Exxon spinoff thread.
 

Can plants power cars?
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/27/0432/3533

Sustainability, Energy Independence and Agricultural Policy
Other, less-serious problems have been dealt with far more competently. The USA had a plan for achieving the goal of saving the peregrine falcon and bald eagle from DDT, and another for saving the world's ozone layer from halocarbon emissions. Both of these were carried forward both domestically and internationally, with considerable success on both programs. Given the last ten years of concern about global warming and three decades of concern over energy supplies, you would expect something similar would be in the works for those also. Something broad-based and serious:

* A self-sustaining system which replaces petroleum-based fuels in the short term, and all fossil fuels eventually.
* Productivity high enough to eliminate the displaced fuels without major land-use or other changes.
* A shift toward a neutral carbon and GHG balance, or even a negative net balance.

You can look through our initiatives from last year's energy bill through the previous three administrations, and you wouldn't find anything like this. Nothing in our current energy "policy" even aims squarely at these goals, let alone has a prospect of meeting them (though Carter and Clinton/Gore do deserve credit for thinking about it).

It looks like we could do a lot, with the right engineering backed by supportive policies. What would you say if I told you that we could use biomass to:

* Replace all the petroleum used by the ground-transport sector (55% or more)?
* Replace all the natural gas used by the electric-generation sector (about 1/3 of US natural gas consumption)?
* Replace every pound of coal burned for electricity (about 90% of all US coal consumption)?
* Eliminate over 1.2 billion tons of carbon emissions (4.4 billion tons of CO2) from oil and coal.

All that, and have some left over. I believe we could, and I'll illustrate how (with numbers!) below. But to understand where we need to go, we should first see where we are and how we got here.

[/QUOTE]

The whole thing is such a joke to begin with.
How many developments and programs suggesting alternative energy
have been shut down during the past decades. Particularly by the 'oil-lobby' and ironically through the legislative branches of governments.

To debate, as it shows, at the dawn of the 3rd Millenium, crude oil and it's products, as more or less the only liable energy source, is like a spit in the face.

Oil is as obsolete, as it can possibly be, by all means of any standards, as a subject of heated debate, as well as an energy source.

It continues to be most profitable for those who run the show and we pay the price.

Not even to mention, the devastation left behind, for generations to come, environmentally and sociologically.

I guess by now, 2007, everybody who is half way through Highschool should know that, but maybe not.

... I wish, I had a, gallon of gas, ... for every, excess comma... and ellipsis....

B

I was just listening to NPR, and they reported that EXXon-Mobil just offered large cash incentives to any scientist whom would write a report that rebuffs the UN's recent report on "global climate change."

Ohh well, I guess I'm going back to rotella.:rolleyes:

If sheep are slaughtered by their shepards is it unusual.
Their idealic life is nothing to flee from.
Oil is as obsolete, as the smell of bacon in the cardiac ward.
It is a chosen killer readly accepted in light of the gifts it bears, dam the surgeon general and eggs with that.
What would you have us do?
Walk back into the jungle and live like apes?
Who has shown that the extinction of man tomorrow would not lead to seas 15 feet greater in 100 years.
Who has shown that burning every pound and every drop of sequestered product would lead to one flood?
The one inescapable element in the equation is that any socioty devoted to the exploitation of a cache of canned food shall one day have to learn to farm, hunt, and fish again or perrish.

All in all you're just
Another brick In the wall.

I've got morter on me fingers.

So, anyone read the article in the link?
I think it's a pretty well thought solution for a bio fueled future though I'm sure the econimics could use some hard scrutiny.

...excerpt
 

"First thing, you turn the biomass into charcoal. This doesn't take sophisticated equipment; it can be made simple, rugged and cheap (though it can always be improved). The process takes biomass and compressed air (or heated gas of some kind). Its products are:

Hot medium-BTU fuel gas (the content of heavy molecules such as tars depends on the operating conditions; hotter operation breaks down heavier molecules).
Charcoal, amounting to as much as 30% of the dry weight of the input biomass.
A 30% (ashless) yield of carbon would contain about 50% of the energy of the original biomass. The remaining 50% would come off as heat and chemical energy in the gas. The simplest processes for making charcoal do it by burning some of the input fuel, but this can be improved. If the carbonization process was driven partly by external or recycled heat, less energy would be expended in combustion; the net energy yield in the gas would shift away from heat toward chemical energy (and total energy yield of charcoal+gas could exceed 100% of the heat of combustion of the biomass). Medium-BTU gas isn't easily transported, but it can be used at the site of production to good effect.

