentation. However, cellulose is hard to break down, and previous efficiency rates only reached 2 percent. With the new method, cellulose can be converted into glucose at an efficiency of 75 percent. The team is aiming to raise that figure to 80 percent.



The method is a combination of various techniques, including removing lignin -- the second-largest component of plant cells -- using lasers, and a more efficient biodegrading process. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and others hopes to boost annual bioethanol consumption to 2.2 million kiloliters by 2030. Japan currently depends on imported bioethanol. Nakasaki's research team estimates that there is about 93 million tons of bamboo in Japan. According to the team, cutting bamboo at a rate of 3.3 million tons or less per year will not harm the ecosystem, and will produce enough bioethanol to cover about 10 percent of the ministry's target figure.


Grow it UP/ Talk it UP--What is holding back any new feedstock? The government primarily supports cellulosic ethanol. And previously due to the efforts of BBI and the RFA the government spent excessive money supporting corn. Why? Perhaps it is because fuel and farm industry leaders are lobbying for what suits the 'big boys' needs more than the needs of the farmer or the public and assuming that bigger is better. Dominance by focus groups that want to industrialize and control energy markets is one thing holding all of us back. However, they did succeed in expanding fuel ethanol markets and availability. Also, not enough farmers are willing to take a chance. The industrial application cost of equipment and the lack of cost effective small and mid-sized processing equipment availability will soon be solved. New designs and systems are now being marketed. Sustainable Technology Systems intends to join the marketing offering systems at about 33% less than competitors.


How Sweet It Is: AC writes--Thanks for forwarding information on sweet sorghum. I have a login to their web site, but am not an official member, so am not getting the presentations. The information is very good. It appears that most everything could soon be in place to add sorghum as an energy crop. What do you think is holding up the actualization of this technology?

PK Suggests: Without subsidies the margin-of-profit is not quite high enough for investor funding of large projects. Co-product support can tip the scales in behalf of production. Hopefully we will witness a new influx of small and mid-sized production facilities and a new paradigm in pulp and fiber application. Unfortunately, we need new innovation in the pulp and paper industries to support small-scale production of products as well. Industrialization is good up to a point—and then we need to scale systems back down to cottage industries. (My opinion)


Ideas for Starter Beds and Proof-of-Concept: Seeding a saturated growing beds can be effective. Try building an elevated growing bed with about twelve inches of soil--only half of which needs to be above ground if it makes it easier. Control the moisture with a breathable plastic cover (remay). Transplant the shoots in a hospitable spring-time area. Cattails like a slight flow of nutrient rich water once they sprout.


Below Grade: To facilitate easy flow through, we will lower our beds below grade and simply cut off the water supply to harvest the rhizomes.


Roots, Rhizomes, and Seeds: Our propagation specialist uses a sterilization technique to assure crop success when planting seeds. In our summer project we intend to experiment with seeds, cut up rhizomes, and various nutrients including cattail mulch. Please know that what works in one region may differ in another. Please share your trials.



TS Says Thanks for the Info: I agree entirely with a free transfer of ideas and information. The focus on getting wealthy needs to be tempered with an eye towards survival, and not just making the world into haves and have-nots. I’m not saying that everyone gets everything for free; people need to earn some things in life through sweat and mental exercise. If a person works at it he should be allowed to succeed, not like crabs in a bucket where the others will pull the one climbing out back in, but not a handout either. It’s got to be both ways, and improving for everyone you improve things for yourself.
PK: Great comment… Thanks


AH Looks to Technology: Thanks for information! The same day (25.02.2009) Novozyme A/S released news that they have cost effective enzyme complex for biomass hydrolyze which will be available commercially 2010. Let’s wait and see. If you have any "backdoor" to this new product I would be interested.
PK Encourages Novelty: Yes, this is the same presentation that was given at the RFA annual conference I attended in San Antonio TX. Please contact me to share your potential for receiving the product through your local approved channels. The company is most interested in novel applications. Wheat straw is being both tested and applied in a number of locations. Do you have another steady supply of a feasibly good biomass? However, natural yeasts can do a great job on starch–rich and sugary feedstock without the expense of cellulosic processing.


As I mentioned previously, the American Cultures catalog represents about three dozen cultures tested to produce significant cellulase. As stated by the Novozome people, combinations of cultures can produce various effects. Also, the sources of the cellulase producing microbes are quite common.


A good lab tech can isolate a strong culture and come up with a new variety of enzymes right in your neighborhood. Readg Lynn Margulis’s work on Five Phyla. There are an infinite number of microbes and combinations of microbes. The labs that pay big bucks to researchers do not need to be the only players. Their organization allows them to play political games and garner government funds. However, people like you and me can also come up with workable systems and they do not need to be genetically modified. Hazards are not limited to GMO’s either. It is wise to have enough background to be cautious and apply good technique.


AH Understands Economics: When you buy enzymes you are buying activity units and not the weight (powder) or volume (liquid). It means that enzyme with activity 1 mln/g at price 10 USD/kg is cheaper than same enzyme with activity 0,5 mln at price 7 USD/kg. The raw material I am working with is local wheat straw. The pretreatment is lime pretreatment because lime is cheap chemical and easily recoverable by blowing fermentation byproduct CO2 through limewater. The very important step we have found is biomass "wash" after pretreatment. It greatly improves following enzymatic hydrolyze and brings down acid quantity for alkaline neutralization.

PK Discusses RFA Presentations: The Genecore people stressed this alkaline neutralization and it was also mentioned by the Novosomes people. The new 1500 series is more tolerant to pH swings. Different feedstocks respond to pH differently as well. And so you create a biological soup that is unique for each feedstock and each enzyme producing microbe or combination thereof. A voracious person carefully guards his formulae and intends to become a billionaire—or is that careful people greedily guard their findings depending on investments, investors, time and wit. (Inventors want to skip the millionaire stage now days.) Open source is good, yet the investigator also has to make a living. Propagation of pure strains requires good lab technique with appropriate back-up cultures AND the ability to create the same results consistently. My mentor required FIVE consistent tests to approve a technique. Three times repeated is also acceptable in proposal writing.


Even when training people to build cultures ‘in house’ a natural decline in potency is not unusual. Back when I was working with building a business model for production facilities, the primary concern was in keeping the cultures both clean and secure. A number of pirates came to visit and offered money pending our going to their property and setting up a demonstration in their lab. Ha!


