No Corn For Oil!

We really need to ban ethanol from corn, because there is a growing food crisis from two bad crop years and its driving up food prices. The idea of using food crops fior energy is a bad one to begin with. There are plenty of alternatives.

As I’ve said before, switchgrass is the answer. It’s cheaper to grow, takes less energy and less pesticides and fertilizer and it can grow on land unsuitable for farming. It’s really a win/win kid of fuel source. But how good is it? Better than I thought.

On paper, making biofuels from switchgrass and other perennials that need not be replanted seems like a no-brainer. Use the sun’s energy to grow the crop, and then convert it to liquid fuels to power our cars without the need for gasoline. But so far, experiments with these “cellulosic” crop-based fuels have only been conducted on small scales, leaving open the question of how feasible the strategy is. Now, the first large-scale study shows that switchgrass yields more than five times the energy needed to grow, harvest, and transport the grass and convert it to ethanol. The results could propel efforts to sow millions of hectares of marginal farmland with biofuel crops.

Previous studies on switchgrass plots suggested that ethanol made from the plant would yield anywhere from 343% to 700% of the energy put into growing the crop and processing it into biofuel. But these studies were based on lab-scale plots of about 5 square meters. So 6 years ago, Kenneth Vogel, a geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Lincoln, Nebraska, and colleagues set out to enlist farmers for a much larger evaluation. Farmers planted switchgrass on 10 farms, each of which was between 3 and 9 hectares. They then tracked the inputs they used--diesel for farm equipment and transporting the harvested grasses, for example--as well as the amount of grass they raised over a 5-year period. After crunching the numbers, Vogel and his colleagues found that ethanol produced from switchgrass yields 540% of the energy used to grow, harvest, and process it into ethanol. Equally important, the researchers found that the switchgrass is carbon neutral, as it absorbs essentially the same amount of greenhouse gases while it’s growing as it emits when burned as fuel.

Now, you know I don’t put much stock (if any) in the whole carbon thing. But that doesn’t mean I’m not for reasonable alternatives. And this option is vastly more logical than using corn, which costs more to grow than the energy it produces.

More info on switchgrass here.

UPDATE: The BBC concurs

Ah, but switchgrass doesn’t have Archer Daniels Midland behind it...whose home base is Illinois...which is the birth-state of Hillary Clinton.

Posted by Dave Marron  on  01/08  at  01:01 PM

Yes, the corn lobby is behind all that ethanol nonsense. But they could grow switchgrass more profitably.

Posted by  on  01/08  at  01:42 PM

The whole Energy In Vs Energy Out equation just makes this look like a dumb idea.

Posted by  on  01/09  at  07:53 AM

Acotts,

Are you referring to Switchgrass or Corn?

Posted by  on  01/09  at  08:14 AM

I was reffering to corn.

Cellulosic technology still has a long way to go before it is a credible technology.

For the most part, it has not been invented yet. If farmers switched to switchgrass, then they would have nothing to do with it.  At least corn can be eaten.

Also, do any of these papers take water issues into concern?

Posted by  on  01/09  at  09:03 AM

There would be no call to grow switchgrass unless there was a demand. if there was a demand, then they would obviously have something to do with it.

Water is going to be an issue with any kind of crop.

Posted by  on  01/09  at  09:14 AM

I hear you. I was just pointing out that the technology has not been invented yet. 

Its kind of like saying that we should replace all nuke plants with cold-fusion plants becuase, on paper, they are far more effieint and produce more energy.

Its true. but it hasn’t been invented yet.

Posted by  on  01/09  at  09:31 AM

They can make ethanol from sugar cane, so why not switchgrass?

Posted by  on  01/09  at  09:58 AM

Sadly, we don’t have the climate for growing the amount of sugarcane we’d need. Even if we turned ALL of Hawaii into sugarcane fields, it wouldn’t be enough...and the shipping costs alone would be prohibitive.

Posted by Dave Marron  on  01/09  at  10:56 AM

No, what I was asking was, if we can make fuel from sugar cane why not switch grass. Sugar cane is a kind of grass. Switchgrass is equally woody.

It seems to me we have the technology already.

Posted by  on  01/09  at  12:14 PM

Corn and Sugar use the old fashioned fermentation process that farmers have known about for thousands of years.

In the fermentation process, you use only the kernels, or the sugar cane, and the rest gets thrown away (or used inefficiently to heat the boiler.) So, you measure its value by comparing its sugars to woody mass ratio.  In the US, corn is numero uno. There is not greater concentration of starchy/sugary calories in any plant on the earth.  Meanwhile, switch grass has a very bad sugar to woody mass ration.  In fact, it pretty all woody mass.

The Cellulosic process breaks down lignocellulose-- the starch that makes plant cells more rigid. So, using a much more complicated process, it turns the whole plant into ethanol. For the most part, this can be done to any plant.

To find the best plant, you are looking to find what plant absorbs the most solar energy (always a grass) yet still has some sugars in it to jumpstart the process. The sugars give the process a boost. Either you add it as a substrate, or you get it from the plant.

So here is the simple of it

Switchgrass has a high cellulosic content and some sugars
Good for gasifying/hydrolyzing; Bad for fermenting.

Sugarcane and Corn have high sugar/starch content and okay cellulosic content.
Okay for gasifying/hydrolyzing; Great for fermenting.

-Testify

Posted by  on  01/09  at  01:28 PM
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