There are several uses for fuel gas, but one of the best is making electricity. Hot combustible gas is more or less what an SOFC runs on. GE and Delphi have been developing small SOFC's for automotive applications, and both recently beat the $300/kW price barrier. Efficiency is 49% and headed upward. If we assume that:

1.72 billion tons per year of biomass is carbonized.
This biomass has 15.8 million BTU/dry ton of energy (27.1 quads total energy).
53.5% of the energy is yielded as charcoal (30% by weight).
88% of the remainder is yielded as chemical energy in hot gas (11.1 quads gas + 1.51 quads reaction heat + recycled heat).
The gas can be converted to electricity at 50% efficiency.
The electric yield from the processing of the gas would be 5.55 quads, or 1620 billion kilowatt-hours. This is more than twice the US electric generation from natural gas (~750 billion kWh), and more than 1/2 of the total US electric generation from all fossil fuels. In short, all non-renewable natural gas generation could be replaced by energy from the carbonization stage, and a large chunk of the coal-fired generation as well.

But that's not the end of it! The process also produces charcoal; at 30% yield, 1.72 billion tons of input would leave about 515 million tons of output. Charcoal can be used for fuel, as a soil amendment or as a feedstock for further processing. Gasified charcoal would produce fewer pollutants than gasified coal and could be used for power generation or production of nitrogen fertilizer. But the most efficient option appears to be use in direct-carbon fuel cells (DCFC's). Up to 80% of the chemical energy of the charcoal can be turned into electricity in DCFC's (and the byproduct heat is still useful).

Charcoal is like coal, only more stable. Charcoal is the product of a high-temperature process, and is missing most of the hydrogen and volatile chemicals of coal. It can be heaped and stored for weeks to thousands of years; charcoal from ancient forest and camp fires allows prehistoric events to be dated. It is a valuable addition to soil, creating the fertile "terra preta"4 of the notoriously nutrient-poor Amazon rainforest. It's perhaps the ultimate answer to irregular supplies of renewable energy. An annual supply of 515 million short tons of charcoal fed to DCFC's would produce roughly 3400 billion kilowatt-hours of energy. This is more than the total US generation from fossil fuels, and about 84% of the total electric energy consumed in the USA in 2005; together with the generation from the gas, it could conceivably replace every kilowatt-hour we now use, from the trivial amounts made by solar to the entire contribution of coal, with about 25% extra to play with.

It wouldn't be wise to replace everything with biomass energy, of course; throwing away diversity of supply means reducing security. But it shows just how much potential we've got, if we only start using it."
http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/sustain_plantflow.gif

more:
 

http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/sustain_biofuel1.gif
"Knowing where to look

Take another look at those graphs above. One thing should strike everyone: a whale of a lot of energy is lost in conversions. The average refinery makes gasoline with 83% efficiency, but engines are so inefficient that more energy goes to refining losses than pushing the vehicle. An ethanol engine is potentially more efficient than the gasoline equivalent, but the conversion from biomass to ethanol loses so much that it takes more biomass energy than crude oil to do the same job! Biomass gasification may be more efficient than Iogen's hydrolization and fermentation, but even a 70%-efficient process yields barely 18% end-to-end efficiency at best. Still, the available energy from biomass looks to be several times the energy we actually use from crude oil. The conclusions are inescapable:

1. There is sufficient biomass energy to replace motor fuel and then some... if the energy is not wasted.
2. Using bio-ethanol in piston engines means taking between 4/5 and 9/10 of the captured energy and throwing it away.
3. Even burning biomass as a replacement for e.g. coal in conventional powerplants means 60% losses or more.
4. It looks impossible to grow enough biomass to take that path.
5. The old paradigm won't work any more. A new systems approach is required.
6. The essence of a successful system will be fewer conversions and minimizing losses.

The potential is enormous. If we can manage to get our hands on 20-odd quads worth of biomass each year, we could replace huge amounts of other demand. Here's a short list of what actually makes it to useful form:

* 17 quads of gasoline into 3-odd quads of useful work.
* 6 quads of diesel fuel into perhaps 2.4 quads of useful work.
* 6.7 quads of natural gas into 2.57 quads of electricity.
* 21 quads of coal into 6.88 quads of electricity.

The useful work we get out of all of these things comes to roughly 15 quads, far less than the 20-odd quads of biofuels we could get; the problem is getting enough of it in useful form. The key to a renewable economy is efficiency, and efficiency is one thing we aren't pushing hard enough. We could certainly do better. But none of this will change as long as people benefit more from the status quo."

I wish you would quit insisting on hijacking my threads.

Bio fuels raise global dilemas.