What I see happening with the two lead cellulosic processing companies is that they do not have the staff or money or time to go through a multitude of test regimes. Because they want to branch out, they are willing to enter into contracts with qualified investigators to forward their basic foundation. Now, I do not know what will happen if you (me) the investigator take the product to a new plateau. But I can guess.


If you really want to set up a test regime and have appropriate facilities, let’s talk. If you read the archives, I have given enough information in the past to pique the imagination for personal investigation. And I believe that a number of readers have begun their independent studies. However, no one has shared back with me or the forum. This is human nature. And the ego will say, “I am the creator,” even if someone else sent the recipe and the culture.


Cellulase is a very common enzyme. I read cellular biology texts; industrial microbiology texts, biochemistry works, and anything that I think will trigger an idea or inspiration. And I share my inspirations with our team—you have to trust someone. Most of the people within our circle of trust weathered the storm from the previous fall-out. Yet, time and money are tight for everyone, and so we move very slowly. First I recommend that in inquirer studies a glossary of terms--definitions beyond the first line. Then seek to apply that definition to another process. Ah ha! Ahhhhhha, Ha, Ha…We got it!


It is important to keep the channels open even when sharing back in an open source relationship. Like Gilles said, he needs to patent the simple AirCore process not because he intends to keep it under his control, but so that someone else does not attempt to control his technology. His advanced systems will be marketed by STS.

AH Asks: If somebody knows other commercial high activity enzyme producers please share your knowledge.


PK Replies: Sprouted seed has very potent enzymes—especially when applied to the same biomass from which it originates. Genius is said to be 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Thanks to everyone for experimenting and sharing. You do not need to distill to do bench testing of a mash. Please consider bench-testing a couple of nights a month instead of watching TV or going shopping or whatever time-consuming activity cuts into your creativity. Understanding the work space of great minds lets us know that it is not necessary to have an expensive set-up to investigate a process. Good technique, however, is necessary. Be careful and HAVE FUN!


Highlights from Terra Preta: Magic Soil of the Lost Amazon: STS propagation specialist, Dr. Haard is a member of a BioChar study group. This group includes a number of academic researchers that intend to build productive soil as is found in previously occupied areas of South America. February 2007 Acres USA published Terra Preta: Magic Soil of the Lost Amazon by Allan Balliett that gives a historical overview of a very advanced culture that did not survive the colonial period of Europeans. Hopefully many of you will find this article and apply the techniques to your growing beds when you choose to build new soil. Ben Bof teaches this ancient technology in Brazil. Additional information may be found by a search for BioChar.


My next challenge is to promote saturated soil. The addition of charcoal will help. We also seek to learn more about gasification of invasive species of woody biomass. However, using this same wood as a charcoal additive could be an alternative technique. There is always room for more than one application of a resource.

Making Charcoal: My rancher friend and I would rather sit and watch a sunset and chat about ranch life than watch television. Last month, we relived her childhood memories of the local charcoal maker. Back when cedar choppers axed the post for cattle ranchers, real sustainability was practiced in our hill country area of Texas. One family of Mexican heritage supplied the charcoal for the trade area. Abuelo’s charcoal was preferred because it was consistent in texture with large pieces and easy handling. Although she was only a young girl when she visited the charcoal ranch, my friend recalls the following:


Mr. Avila stacked the wood sequential teepee shapes, one on top of the other until he created a structure about three or four layers thick. Then he carefully patted a clay/ mud over the stacked wood and lit the fire through a small opening on the bottom. Charcoal making requires a high heat without a flame.


Sooo… what does this have to do with anything? In the article on Terra Preta, archeologist are finding shards of pottery mixed within the fertile charcoal laden soil. At first they thought it pottery was dumped as a garbage receptacle. However later revelations showed that the pottery helps to direct and hold moisture. Perhaps, they also made their charcoal by covering it with a clay mud that produces a type of pottery residue. In the present day charcoal production facilities in South America they use a pit and not pottery.


Foreign Fields: Friends from abroad have questions about shipping Cattails to Ethanol Books.


Shipping Answer: Estimating a standard postal service shipping box is the best economic deal when shipping to a foreign country. The costs of sending one book or a stack of books is often the same. More to come next month…. Best wishes, Peggy Write Me!

Best Practise Biofuels

Our main reason for working with any form of ethanol is to maintain a supply of liquid fuels for combustion engines.

Thus we have studies attempting to establish best practice regarding ethanol.

This is all very well, except that I think that we are way closer to the delivery of a long range battery than a reliable high volume non food ethanol supply.

That means that the electric car will arrive swiftly and soon. This will displace a third of the globe’s oil demand and that will leave oil as a large supplier but much lower in the supply system. Folks are talking decades for this to happen. I suspect that it will be one vehicle life cycle.

The limitation will be the time needed to build out power plants to support the industry. Again, one vehicle life cycle sounds about right.

In that case, transitional fuels will not be needed at all. We have plenty of oil to support that scenario and the transition to an all-electric industrial base at much the same time. Once a power plant exists around every corner, everything else will preferentially access it.

May 7, 2009

What Is The Best Way to Turn Plants into Energy?

A new study compares biofuels with bioelectricity

By David Biello

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bioelectricity-versus-biofuel&sc=CAT_INNO_20090508

LIFECYCLE ANALYSIS: Using plants to produce electricity rather than ethanol results in more energy from the same amount of land.Courtesy of McDade and Campbell / UC Merced

The environmental case for ethanol from corn continues to weaken. Turning the food crop into ethanol would not be the best use of the energy embedded in the kernels' carbohydrates, according to a new study in Science. That's because fermenting corn into ethanol delivers less liquid fuel energy for internal combustion engines than does burning the kernels to generate power for electric motors."

We had been studying the area of land that would be available to grow crops for energy and we were curious to discover the most efficient use of these crops," explains environmental engineer Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, who led the study. "

We found that with a given amount of biomass you could produce more transportation and greenhouse gas offsets with electricity than with ethanol."

The new study shows that burning biomass to produce electricity rather than converting it to ethanol (made from corn kernels or the other parts of the plant, so-called cellulosic ethanol) delivers 81 percent more miles per acre of transportation in electric vehicles than ethanol burned in internal combustion, even taking into account the lifetime costs of the expensive batteries available today.

"The input energy to produce an electric vehicle was 1.5 times the energy to produce an [internal combustion vehicle],"

Campbell says.

"The batteries currently require large energy inputs in the vehicle production component of our life cycle assessment."

