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Is it right to discredit electric cars TODAY because of this article?

Yes
1
11%
No
3
33%
No way, in fact, Hammer278 should replace any mod who continuously misleads the members
5
56%
#422699
Here is the Dr holmes magic article you had to pay for that puts forward a way of using biofuels to help reduce emission

2012-12-14 18:35 | Tags
Source:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628941.600-biofuel-thats-better-than-carbon-neutral.html?full=true

The race is on to create a biofuel that sucks carbon out of the sky and locks it away where it can't warm the planet

THE green sludge burbles away quietly in its tangle of tubes in the Spanish desert. Soaking up sunshine and carbon dioxide from a nearby factory, it grows quickly. Every day, workers skim off some sludge and take it away to be transformed into oil. People do in a single day what it took geology 400 million years to accomplish.

Indeed, this is no ordinary oil. It belongs to a magical class of "carbon negative" fuels, ones that take carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it away for good. The basic idea is fairly simple. You grow plants, in this case algae, which naturally draw CO2 from the atmosphere. After you extract the oil, you're left with a residue that holds a substantial portion of the carbon. This residue is the key to carbon negativity. If you can store the carbon where it won't decompose and return to the air, more CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere than the fuel emits.

Such carbon negative fuels are no accounting sleight of hand - they could be the most realistic short-term solution we have to curb climate change. And although it is still early days, companies like General Electric, BP and Google are putting their money behind the idea.

Every time you drive your car or hop on a plane to somewhere sunny you're adding a little more carbon to the atmosphere and bringing a global warming crisis just a little bit closer. Biofuels are one way of reducing the problem, as plants draw CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, thereby not adding to the carbon footprint. Today, the most popular biofuel is ethanol made from corn.

In theory, such a fuel should be carbon neutral: that's to say, for every 100 carbon atoms it draws from the atmosphere, it returns exactly 100 when burned. Unfortunately, however, it's not that simple. By the time farmers have tilled the soil, poured on fertiliser and harvested the crop - not to mention the natural gas and coal burned to run the ethanol plant itself - they've used an awful lot of fossil fuel, leaving them well short of carbon neutral.

You might think the problem could be simply solved by capturing the carbon emitted during the biofuels production process. The fermentation process used to produce ethanol, for example, generates an almost pure stream of CO2 as a by-product. So, earlier this year, agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) started building the US's first large-scale carbon capture and storage project in Decatur, Illinois. It will siphon CO2 from the company's ethanol plant, compress it and store it underground nearby. It plans to store over 1 million tonnes of CO2 annually (see diagram).

However, ADM's ethanol still isn't carbon neutral: instead, thanks to all the energy costs of making the ethanol, it's likely to reduce emissions by only about 20 or 30 per cent compared with fossil fuel.

You might be able to solve the problem if you replaced all the fossil fuels used to run the ethanol plant with renewable energy. But that doesn't solve the other major issue for crop-based biofuels: they compete with food crops for land. In 2010, corn-based ethanol accounted for 8 per cent of US transport fuel, but consumed almost 40 per cent of the country's corn. If ethanol replaced all fossil fuels, it would either push food prices into the stratosphere or force farmers onto new land - most likely both. To make a dent in the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, we need to find ways around this. "The question is how many of these situations we can find without infringing on other services that the biomass or the land is supplying," says Johannes Lehmann, a soil scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York

This is exactly why algae is so promising, notably the single-celled, blue-green variant now referred to as cyanobacteria. They grow much faster than terrestrial crops, potentially yielding 20 times more biomass per day than soybeans; their oil production is easy to ramp up through genetic engineering; best of all, they can grow in seawater or brackish groundwater on non-arable land, so they don't take land away from food production or forest (Science, vol 314, p 1598).

These qualities were especially appealing to Bio Fuel Systems, (BFS) a small company in Alicante, Spain, that uses cyanobacteria to make its "Blue Petroleum". The company's prototype plant, in the Spanish coastal desert, is piggybacked on a cement factory, which emits the CO2 the algae need to grow.

Blue petroleum

The numbers given to New Scientist by BFS president Bernard Stroiazzo illustrate the fraction of carbon that can be trapped by the process. To make a single barrel of oil, the algae suck a little over 2 tonnes of CO2 from the smokestack of the cement works. Not all of that stays out of the atmosphere, though. The algal cultures need regular mixing, which takes energy, as does supplying fertiliser and creating the oil through a patented process involving high heat and pressure. All the fossil fuels needed for these processes release about 700 kilogrammes of CO2. Burning the oil itself - in car engines, say - emits another 450 kg. The rest of the carbon - the equivalent of about 900 kg of CO2 - stays in the leftovers, an inorganic carbonate sludge that can be buried or mixed into concrete. "That will never go back in the atmosphere," says Stroiazzo.

