Sugar-based ethanol stateside – finally

Cripes – now the price of me rum will go up as well as me gas and corn.

“no more sugar in my coffee”

Growing crops for fuel will always always always be a really bad idea. It may be OK to make cellulosic ethanol from other biomass such as corn husks and stalks. However, specifically growing any crops of any type for fuel will always put food for poor people in competition with fuel for rich people.

Anyone care to guess who’ll win?

Traded a few e-mails Dvorak about this very thing a couple months ago. Sugarbeets and Sugar Cane are #2 & 3 in yield for ethanol where corn is something like 22nd

#5 – Olo Baggins of Bywater,

In addition, how long can the soil provide the nutrients necessary to grow these high-energy crops before it is completely depleted, leaving us with wasteland?

Excellent question. However, that one applies to any crops on any soil. We are depleting our top soil as well as our aquifers. When either runs out, the dust bowl begins.

I have THE solution: Take all the fat from the overweight people in north America, feed that through pyrolysis and produce diesel. This way, we will save money with less overweight people, create job for liposuction specialist, save the food for the people, save on gas because the less overweight you are the less you consume and more happy people… What do you think?

OK, just dump the sugar subsidies. Last I checked, growing sugar was harming the environment in the Everglades, but now environmentalists are cheering?

Pardon the typo
fructure = fructose

Hemp is the better solution.

Great to see this as Louisiana has the climate and land to support sugar cane. Onward to cleaner and renewable fuel sources and innovation!!

Our nations biggest to solving our energy problems is to let all the moronic excuses, inertia, special interest and negative sally’s get in the way.

#19 – me,

The following line should not have been in italics. It is my comment, not bobbo’s. I must’ve missed a close tag.

Excellent point. These are also severe problems with growing crops for fuel.

#21 – bobbo,

Nobody grows food for the poor people or to grow it to lower prices. I don’t think anyone is starving in Brazil from a lack of food==if anything, some can’t afford what is already available and farmers have no interest in growing more and reducing their per unit profit.

No. But people have farms. They can grow food crops or fuel crops. When too many choose fuel because the price is higher, food becomes more scarce and expensive. We are already seeing some of this.

BUT–the notion of not destroying the rain forrest is a good idea we have in the West==the Brazilians are busy destroying their forrest as reapidly as we did ours, as is China, as is India?

Almost exactly right. You just missed the point that we are still clear cutting huge swaths of our own rainforests (temperate rainforests) in Alaska. Many acres have been given back to native Americans since they were managing them for thousands of years. Unfortunately, they’re just people like you and me and will also go for the quick short term profit of clear cutting forest. Humans suck.

I can’t wait for 2-3-4 more advances in solar conversion. Love to know where we would be had solar been fast tracked 40 years ago??

Why wait? PVCs are getting a lot better already. And, concentrated solar is even better. Another great source is simply using solar to heat water and store hot water underground. That water can then be fed to our conventional power plants which will require a lot less fuel to heat the water the last few degrees and then burn dramatically less fuel.

We’ve got the technology. We just need the revenue neutral carbon tax (or I’d settle for carbon trading) to jump start the financial investment.

“To the Future, and beyond!!”

To the future! (What little there is left of it for us apes.)

>>So, in a real way, as Mustard has obnoxiously
>>posted, higher gas prices even if artificial
>>thru taxes or cartels, is motivating the
>>switch to alternative energy.

Don’t be kissing Scottie’s ass too much now, Bobbolina.

HE was the one who first posted that idea. My contribution to the discussion was merely to agree with him.

Hey, I may be obnoxious, but at least I khow the general rules of punctuation.

#24 – Mister Mustard,

>>So, in a real way, as Mustard has obnoxiously
>>posted, higher gas prices even if artificial
>>thru taxes or cartels, is motivating the
>>switch to alternative energy.

Don’t be kissing Scottie’s ass too much now, Bobbolina.

HE was the one who first posted that idea. My contribution to the discussion was merely to agree with him.

Yeah. Sounds like me I’ll take the credit/blame for that as well as the moniker obnoxious. I’ve been called much worse.

Hey, I may be obnoxious, but at least I khow the general rules of punctuation.

But, do you khow how to spell? Or, are you merely ignoring your Firefox 3 spell checker?

And, for that matter, your statement if correctly punctuated and spelled, might be:

Hey, I may be obnoxious. But, at least I know the general rules of punctuation.

I think we all get a bit lax sometimes. bobbo just invents his own rules for punctuation and then enforces strict dictionary definitions on words. bobbo, you might really want to think about that dichotomy a bit and convert to more standard use of punctuation. It seems to put a lot of people off on this blog. It’s just a suggestion; it’s your call, of course. I’ve actually gotten abused to your punctuation style by now.

#27–raf==thats the most interesting bit of info I have seen in years. I wonder why its not being put in place right now? What are the negatives if any? THANKS.

#26==Scott==I think Mustard’s punctuation is more standard than your own? Your first sentence strikes me more as a dependent phrase. But, that could be just me===no, it is certainly ME!!

Punctuation? Rules: “and the priests in black gowns, were making their rounds, and binding with briars, my joys and desires.”

#29–Scott==its good we can argue the degree of Mustard’s incompetence without him even having to contribute much. We may be on the verge of another religion?

Now, its interesting how you parallel the same construction with your response and yours seems right, while Mustards does too?

Do you read Steven Pinker at all? Psycho-Linguistic Prof at Harvard. Good stuff.

So, I think my sentence was a question, and as such should end with a question mark. I was in fact not being conclusionary and was asking for confirmation. A matter of emphasis and flexibility. In fact, I see I could legitimately end every sentence in this paragraph with a question mark. The punctuation DOES change the meaning, so by wanting to change my punctuation, you want to change what I say.