On average, looking at a wide variety of source crops (corn kernels to switchgrass), ways to convert plants to energy, and vehicle sizes (ranging from compact cars to SUVs), bioelectricity delivered 56 percent more energy for transportation per acre, even including the fact that making ethanol produces other useful products, such as cattle feed. To take just one example: a small truck powered by bioelectricity could travel almost 15,000 city and highway miles (24,000 kilometers) compared with just 8,000 comparable miles (13,000 kilometers) for an internal combustion equivalent.

From the atmosphere's point of view, growing biomass to burn in a power plant and using the electricity to move a car avoids 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per acre, or 108 percent more emission offsets than ethanol.

"One other aspect of the electricity pathway is that most emissions are concentrated in one location, which provides perhaps an opportunity for more control of the emissions," Campbell notes. "

It also perhaps locates [other air pollution] emissions in a place where impacts might not be as harmful as where cars are driven today."

Of course, such a bioelectricity future for transportation would also rely on widespread availability of cars and trucks with batteries and electric motors.

"A great deal of innovation must happen in vehicle and power transmission technologies to make that a reality," argues Renewable Fuels Association spokesman Matt Hartwig, an ethanol trade association that owns an ethanol-electric hybrid car. "

In the meantime, Americans still need liquid transportation fuels. If the goal is to have more of those gallons come from renewable sources rather than imported oil, fuels like ethanol are the only technologies that are having an impact today."

He adds:

"In theory, you could have a plug-in hybrid with a renewable fuel powered [internal combustion engine] and eliminate the need for petroleum all together."

The Obama administration seems to agree, granting $786 million in 2009 for biofuels research and setting up the Biofuels Interagency Working Group to study how best to meet the renewable fuel standard mandated by Congress that will require increasing the amount of renewable fuels, such as ethanol, to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (and the California Air Resources Board) have noted that turning corn into ethanol can actually be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and other unintended environmental effects, largely by driving the expansion of agriculture and its attendant pollution—as evidenced by previous studies published in Science.

All use of biomass—whether for ethanol or electricity—runs the risk of displacing food crops, however, as well as the need for large amounts of water.

"Both pathways could be totally disastrous if these types of impacts can't be avoided," Campbell admits.

"This is going to be a constrained area of land and amount of biomass, so how much transportation and greenhouse gas offsets can we milk out of this constrained land? It looks like the electricity pathway might get us more bang for the buck."

And burning biomass for electricity while capturing the CO2 emissions from such a power plant can actually result in carbon-negative power generation—taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.

"By sequestering the flue gas CO2 at the power plant, the bioelectricity pathway could result in a net removal of CO2 from the air," the researchers wrote, and that could help with the problem of ever-rising levels of the greenhouse gases causing climate change.

EPA Riles Paterson

Sober second thought is now setting in of the cap and trade scheme. I have no doubt what has been proposed will be unrecognizable by the time it reaches signature. So much simply cannot stand.

There is nothing more fraught with danger to the political class than new tax law. Even when it is absolutely the right thing to do, the political blow by is atrocious. Yet with a collapsed credit system it is proposed to add what will be an energy tax to the economic system. The only proposal I imagine that could be worse would be a payroll tax in terms of direct consequences to corporate America.

Quite bluntly, if they pass such a tax; the next congress will repeal it.

I do not think it will get to that. Congress has found a wonderful way to unite agriculture, the oil industry and the auto industry under one tent. And let us not forget the Unions who are been asked already to give up huge numbers of jobs.

I cannot imagine a way to make this medicine go down, and with a Congress that cannot do the right thing with a medical insurance system that is a disgrace to the developed world, and easily garnered popular support, passing a cap and trade act in the face of neither is impossibility.

Peterson cries foul on EPA ethanol proposal, vows not to support climate change bill

(5/6/2009) By Sally Schuff

http://www.feedstuffs.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=F4D1A9DFCD974EAD8CD5205E15C1CB42&nm=Breaking+News&type=news&mod=News&mid=A3D60400B4204079A76C4B1B129CB433&tier=3&nid=2ED25D0552384C0396608AE0F548F8E9

House Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson (D., Minn.) sent a message to the Obama Administration today not to count on his support for climate change legislation.

"I'm off the train," Peterson said May 6 during a strongly worded statement at a hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency's new proposal for assessing indirect effects of ethanol production on greenhouse gas emissions. Peterson predicted that the EPA proposal, combined with the climate change legislation under consideration, could "kill off corn ethanol."

Peterson said, "I will not support any kind of climate change bill -- even if you fix this -- because I don't trust anybody anymore. I've had it."

Peterson said his position was not negotiable. "I don't have any confidence. The only way I would consider supporting any climate change legislation would be if it was ironclad that these agencies had no ability to do any rulemaking of any kind whatsoever ... (that) we could be absolutely guaranteed that these folks would not get involved," he said.

Following his statement at the hearing, Peterson told reporters he had notified both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Cal.) and the White House of his position.

Peterson charged that corn ethanol had been singled out by its opponents for assessment of its indirect land impacts, while petroleum, which has a much larger carbon footprint, was not subject to the same scrutiny.

He made his remarks as Margo Oge, EPA director of transportation and air quality, prepared to testify on the agency's proposed rulemaking, which was unveiled May 4 with more than 1,000 pages of rule language and background. There is a lively debate among scientists on how accurately the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions can be calculated from land use for biofuel crops.

A U.S. Department of Energy briefing document on the controversy is online at www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/obp_science_response_web.pdf.

Algae Biodiesel Status

These two articles give us another snapshot of the algae biodiesel industry which has been built out mostly to absorb a lot of cheap capital ahead of any convincing technical success. That really is the problem.

That we have a breakthrough in harvesting and drying is good news and an issue I addressed months back because no one had much to say about this most fundamental issue. That this is recent news is bad news. It takes years to polish technology like this.

I think we will master this technology and that it will become our best source of biodiesel, ethanol and other organic feed stocks. The problem is that we have begun a serious twenty year development cycle that is way more difficult than wind or geothermal which are both thirty years down the same road.

I would like to see work done on integrating algae production with some form of shallow sea system. We certainly get the requisite algae blooms with a minimum of encouragement. Converting that into a form of husbandry should be possible.

I believe algae to be suitable operated in the sea and on non arable lands with excessive sunlight. That prevents competition for valuable agricultural lands.

I would also like to see a productivity comparison between optimal algae production and optimal cattail production. Right now, I think cattails win.

When Will Algal Fuels Be Plentiful and Cheap?

The algae industry is getting there – growing, harvesting, separating and converting to useful oils is nearing completion and the ideas are proving up nicely, which should trigger competition in ideas for the process steps in controlling production costs.