BFS's pilot plant produces about 2.5 barrels of crude oil per hectare of algae each day. At that rate, Stroiazzo says, a system like BFS's could replace the world's entire crude oil consumption, using an area just a quarter the size of the Libyan desert. Thirty-five million hectares is a lot of land, to be sure, but not overwhelming if it replaces the 90 million barrels of oil we use each day. It is also about 1 per cent of the world's pasture area; spread over many plants worldwide it quickly becomes feasible.

But there are a few more factors to consider. Though they are not selling the oil yet, cost will likely be an issue: BFS's equipment is by no means cheap. The polycarbonate tubes that house the cultures cost upwards of $1 million per hectare, and stirring the algae requires large amounts of electricity. This is likely to push the cost of algal biofuel to at least $5 per litre, according to a2010 International Energy Agency report.

To stay solvent, BFS sells its high-value algal by-products as nutritional supplements, such as omega-3 fatty acids. While this may work in a nascent biofuels industry, demand for nutritional supplements will falter when the products flood the market, and anyway it doesn't get to the heart of the problem.

Other companies are trying to do that, though. Algae Systems, near San Francisco, suggests cutting costs by culturing its algae in the ocean, in 25-metre plastic bags floating near the shore. The bags keep the algae at the surface, where the light is most intense, and natural wave action does the mixing. The firm plans to pipe in nitrogen-rich wastewater to fertilise the algal growth.

Algae Systems is now constructing a pilot plant covering several hectares in Mobile Bay, off the coast of Alabama, which should be operational early next year. If all the component processes work as well as they have in the research lab, the result should be carbon-negative fuels, says company president Matthew Atwood. This fuel should be able to undercut fossil petroleum prices within three or four years, he adds.

However, they will need to solve another problem for algal biofuels: fertiliser. Algae are gorge on expensive nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. At relatively small scales, wastewater from cities and croplands can easily supply these, as in Algae Systems's design. But scale up and there simply isn't enough wastewater to go around. "Human nutrient loading is simply not sufficient," says Stefan Unnasch, an energy analyst and engineer at California consultancy Life Cycle Associates. "You put more in your car every day than into your toilet." Indeed, producing even a tenth of the US's liquid fuel from algae would consume more than the entire US supply of both nitrogen and phosphorus, according to calculations by Ronald Pate, an algal biofuels specialist at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico (Applied Energy, vol 88, p 3377).

Researchers may some day find a way to solve the nutrient problem by extracting and reusing nitrogen and phosphorus from the algal residue, but the biggest difficulty to scaling up is more intractable: how do you get your hands on all that CO2? Even if algae-growers could tap every last smokestack in the US, that would only be enough to produce about 75 billion litres of algal biofuel per year, according to Pate's calculations. That's less than 10 per cent of the world's current transport fuel needs. Moreover, tying biofuel production to fossil-fuel-burning industrial smokestacks merely wrings a second round of energy out of CO2. "This just postpones emissions," says Jonas Helseth, director of Bellona Europa, an environmental foundation based in Brussels, Belgium.

As yet, this problem has no robust solution. A few companies are developing technologies to extract and concentrate CO2 from the air. Global Thermostat, based in New York, has patented a process that uses chemicals and low-temperature waste heat - about 90 °C - to capture CO2 from a stream of air. Its pilot plant has been operating near San Francisco for more than a year, and a second is on the way, says co-founder Graciela Chichilnisky. The company has already signed an agreement to supply its technology to Algae Systems and is in talks with several other algal biofuel companies, she says.

Biofuels franchise

Solve these problems, and algae may yet be vindicated as the most promising path to carbon negative biofuels. But until then, a less glamorous method is poised to take off.

The cheapest, most low-maintenance feedstock for biofuels is waste biomass, such as the cobs and straw left over after corn harvest, perennial grasses such as giant miscanthus, or dead trees. This raw material has been used to make ethanol, but its efficiency has been stymied by the difficulty of breaking down the materials. Cool Planet Energy Systems, based just north of Los Angeles in Camarillo, California, has found a better way to process it. It has developed a variant of a process called pyrolysis, in which heat, pressure and catalysts convert the biomass directly into the hydrocarbons found in gasoline, diesel oil and jet fuel. This means the company's fuel can be mixed into regular gasoline to reduce the overall amount of fossil fuel, or in other words, it lowers the carbon intensity of the gasoline.

Earlier this year, researchers at Google - one of the company's investors - road-tested a blend of 5 per cent Cool Planet fuel and 95 per cent gasoline in its GRide cars at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. The mix reduced the carbon intensity of gasoline by 10 per cent, says vice-president Mike Rocke, meeting California's 2020 Low Carbon Fuel Standard eight years early.

