In New York, Vinod Khosla and Big Oil started a “food fight” at the Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference, where Khosla accused the American Petroleum Institute for linking food price increases to ethanol production, saying “The API started issuing press releases about food. Suddenly they got interested in the welfare of poor Africans.”
The Brazil bioethanol production has also been critizied for its food-connection. We had a case in Finland where the ALTIA ethanol plant program was discontinued due to the "rising price of metals (China) and locally produced crops in the area". The huge demand for water was also discussed.
“We have never said anything about ethanol being responsible for food prices,” said American Petroleum Institute President Red Cavaney. “It was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in recent Congressional testimony who linked a 4.5% increase in food prices to rising worldwide demand and the amount of corn going to ethanol.”
Who says what?
Khosla suggested government rules mandating that service stations dispensing more than $5 million worth of fuel a year should have E85 pumps. Recently, “Vinod you are still totally clueless” and “there will be pie in the sky by-and-by” were among comments hurled at Khosla in response to a three-part series of articles posted at Grist.
Figthing for distribution rights...Consumers make their decisions at the pump, right!
The second series focused on Biomass, including regulatory standards , “better agronomy for energy crops” , and “cellulosic ethanol yields“.
Cellulosic ethanol yield is a big issue in Finland. We're trying to get in grips with this movement. New ideas about improving they yield are circulating in the visionary meetings, but the basics are still handled by F-P technology.
Among dozens of responses, writers accused Khosla turning “self delusion” on carbon cycles into a “mass delusion”, adding comments such as “cellulosic ethanol is such BS and that’s not just for the fertilizer.”
Cellulosic ethanol...what is new?
Among other proposals, Khosla endorsed a CLAW standard for sustainable production of biomass:
- C — COST below gasoline
- L — low to no additional LAND use; benefits for using degraded land to restore biodiversity and organic material
- A — AIR quality improvements, i.e. low carbon emissions
- W — limited WATER use,
Cellulosic ethanol...from harvesting residuals and the roots. First thinnings can also be used for this purpose. However, the day will come when fertilizers have to be brought back to the woods.
3 comments:
So Vinod is getting some heated returns from this particular audience, huh?
Actually, he means well - and is anchoring his chances at financial success by using his money cache to fund technologies all over the mat. One r two of em' will likely rise above the pack. Yet it is rather obvious that he himself doesn't even seem to know which one or via what technological mechanism...
Where he's making his biggest mistake is in suggesting that Farmers plant ANYTHING for new biofuel production.
What Vinod and most folks don't assimilate is that it isn't switch grass or miscanthus or sugar cane or corn kernals which produce ethanol - it is the carbon atoms contained within these various feedstocks. Same carbon atoms in corn kernals are also contained in charcoal, coal, natural gas, CO2 greenhouse gas, tires, garbage, sewer sludge or forestry wastes. And to access these other carbonaceous feedstocks (mostly wastes) you don't have to plant any new crop, fertilize it with petrochemical fertilizers, copiously water it with fresh water and harvest it once a year with diesel tractors.
Instead, maybe run a diesel front-end loader into your community's leaching landfill and start unearthing all this carbon garbage resource. But you've got to change the chemistry sets here regarding how to then process the garbage carbon into valuable, biodegradable new fuels. There is more out there than simply grain ethanol or biodiesel these daze.
The angle here is to change the technical mechanism in order to first isolate that carbon atom from waste (or crops) and not inefficiently use enzymes and biobugs or yeasts to accomplish this process of isolating carbon building blocks and re-arranging these atoms into new fuels. This is the typical process for corn-ethanol (a 4-day batch) or ligno-cellulosic ethanol producing maybe 40% the volumes via a 7-day batch process where one third of the batches are contaminated by mother nature's own bugs.
Instead, switch to 150 yr. old steam reformation of rather abundant carbonaceous gasses like methane or CO2 and also switch to german-type solids gasifiers which are about 90 yrs. old now to handle solid feedstocks. Gasification will efficiently isolate that elemental carbon from society's waste streams including petroleum coke refinery bottoms on a continous 24x7 basis. Think about converting society's daily waste streams INSTEAD of growing an acre of anything for it's carbon content to convert into alternative fuels. The current food vs: fuel issue has risen it's ugly head far faster than even insiders had realized that it would. Going from 4 bgpy to 7ish bgpy of ethanol in two years is what has accomplished this.
Please interpret just a little of what I'm saying here.
A bushel of petroleum coke bottoms or municipal sewer sludge contains more carbon atoms than does a $5 bushel of corn kernals.
Just switch the chemistry sets over to something new using steam as a front-end process driver to isolate that residual carbon content before using catalysis as a second step in order to re-arrange elemental carbon and hydrogen plus necessary and very beneficial oxygen derived from water into new alcohols. There exist more alcohols beyond only ethanol.
Please beware of anything being promoted like "iso-butanol." The "iso" correctly refers to a branched molecule which mother nature's bugs can't digest and utilize as a food source - same thing as was molecularly wrong with MTBE. Oil refiner's MTBE worked as a competing oxygenate to agri-ethanol. The MTBE diluted in water which was good - but it didn't biodegrade. Nature's micro-organisms couldn't eat and thus break down a more complex tertiary carbon bond in the MTBE molecule so it persisted in the groundwater. Consider that something new called iso-butanol is NOT 4-carbon single-chained (n) butanol here. OK?