Lots of claims have been made over the years for algae energy efficiency: Some experts say each acre given over to algae cultivation could theoretically produce the equivalent of thousands of gallons of oil per year, compared with an estimated yield of 18 to 335 gallons of ethanol per acre for traditional biofuel crops. Others claim that algae-growing systems could be tweaked to yield as much as 100,000 gallons per acre annually.


There are four important steps in the production of algal biofuels: growing the algae, harvesting the crop, separating the oil, and refining the oil to useful fuels. Each step in the process is the focus of intense study by scientists, engineers, and technologists across the developed world. We have already seen a very significant breakthrough in harvesting and drying of algae.


Technologists tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in two years and underestimate what can be accomplished in ten to twenty years. Algae as biofuel looks more like a ten to twenty year project. DARPA is betting on three to five years, VCs are betting on three to five years, the algae roadmap from DOE takes a decade. _Greentech

A better method of making fuel from algal oil has got a lot of biofuel analysts excited:

"This is the first economical way to produce biodiesel from algae oil," according to lead researcher Ben Wen, Ph.D., vice president of United Environment and Energy LLC, Horseheads, N.Y. "It costs much less than conventional processes because you would need a much smaller factory, there are no water disposal costs, and the process is considerably faster."

A key advantage of this new process, he says, is that it uses a proprietary solid catalyst developed at his company instead of liquid catalysts used by other scientists today. First, the solid catalyst can be used over and over. Second, it allows the continuously flowing production of biodiesel, compared to the method using a liquid catalyst.

_WaterandWastewater

A continuous process using solid catalyst is potentially more efficient and productive, compared to batch processing. Also more scalable.

Currently, producing biodiesel from algal oil costs about $20 a gallon. But with all the attention being given each of the multiple steps in the fuel production process, some producers are projecting production costs as low as $1.50 a gallon. If costs drop that low within the next 10 years, algal biodiesel will begin to place an effective ceiling on the costs of petrol diesel. It will take time to scale up production, of course.

Eric Wesoff

Slimed, Pt. 1: Biofuels and the Aquatic Species Program April 3, 2009 at 1:02 AM

http://greenlight.greentechmedia.com/2009/04/03/slimed-part-1-biofuels-and-the-aquatic-species-program-1313/

Scores of firms, startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, are working on algae-based biofuels. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested. And so far, maybe a few thousand gallons of algae oil have been produced.

The question is: Can algae be economically cultivated and commercially scaled to make a material contribution to mankind’s liquid fuel needs? The jury is still out.

Ghosts of NREL Algae Programs Past

The basement of the marine biology department at the University of Hawaii has a hallway lit by a dim incandescent bulb. At the end of the hallway is a cardboard sign with the faded letters “ASP” written on it. A creaky door leads to a dank-smelling room crowded with beakers and algae scientists, milling aimlessly. They share the same slightly green tinge and defeated look.

This is the last remains of the Aquatic Species Program or ASP. These letters are spoken in hushed reverence by today’s crop of phycologists, NRELians and algae-fuel entrepreneurs.

The Program identified hundreds of algae species that could potentially be farmed and cultivated for their lipids — lipids that could be converted to biodiesel and used to wean the U.S. from its dependence on foreign oil.

The Aquatic Species Program was launched in 1978 by president Jimmy Carter to explore the potential of algae as an energy source. About $25 million was put into the program until it was shelved by the Clinton administration in 1996. They never found the “lipid trigger.”

The echoes of that program reverberate in today’s algae fuel renaissance.

Why Algae?

On paper, algae is perhaps the perfect feedstock for biofuels. It grows in a wide variety of climates. It can be used to mitigate carbon dioxide. The liquid fuels produced by these single-celled creatures are only one of their byproducts, and potentially not even the most valuable. Cosmetic supplements, nutraceuticals, pet food additives, animal feed, and specialty oils for human consumption may well fetch higher per-gallon prices.

The tantalizing quality of algae is that some algal species contain up to 40 percent lipids by weight. And therefore, according to some sources, an acre of algae could yield 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of oil a year, making algae far more productive than soy (50 gallons per acre), rapeseed (110 to 145 gallons), mustard (140 gallons) jatropha (175 gallons) palm (650 gallons) or cellulosic ethanol from poplars (2,700 gallons).

More optimistic data from less informed people indicate the theoretical biodiesel yield from microalgae is in the range of 11,000 to 20,000 gallons per acre per year.

But according to Dr. John Benemann, a cantankerous algae consultant whose research is widely cited in the field, the realistic potential production level (despite claims to the contrary) is about 2,000 gallons of algal oil per acre per year.

VCs and Algae Farmers

“VCs cannot come in here and just harvest ripened fruit, this is not shovel ready technology,” said Dr. John Benneman.

Considering the immense technical risks and daunting capital costs of building an algae company, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable venture capital play. And most if not all of the VCs I’ve spoken with categorize these investments as the longer-term, long-shot bets in their portfolio. But given the size of the liquid fuels market, measured in trillions of dollars, not the customary billions of dollars, it makes some sense to take the low-percentage shot.

These firms are going to continue to need capital. According to Jennifer Fonstad of VC investor, Draper Fisher Jurvetson: “The current strategy of many of these companies has been to turn to the government stimulus plan – this is the risk capital we can rely on today.”

A Few Conclusions

We need lots more time and more money

Technologists tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in two years and underestimate what can be accomplished in ten to twenty years. Algae as biofuel looks more like a ten to twenty year project. DARPA is betting on three to five years, VCs are betting on three to five years, the algae roadmap from DOE takes a decade.

The scope of the algae to large-scale biodiesel effort is more along the lines of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo moon shot, which cost $24 billion and $360 billion respectively. A $25 million Aquatic Species Program or $300 million in venture capital is not going to get it done. It will take tens of billions of dollars and decades.

All of the process steps need to be addressed

In the words of Courtney McColgan of DFJ, “There are many pieces to the algae puzzle that seem like afterthoughts, but are actually crucial to the economics — co-products, nutrients, harvesting, drying, and conversion technology. System design and algae strain (which seem to be the focus of most discussions) are important, but not the only components.”

Algae producers admit that there’s a massive difference between growing large, consistent quantities of algae versus growing it on a fish tank wall. Standards for growth, strain selection, breeding, genetic modification, water extraction, oil extraction, and oil refining have yet to be established.