That piece of poetry is one of my favorites. I read the poem once, and it has stuck with me forever. I used to think it was Archibald MacLiesh, but I think his poem was on the opposite page. Its Yeats, or Keats, or Yates–cant keep those (romance?) poets separate.

Dont miss the link in #27–its fantastic.

#31 Scott,

Many thanks for that

I just tried to makee a terse reference to a terrific finding (via reddit.com BTW) Of course I’ve missed things.

One of those would be that you could build a power station that would burn the algae fat in some gas turbine, and the resulting CO2 + H2O would go back into the algae reactor.

One thing that is not explained in the video is how the CO2 is fed into the bioreactor.

Another thing is the carbohidrates + proteins subproducts that could be used as fertiliser / cattle feed / ethanol…

There are other algae biofuel companies:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/algal-biofuels-klm-cruise-ships.php

But they use open ponds instead of controlled bioreactors.

It does need SUNLIGHt though… B-)

ETHANOL-PRODUCTION WITH BLUE-GREEN-ALGAE
A SOLUTION AFTER PEAK-OIL AND OIL-CRASH

University of Hawai’i Professor Pengchen “Patrick” Fu developed an innovative technology, to produce high amounts of ethanol with modified cyanobacterias, as a new feedstock for ethanol, without entering in conflict with the food and feed-production .

Fu has developed strains of cyanobacteria — one of the components of pond scum — that feed on atmospheric carbon dioxide, and produce ethanol as a waste product.

He has done it both in his laboratory under fluorescent light and with sunlight on the roof of his building. Sunlight works better, he said.

It has a lot of appeal and potential. Turning waste into something useful is a good thing. And the blue-green-algae needs only sun and wast- recycled from the sugar-cane-industry, to grow and to produce directly more and more ethanol. With this solution, the sugarcane-based ethanol-industry in Brazil and other tropical regions will get a second way, to produce more biocombustible for the worldmarket.

The technique may need adjusting to increase how much ethanol it yields, but it may be a new technology-challenge in the near future.

The process was patented by Fu and UH in January, but there’s still plenty of work to do to bring it to a commercial level. The team of Fu foundet just the start-up LA WAHIE BIOTECH INC. with headquarter in Hawaii and branch-office in Brazil.

PLAN FOR AN EXPERIMENTAL ETHANOL PLANT

Fu figures his team is two to three years from being able to build a full-scale
ethanol plant, and they are looking for investors or industry-partners (jointventure).

He is fine-tuning his research to find different strains of blue-green algae that will produce even more ethanol, and that are more tolerant of high levels of ethanol. The system permits, to “harvest” continuously ethanol – using a membrane-system- and to pump than the blue-green-algae-solution in the Photo-Bio-Reactor again.

Fu started out in chemical engineering, and then began the study of biology. He has studied in China, Australia, Japan and the United States, and came to UH in 2002 after a stint as scientist for a private company in California.

He is working also with NASA on the potential of cyanobacteria in future lunar and Mars colonization, and is also proceeding to take his ethanol technology into the marketplace. A business plan using his system, under the name La Wahie Biotech, won third place — and a $5,000 award — in the Business Plan Competition at UH’s Shidler College of Business.
Daniel Dean and Donavan Kealoha, both UH law and business students, are Fu’s partners. So they are in the process of turning the business plan into an operating business.

The production of ethanol for fuel is one of the nation’s and the world’s major initiatives, partly because its production takes as much carbon out of the atmosphere as it dumps into the atmosphere. That’s different from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which take stored carbon out of the ground and release it into the atmosphere, for a net increase in greenhouse gas.
Most current and planned ethanol production methods depend on farming, and in the case of corn and sugar, take food crops and divert them into energy.

Fu said crop-based ethanol production is slow and resource-costly. He decided to work with cyanobacteria, some of which convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into their own food and release oxygen as a waste product.

Other scientists also are researching using cyanobacteria to make ethanol, using different strains, but Fu’s technique is unique, he said. He inserted genetic material into one type of freshwater cyanobacterium, causing it to produce ethanol as its waste product. It works, and is an amazingly efficient system.

The technology is fairly simple. It involves a photobioreactor, which is a
fancy term for a clear glass or plastic container full of something alive, in which light promotes a biological reaction. Carbon dioxide gas is bubbled through the green mixture of water and cyanobacteria. The liquid is then passed through a specialized membrane that removes the
ethanol, allowing the water, nutrients and cyanobacteria to return to the
photobioreactor.

Solar energy drives the conversion of the carbon dioxide into ethanol. The partner of Prof. Fu in Brazil in the branch-office of La Wahie Biotech Inc. in Aracaju – Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – is developing a low-cost photo-bio-reactor-system. Prof. Franke want´s soon creat a pilot-project with Prof. Fu in Brazil.

The benefit over other techniques of producing ethanol is that this is simple and quick—taking days rather than the months required to grow crops that can be converted to ethanol.

La Wahie Biotech Inc. believes it can be done for significantly less than the cost of gasoline and also less than the cost of ethanol produced through conventional methods.

Also, this system is not a net producer of carbon dioxide: Carbon dioxide released into the environment when ethanol is burned has been withdrawn from the environment during ethanol production. To get the carbon dioxide it needs, the system could even pull the gas out of the emissions of power plants or other carbon dioxide producers. That would prevent carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere, where it has been implicated as a
major cause of global warming.
Honolulo – Hawaii/USA and Aracaju – Sergipe/Brasil – 15/09/2008

Prof. Pengcheng Fu – E-Mail: pengchen2008@gmail.com
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – E-Mail: lawahiebiotech.brasil@gmail.com

Tel.: 00-55-79-3243-2209