I wish Vinod were more upfront concerning what one of his companies is doing using methods I've just described above to process and convert forestry waste/wood chips from Georgia. They are presently pulling the wool over everybody's eyes in labeling this GTL (gas-to-liquids) synthetic fuels process as "ligno-cellulosic ethanol" in order to secure a $76M DOE grant which is REAL money here. I and other attorneys are waiting to see them output pure ASTM ethanol as they've been quoted as saying -- so that they don't otherwise infringe on fuel formula patents not belonging to them.
There is soooo much going on in the world of biofuels wherein over one-half of the new alternative fuels won't even biodegrade such as "biodiesel" produced from waste french fry grease or from acres of planted/harvested soybeans. Hey, biodiesel may be sulfur free - but it still floats on this planet's water bodies just like any other crude oil spill does. And it's uncombusted emissions still phase-separate in this planet's atmosphere of water vapor just like petroleum diesel emissions - and both of them form urban smog (simply unburned oils) the real precursor to climate-change phenomena.
The secret to the biodegrability function is to integrate oxygen into the alternative fuel and when this happens - it becomes an alcohol or oxycarbon and not a float-on-water oil - thus hydrocarbon.
People who hand out the gov't grants don't seem to understand this basic global biodegradable element either as is quite evident. Your first question when hearing about any new alternative fuel scheme is to ask yourself (A) - is this alternative fuel biodegradable? Then remember that all oils, even edible extra virgin oil in your salad dressing will still phase separate from water and not readily biodegrade. Same as a oceanic spill of crude oil washing up on the beach, fouling wildlife, sealife, etc.
Answering this basic biodegradability question thus eliminates biodiesel, synthetic diesel, synthetic kerosene jet fuel and synthetic gasoline. It also eliminates "iso"butanol now being promoted by a company who is doing genetic manipulation of ecoli biobugs. Please don't get lost in the forest of newfound hope - simply realize a few third-grade earth chemistry basics along the way while realizing that a suitable solution may be near-term. Even if the billionaire who is supporting it doesn't know the difference between batch fermentation, promotion of acres of new switchgrass vs: cleanly harvesting and converting society's waste streams for it's basic carbon content.
Gary Bridge
Dear Gary Bridge,
thank you for a very detailed comment. We've a team of scientists in Finland thinking about alternative ways of building bioreactors. I asked Elias Hakalehto and Juha Mentu to write their comments to your very interesting comments.
Bioreactors has been one of the themes in our internal Basecamp discussion.
* Altea’s project in Finland didn’t get started
* Biodiesel pilots StoraEnso + Neste and UPM and Andritz
* The forestry giants talk about full scale units costing 200 to 250 mio. euro.
This is one of my Biotouch Basecamp entries...
Ethanol may not be much of a long-term energy solution, but it has been one heck of a short-term solution for farming profitability.
Because ethanol production is booming, so is demand for corn. Rising demand means rising prices, which makes corn farmers very happy…maybe too happy.
Corn farming has become so enticing, that many farmers are ignoring the age-old imperative to rotate their corn crops with soybeans. Corn on corn is the new craze in grain-growing country.
Read more about "ethanol":http://www.agorafinancialpublications.com/RudeAwakening/RAissues/2007/JulAug/RA071707.html
I'd like to introduce you to Juha Mentu:
Pulp, Paper, Board and Packaging Microbiologist
This blog contains novel ideas for the development of paper industry microbiology. Traditional methods, despite their important role in the selection of harmful microbes from process and product samples, does not fulfil the needs of modern HACCP and process stability control. Faults in the process management as well as in the QC of products can cause hazardous situations for the economy of production as well as for the safety of employers, customers and environment.
and Elias Hakalehto:
"The PMEU makes it possible to see the life of microbes in real time situations. We have been using it in many connections in my company Finnoflag Oy. This method provides a new approach to food microbiology, clinical studies, bioprocess development, environmental monitoring, hospital hygiene, and various other relevant fields.
An improved understanding on the life of microbe cells as living organisms will add a lot to our understanding on any field, such as paper and pulp microbiology. We need rigorous development work, and this has now been instrumentated.
Best Greetings,
Elias Hakalehto, Docent in Biotechnical Microbe Analytics"
Juha Mentu Wed, 19 Mar at 9:59 PM
commented this writing in our internal Basecamp.
Juha: This is very interesting!It seems that a combination of political issues and knowledge of bioethanol / biodiesel production must be interconnected. There are so many issues like
* food production
* food prices
* politics
* conversion of wood (cellulose with other woodborne compounds) to biodiesel / bioethanol
* organic, wood-derived compounds for diesel fuels
* biotechnical methods for the conversion of wood fractions into fermentable sugars (-> bioethanol)
* some other fractions of “wood refinery” for fuel usage
* taxes (“diesel tax” in Finland makes no sense anymore!)
* and
* so
* on
It seems that this is a wide area containing great enthusiasm, scientific interests and political opinions. I shall start following discussions about this topic because I see clearly beneficial forecasts for bioethanol / biodiesel production.
Helge: I added Juha's comment to this blog.
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