Set realistic expectations for the technology

Exploit near term, intermediate technology deployment opportunities such as wastewater treatment. Cost constraints restrict consideration to the simplest possible devices, which are large unlined, open, mixed raceway ponds.

And finally a word from our favorite curmudgeon…

“Engineering studies do not conclude that we can or will actually be able to produce algal oil/biodiesel. They conclude that the R&D to develop such processes can be justified, at least until it can be demonstrated to be impossible,” said Dr. John Benemann.

This is a small excerpt from the April issue of the Greentech Innovations Report which dives deep into the algae pond. You can subscribe to it here.

Corn Gene Doubling Produces Giant Biomass

This breakthrough is good news as it allows a biomass focused growing regime in the Corn Belt. They do not share any expected yield as this is simply too new. Combined with the report today on the advance on using xylose, we see the ingredient for an emergent corn cellulose to biofuel industry that will have a low producer cost base and ample developed land to grow on.

We have never focused on maximizing cellulose production ever and this is a good stert. Other crops like hemp and tobacco should be just as amenable.

There is obviously still plenty of work to do in this field but I am now encouraged that the cost in land and space will be completely bearable. Worst case scenarios were making the ethanol fuel replacement model look impossible. We now are seeing that full biomass conversion to ethanol or perhaps biobutanol will be technically feasible. That means that cost structures and operation scales will be stable everywhere.

Once that is properly settled, then it should be one additional step to develop wood waste as a feedstock also. This would permit the proper use of wood management methods to be possible economically employed in a way that begins to maximize the tree size and quality over the decades. All our hardwood forests can become fully managed and a large section of the boreal forest also as the cattail trade expands into the forest.

Doubling A Gene In Corn Results In Giant Biomass

by Staff Writers
Champaign IL (SPX) Mar 04, 2009

http://www.biofueldaily.com/reports/Doubling_A_Gene_In_Corn_Results_In_Giant_Biomass_999.html

University of Illinois plant geneticist Stephen Moose has developed a corn plant with enormous potential for biomass, literally. It yields corn that would make good silage, Moose said, due to a greater number of leaves and larger stalk, which could also make it a good energy crop.

The gene known as Glossy 15 was originally described for its role in giving corn seedlings a waxy coating that acts like a sun screen for the young plant.

Without Glossy 15, seedling leaves instead appear shiny and glossy in sunlight. Further studies have shown that the main function of Glossy15 is to slow down shoot maturation.

Moose wondered what would happen if they turned up the action of this gene. "What happens is that you get bigger plants, possibly because they're more sensitive to the longer days of summer. We put a corn gene back in the corn and increased its activity. So, it makes the plant slow down and gets much bigger at the end of the season."

The ears of corn have fewer seeds compared to the normal corn plant and could be a good feed for livestock. "Although there is less grain there is more sugar in the stalks, so we know the animal can eat it and they'll probably like it." This type of corn plant may fit the grass-fed beef standard, Moose said.

"The first time I did this, I thought, well, maybe the seeds just didn't get pollinated very well, so I hand pollinated these ears to make sure. I found that just like the shoot, seed development is also slower and they just don't make it all the way to the end with a plump kernel," Moose said.

He explained that the energy to make the seed goes instead into the stalk and leaves. "We had been working with this gene for awhile. We thought there would be more wax on the leaves and there was. But we also got this other benefit, that it's a lot bigger."

Moose tested his hypothesis with other corn lines and the effect was the same. "We essentially can make any corn variety bigger with this gene. And it can be done in one cross and we know exactly which gene does it."

He noted that if you put too much of the Glossy 15 gene in, it slows down the growth too much and the frost kills the plant before it can grow.

One advantage to growing sugar corn for biomass rather than switchgrass or miscanthus is that sugar corn is an annual. Moose said that if it would attract a pest or develop a disease, farmers could rotate a different crop the next year.

Moose said that sugar corn might make a good transition crop.

"We think it might take off as a livestock feed, because it's immediate," Moose said. "This would be most useful for on-farm feeding. So a farmer who has 50 steers, could grow this and use the corn as feed and sell the stalks and sugar. It could be an alternative silage, because it has a longer harvest window than regular silage."

For this sugar corn plant to become commercialized, it would have to get government approval, but Moose said that this is about as safe a gene as you can get. "It's a gene that's already in the corn - all we did was to put an extra copy in that amps it up."

Global Warming Business Lobby

This article spells out the drivers behind the rush to judgment on the global warming front. Business has bought into a government managed revenue stream that they all think they can win at. This is why its proponents are continuing to turn a blind eye to the encroaching facts of global cooling.

We are having a sustained bitter cold winter that is wracking up numbers that when reported will show even greater cooling than last winter. The sea ice will jump to full thickness this winter matching any previous year. In fact we should not expect winter to end until March is over. We may get a late blizzard this year. This is my present prognosis.

We are now going to have at least three more winters just like this one before it lets up.

I am not a seer. The global temperature fell out of bed last year. It will lose at least a full degree and perhaps a little more. Most of it is lost now. It now needs to stabilize for a couple of years at least as the Earth adjusts.

Then it can begin the slow creep back up that will take about twenty years per half a degree.

If I have a concern, it is that the drop is good for two degrees, as occurred during the little ice age. That would hurt. It would not hurt to see the last true believers attempting to explain it all away.

Right now, global warming is over. Mother Nature is having the last laugh.


Climate Confusion

By Steven Milloy
FrontPageMagazine.com

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

As a new president takes office and elevates global warming alarmism to official federal policy, much of America is experiencing record low temperatures. While the deep freeze amounts to little more than irony, Americans should nevertheless take what could well be a last opportunity to reconsider the cliff off which Barack Obama, Al Gore and the rest of the global warming industry want us to jump.

No doubt many experiencing the bitter cold this January have muttered under their breath that we could actually use some global warming about now. But the ongoing cold spell no more debunks global warming alarmism than Hurricane Katrina proved it was real. Weather, a short-term phenomenon, is simply not evidence of climate change, a long-term phenomenon. Weather is not the only natural phenomenon that is often misused as evidence of manmade climate change.

We’ve all read and heard about shrinking polar ice, receding mountain glaciers, endangered polar bears and a variety of other environmental phenomena that supposedly reflect the allegedly harmful effects of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. Alarmists have tried to induce the public to think that simply because the Arctic ice cap has shrunk on our watch, for example, then industrialized man must have caused it. The reason they do this is because they have been unable to prove their fundamental contention in the global warming debate - that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases drive global climate - despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars on climate research over the last 25 years.

Here are three indisputable scientific facts about climate that are sufficient on their own to throttle any claims of manmade global warming. First, we know from studies of Antarctic ice that, over the last 650,000 years or so, warmer temperatures have preceded increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by hundreds, if not thousands of years. The ice studies indicate that the carbon-dioxide-causes-global warming theory is precisely backwards.

Second, during the 20th century, there is simply no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature. Not only did most of the century’s temperature rise occur before most of the century’s manmade greenhouse gas emissions, but during 1940-1975 global temperatures actually declined while atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide emission levels steadily increased.

Finally, the ultimate test of a scientific theory is whether it has predictive value. We used Newton’s laws of physics, for example, to land men on the moon. Unfortunately, there are no climate models that predict trends and changes in global climate with any degree of accuracy. Think about the recent failures with hurricane season predictions or even the risk of relying on what your local weatherman predicts for tomorrow’s weather - and you’ll start to get an idea of how far away science is from predicting global climate 10, 50 and 100 years from now.

Although none of this is rocket science or a state secret, our government is nevertheless on the verge of saddling our society with draconian energy-use and rationing laws that will harm our economy and reduce our standard of living. How did we find ourselves in this position?

You may be surprised to learn that it’s not only or even mostly due to the persuasiveness and persistence of environmental activists. After all, how many people really believe Al Gore and Greenpeace? Ironically, we’re in crushing jaws of global warming regulation thanks to big business and other rent-seekers, including Gore, who hope to profit from new laws.

Leading the lobbying charge on Capitol Hill is the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a big business-environmental activist group coalition that is urging Congress to enact a so-called cap-and-trade bill. Under such legislation, Congress would issue permits to emit greenhouse gases (also called “carbon credits”) to electric utility companies and other major emitters. The permits represent more than mere regulation since they have monetary value and are tradable among emitters. An electric utility, say, that emits more greenhouse gases than it has permits for, would be forced to purchase additional permits from another utility that had excess permits. Under cap-and-trade, Congress would issue more than one trillion dollars worth of permits over the programs first ten years - so there’s a lot of money at stake. Who’s set to profit from all this?

Manufacturing companies and USCAP members like Alcoa, Dow Chemical and Dupont want Congress to award them free carbon credits for actions they’ve taken since 1992 to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. - like moving manufacturing operations to other countries. They’ve not reduced their emissions so much as they’ve displaced them.

Other USCAP members include electric utilities like Exelon, Florida Power & Light, and NRG Energy. They use emission-free nuclear power to generate much of their electricity and anticipate having extra carbon credits that they can sell at high prices to major greenhouse gas emitters like coal burning utilities. Wall Street is also a big proponent of cap-and-trade in anticipation of investing in and facilitating the trading of carbon credits. Goldman Sachs, for example, owns part of the Chicago Climate Exchange and European Climate Exchange where carbon credits would be traded.

Many would-be climate profiteers don’t care so much about cap-and-trade per se as they do any legislation that would mandate America’s switch to new and more expensive forms of energy production and energy efficiency. USCAP member General Electric, for example, wants to sell wind turbines, pricey equipment for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired utilities and high-priced but more energy-efficient industrial and consumer products. Al Gore is a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins which, as described in a New York Times Magazine cover story hopes to make billions of dollars of profits off global warming legislation.

Regular Americans who are not part of some global warming special interest group will be paying the price for all this. Expect the price of electricity and gasoline to skyrocket, as well as the prices of goods and services that are produced with energy. Remember the 2007-2008 spike in food prices caused by higher gasoline prices as well as the ethanol mandate? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Much more than mere money is at stake. The global warming mob wants to tell you where to live, what to drive, how many children you can have, what you can eat - all in the name of reducing your carbon footprint. Energy efficiency can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing when it’s forced down your throat, costs you more money than it saves and robs you of your freedoms and dignity.

Action to reduce the dreaded “global” warming, of course, needs to be coordinated on a global basis, hence the need, climate alarmists intimate, for global government. “We are one” was a theme of Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities - disturbingly similar to the Communist Chinese theme for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “One World, One Dream.” While such rhetoric may sound inspiring, the reality is that it is little more than a euphemism for central planning and, ultimately, “the road to serfdom” as economist Friedrich Hayek might say.

America’s strength lies not in its one-ness, but in its diversity of beliefs and efforts. And it will take all our strength in the coming years to combat global warming alarmism and to keep America from falling into the totalitarian green abyss.

Peggy Korth on Cattail Culture

This article by Peggy Korth shows that cattail culture is advancing and we will monitor this. In particular, she is also associated with the marketing of a farm sized ethanol production unit made from off the shelf hardware. I will do a separate column on that. I am posting the article after our correspondence. Her efforts are well worth supporting as she is getting answers.



Hello Robert,

I thought the letter copied below may be of interest. The intent if such messages is to change the false precepts of overzealous informants who do not fully understand climate warming and certainly do not understand the food and fuel concept. Making all kinds of generalized statements about fuel ethanol can be quite detrimental to the use of an excellent fuel. With my system, we remediate both water and soil, we capture carbon dioxide from the air, we restore fallow land, we have ABUNDANT potential per acre for starch and sugar conversion, we have a new product to provide pulp and fiber without chemical farming or killing trees, we promote rural economic development, we provide new jobs and educational training, we provide low-cost safe equipment for the small and mid-sized producer, and the list goes on...

Out of courtesy, please do not quote the names of the recipient of the letter. The magazine did not respond because they want to holler about their point of view instead of finding solutions. In my opinion, unless the complainer is offering advice or alternative solutions, then that message is not constructive. Building hope relates to practical solution that can be implemented by communities and NOT dependent on big business or government.Also after working for fourteen years out of my own pocket, I intend to offer paid services and equipment that I helped forge through my input and support. I give generously to the public. Yet, I also expect the public to be responsible for their own future. In the past I have lived frugally and enjoyed a good professional life. Awakening the hope of the next generation means building a passion to make a difference for their own posterity.

Sustainable Technology Systems, Inc.

Peggy G. Korth, President
40 Sun Valley Dr., Spring Branch TX 78070
Cell: 512 757-4499, 830 885-4823; FAX 830 885-4827
Email: rpk@gvtc.com
September 25, 2008

Gentlemen,

####Over seven years ago I presented a concept to ##### concerning alternatives to corn as co-development. He patted me on the head and said, “Well, maybe someone will listen to you in ten years, but right now corn is king.”

And now people are starting to listen. Our company had developed a propagation and growing methodology to raise over a thousand gallons of fuel ethanol from cattails as a row crop. The limiting factors are wastewater availability, diverting a polluted stream, and/ or land adjacent to or nearby wastewater processing.

Furthermore, the concept of mega-sized production plants is not necessary or practical. Our engineers have developed farm-scale systems for bioenergy with an amalgamation of energy-savings adjuncts such as gasification from waste woody biomass and parabolic solar collectors to provide low-cost functionality.

Your discussion perpetuates a number of myths, as discussed in the recent Texas biofuels conference in Austin last week where we once again gave state officials information on both rhizome and stalk processing from cattail crops.

Numerous alternative crops are available and it is wise to advance small to mid-sized systems that will provide both the farmers and rural communities with a means for self-sufficiency serving first-responders and community based fleets. Your larger systems can serve the public interest if excess fuel is not available. However, our group DOES have a mechanism to impact the controversy and provide biofuels production systems as a real, doable, and affordable safety net to our rural communities.

Thanks you for your interest. Hopefully we can expand your horizons beyond the corn field. Best wishes,

Peggy


Water Assurance Technology Energy Resources—a 501C3 Educational and Research Organization dedicated to Clean air, Clean water, and Clean energy.

Peggy Korth, President 40 Sun Valley Drive, Spring Branch TX, 78070, 512 757-4499, F 830 885-4827, rpk@gvtc.com


Optimize bioenergy, remediate wastewater, and impact soil amelioration for communities through a methodology suitable to global adoption. Merged clean technologies begin with propagating cattails as a row crop adjacent to municipal wastewater treatment. A new applied methodology brings technological innovation to small and mid-sized bioenergy production units suitable for most any community. Abundant and renewable bioenergy provides a safety-net of security for fuel availability in conjunction with low-cost equipment design merging parabolic solar energy, gasification of invasive species, and waste from sewerage additionally reducing toxins, heavy metals, and drugs from wastewater streams. Furthermore, the benefits of building soil from sludge transforms here-to-fore barren land into fertile acres to grow additional energy and non-food crops.

Practical demonstration began with academic studies through a DOE grant. New feasibility studies related to climate influence are scheduled to begin in January 2009 in Otero County New Mexico—a barren desert with brackish ground water and rugged terrain. Forward-thinking town fathers promote systems for long-term renewable energy application. Supported by a conservation alliance, the United States Forest Service shares research and information gathering with our outstanding group of STS specialty associates. Novel industry application implements remediation and watershed services plus value-added benefits in rural economic development, homeland security, and practical solutions to community self-sufficiency. Modern technical application from spent feedstock residue extraction of pulp and fiber from feedstock waste opens new industry opportunities to the building materials and paper industries.

Collaboration with a research division of the University of New Mexico utilizing algae waste assists in soil building demonstrations. Through the efforts of Ms. Korth ‘Cattails to Ethanol’ is favorably embraced by numerous independent researchers and foreign communities. As new feedstock cattails offers over a thousand gallons of fuel ethanol per acre plus numerous benefits to provide ongoing affordable renewable energy.

Feasibility studies provide unique operating formats to bring most any global village into compliance while reducing surface flow pollution diverting contaminated, non-potable water through remediation beds accessed by unique harvesting equipment. By reducing the cost of operations and providing processing equipment that allows incremental expansion, facilities enlarge on a pay-as-you-go plan. Development of the concept began in the early 1980’s with academic validation of the concept.

Expanding that knowledge into additional beneficial processes brings new low-cost practicality to communities sustaining affordable quality-of-life programs and first responder fuel security.

As the principle of an adjunctive association of specialist working through Sustainable

Technology Systems, Inc. Peggy Korth has been featured at the International Fuel Ethanol Workshop and The World Biomass Conference presenting lectures and break-out sessions in How to Implement a Community Feasibility Study and Data Collection Basics, Small Scale Energy and Fuel Production for Farmers and Communities, Alternative Crop Efficiencies as well as developing training curriculum for biofuels programs. Ms. Korth authored two Small Scale bio-energy and Fuel Production text: Cattails to Ethanol and Bioenergy Business supporting producers in their due diligence and presentation preparation. Her compilation of the most comprehensive Bioenergy Glossary is being translated into Spanish. Ms. Korth’s USDA, SARE grant program, Livestock and Feedstock: Distiller’s Grain and Fuel Ethanol, proved dairy application benefits for farmers to produce their own fuel in farming operations. Additional environmental lectures are highlighted in Ms. Korth’s biographical summary which is available upon request.

There are good pictures here but we do not have a address for them so they will likely not survive pasting.

Cattail Culture by Daniel Little

Good item on the use of cattails. My thoughts on harvesting, is that it will need to be mechanized. That is the very good reason it was not a primary food crop of our ancestors. Something like a potato lifter should do it with a pressure line to wash out the mud perhaps.

With the right machinery it will be easy to harvest and ultimately macerate the rhizomes.

The cattail paddy would be harvested in late October after it has been drained and allowed to firm up. And after the stalks and leaves have also been harvested and processed. This harvesting cycle will also allow possible separation of the cattail seed head fiber and the ripe seeds themselves all having recognized value.

This also happens after the mosquitoes are suppressed in northern locales.

I wonder how this plant behaves in the saline waters of the tarsand tailings pond. It would be nice if they could extract the various salts. I doubt if it does much good, but its propensity to work well in sewage ponds is a positive indication.

These folks are wrestling with the economics of operating a coop that could be self sufficient and the prospect of efficiently producing one’s own fuel is critical. They appear to have made real progress.

It is obvious that a starch rich crop easily harvested in the off season like cattails and not competing for food is a valuable addition to the community business plan.

http://changingsociety.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/sustainability-and-biofuel-farming

Sustainability and biofuel farming

James Gustave Speth has written a really important book on sustainability within a modern society. The book is called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability , and it’s an important contribution. One of the most fundamental conclusions that Speth arrives at is the idea that sustainability will require a truly profound transformation of how we think about a “good life,” and a rethinking of the kinds of material circumstances we might aspire to in order to create a world system that is genuinely sustainable.

One way we might try to pursue this line of thought is to consider whether gardens and local biofuel production might provide a basis for more sustainable human activity. Could we use more of our own time and labor to create some of the material necessities of our lives, and do so in a way that imposes a smaller footprint on the world’s energy and resource system?

David Blume was a guest on NPR’s Science Friday on August 15. Blume is the author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century. Blume is an advocate for the idea that alcohol can be a large and ecologically positive component of our modern energy economy (website). And he believes that it is possible to imagine a more decentralized energy economy for the United States in which local producers and distillers satisfy a large percentage of the energy needs of a region.

Blume made an observation that I found intriguing: that the common wetland plant, the cattail, can be a fuel source for producing ethanol. (Here’s a news story on Blume’s comments about cattails on an earlier occasion.) Corn produces about 250-300 gallons of ethanol per acre, and it is estimated that cattails would produce something less than this. (Blume himself estimates that the yield of cattail ethanol production would be “many, many times” that of corn, and says that 7,000 gallons per acre is feasible. This seems unsupportable, given the potential yield of other biofuel crops.) But cattails also have ecological advantages: they soak up excess nutrients (e.g. agricultural fertilizer runoff or sewage waste plant effluent), and they require little cultivation. Here are a few news stories (story, story) with some interesting background.

So here’s the question: what would be involved in creating a community that is energy self-sufficient based on ethanol production? Could households grow their own fuels? What would the economics of a cooperative community-based distillery look like? How much land, labor, and money would be required for the household?

It should be noted that there is serious disagreement about the most basic features of the commercial ethanol economy: does ethanol production lead to a net gain in energy, or do the inputs into the cultivation and distilling processes exceed the energy content of the resulting volume of alcohol? Here’s a discussion at FuturePundit and a summary of the findings of a national expert, David Pimental from Cornell University. Here are the central conclusions of a recent study by Pimentel and Tad Patzek at UC-Berkeley:

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California- Berkeley study. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”
(Other studies reach a very different conclusion. See a summary of studies on the energy balance of current ethanol production on this Oregon website.)

But still, let’s think it through a bit. The scenario I’m imagining is labor-intensive and local, so the costs of energy associated with mechanization and transportation are reduced or eliminated. Could we imagine a local energy economy based on crops and distillation that could be fitted into an otherwise acceptable lifestyle? (The analysis will begin to sound like Piero Sraffa’s exercise, Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory .)

A family’s energy budget might look something like this, estimated in gallons of ethanol:

transportation 800 gallons (10,000 miles)
cooking 300 gallons (365 days)
heating 1000 gallons (180 heating days)
illumination 100 gallons (365 days)
refrigeration 200 gallons

This adds up to 2,400 gallons of ethanol required for a year’s energy use. But we aren’t finished yet, because cultivation and distillation also have an energy cost, and this cost is a function of the volume of alcohol required. Let’s take a more optimistic estimate than that provided by Pimental above, and assume that the energy cost of distillation is 30%. (We’re working with a coop, after all!) To produce a gallon of ethanol we have to expend .3 gallons in the distillation process. And let’s assume that cultivation is done by hand without mechanization, but that the crop needs to be transported to the distillation facility at a 10% cost. (That is, I assume that the net transportation cost of transporting the thousands of pounds of feed crop to the processor is 10% of the net alcohol product of the crop.) These estimates imply that the household requires 4,000 gallons of alcohol.

Now assume that the alcohol yield of an acre of cattails is 250 gallons; this implies a fuel farm size of 16 acres. (It would be nice to extend the exercise to include a food garden as well; this is left for the reader! Here’s an interesting United Nations article from the 1980s on the economics of family gardening that can help get the analysis started.)

Now how many hours of labor time need to be devoted to cultivating and harvesting this crop? Evidently cattails don’t require much by way of fertilizers, irrigation, and pest control. But I’m sure there is some level of maintenance needed, and 16 acres is a large area. In fact, it represents a rectangular plot that is 200 feet by 3,500 feet — more than half a mile long. So let’s assume that basic maintenance of the cattail crop requires 2 hours a day of adult labor. The large investment of labor, however, occurs at the harvest. About 14,000 pounds of cattails will be harvested per acre, or 224,000 pounds for the farm over the course of the harvest. If we assume that an adult can harvest 200 pounds per hour, this represents 1,120 hours of harvest work. Let’s assume that harvesting can be spread out over a couple of four-week periods or 56 days; this implies 20 hours of adult labor per day during the harvest season. So it would take 10 hours a day, 7 days a week during the eight weeks of harvest season for two adults to harvest this volume of cattails. Two months of very hard work devoted to harvesting will eventually produce enough ethanol to support the household’s chief energy needs.

Now what about the economics of the cooperative’s distillery? If we assume a cooperative involving 100 households of the scale just discussed, the distillery needs to process 22,400,000 pounds of material in order to produce 400,000 gallons of ethanol. The households will be farming an area of 1,600 acres of cattails — about three square miles. And the system will be supporting the energy needs of about 500 people. If we keep our assumption of a 30% ratio of input-to-output, this process will consume 120,000 gallons of ethanol. The coop members will need to fund the purchase and maintenance of the still and the labor costs associated with operation of the still. Perhaps it’s a labor coop too? In this case, each household will need to devote several hours a week to work in the distillery. And we might imagine that the coop would require a “tax” of some small percentage of the alcohol produced to cover maintenance and operating expenses. Here’s a research article from AGRIS that examines the costs of a small distillery of roughly this size. The conclusion is somewhat discouraging: “The analysis indicates that the distillery would not be profitable at current prices for corn and ethanol.” In other words, the cost of inputs and operation of the distillery exceed the value of the alcohol produced, according to this analysis. But this conclusion isn’t quite relevant to our scenario, because the raw materials are not purchased through the market and the product is not sold on the market. Nonetheless, the finding implies that there’s a shortfall somewhere; and it may well be that it is the unpaid labor of the fuel farmers that is where the shortfall occurs.

So here’s the upshot of this back-of-the-envelope calculation: it would be a major commitment of land and labor for a household or a village community to achieve energy self-sufficiency through cooperative-based ethanol distillation. And I’ve made an assumption I can’t justify: that the energy input to the distillation process is 30% of the energy content of the resulting quantity of ethanol. If that ratio is 60% instead of 30%, then the land and labor requirements for each household are greatly increased; and if the ratio approaches or exceeds 100%, then the whole idea falls apart. But even on these assumptions, the life style associated with this model sounds a lot closer to that of a peasant village in medieval France or traditional China than to that of a modern US citizen. It involves hard physical labor during several months of the year and a moderate level of labor effort during the remainder of the year. And if we imagine that the scenario is extended by incorporating a substantial amount of food gardening for family consumption, then the balance of necessary labor to free labor tips even further in the direction of the peasant economy.