Better yet, carbon gets sequestered. Along with fuel, Cool Planet's pyrolysis process yields large amounts of biochar, a carbon-rich compound that resembles charcoal. Instead of burying this residue deep underground like ADM or mixing it into cement, however, Cool Planet returns the biochar to the soil.

This has several advantages. It does not depend on the presence of suitable geological formations, and it is easier to transport. Best of all, the biochar enriches the soil and enhances crop yields because its high surface area helps hold water and nutrients. "It's like a molecular sponge," says Rocke. Lehmann, a biochar expert, says the stuff can persist in the soil for centuries, which qualifies as carbon sequestration as set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That's not the only trick that makes the biofuel carbon negative. Instead of wasting fossil fuel on transporting the biomass to a centralised factory to be made into fuel, Cool Planet will build 400 modular units, each capable of producing between 40 and 200 million litres of gasoline per year. These will use whatever biomass is available within about a 50-kilometre radius. "Wherever the biomass is, we're going to roll out these plants," says Rocke. "They're like a Starbucks."

Cool Planet's process only returns half the carbon to the atmosphere and stores the other half as biochar, making the fuel what Rocke terms "100 per cent carbon-negative". To break into the market, however, the company plans to make a version that is 60 per cent carbon-negative, storing only about a third of the carbon in the plant matter. At this sweet spot, Rocke reckons the company should be able to sell its fuel for about 40 cents a litre.

To date, the research facility has produced only a few thousand litres of fuel. However, a pilot plant - bankrolled by investors including Google, BP and GE - will start operation near Los Angeles this month, producing nearly a million litres per year. And within 20 years, they intend to build 2000 of their modules, enough to supply about 10 per cent of the world's current liquid fuel needs.

Cool Planet's results are encouraging. In 2007, the IPCC reported that for the world to escape catastrophic climate change, carbon emissions would have to begin declining by 2015, with an 85 per cent reduction by 2050. We haven't even started.

Since we can't seem to keep the CO2 from entering the atmosphere, we're left with only two ways to avoid trouble. We could embark on grand geoengineering schemes to cool the planet, all of which bring huge risks of unintended consequences (New Scientist, 22 September, p 30). Or we could try to pull some of the CO2 back out of the atmosphere, one car trip at a time. "Even if carbon-negative biofuels turns out to be just a bit player, they will have done at least a little to reduce carbon emissions," says Lehmann. "It's a no-regret strategy."

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist
Last edited by CookinFlat6 on 29 Oct 14, 13:41, edited 1 time in total.
#422702
I gave a response to the article in the other thread.
:yikes: double negatives again! Why do you do this to me Cookie? I clicked 'no' ......but that means 'yes' to electric cars...no? :rofl:
#422707
Yes means you believe all the twisting of the facts and stats the spankee has wasted our time with for ages

Yes means you agree with spankee that electric cars are terrible because they cause a negligible emission when charged by fossil fuel plants although the car makers are gambling that solar and carbon neutral power stations will happen in the near future.

Yes means you agree with spankee that the algae produced by that company is a better option today and will actually remove carbon with no other impact

No means you think he is either a lying misleading time wasting corrupt :censored: or that he is paid by oil companies for viral marketing or you think he is reading comprehension and maths challenged ((that's the nicest thing to assume)

Anyone who has followed this debate and maybe even learnt something (previously hidden by the deep pockets of the oil companies) needs to step of the sidelines and make a decision by voting. These are very important issues for any member of a car centered forum. Do you want to be decieved and let others make important decisions or do you want to step up and combat those who would have us continue with the unneccessary addiction to fossil fuels, every voice helps, especially online - this is the frontline of the democratic process
Next time someone says biofuels blah blah stand up and say NO, ask about the food prices, ask about Indonesia, ask about why public opinion in favour of biofuels is the main driver allwoing these subsidies and schemes etc to waste our resources

and if you like to have a say in the integrity of those able to censure your posts and your voice then show it by picking the third option

by the way, for a living I spend most of the time reading between the lines of what the central banks and politicians and online plants and rumour mongers and truth distorters are putting out, because to profit from the capital markets its not about inflation numbers or productivity or factory orders or employment etc, its about how people behave in response to these things which can sometimes be 'creatively tidied up'

eg, in the UK, the minute you start seeing articles in certain papers talking about the benefits of switching your mortgage from a fixed rate to a floating rate - it means interest rates rises are on the cards in x amount of months (the big banks lose to fixes when rates rise) - I could tell you more, but Id have to charge hehe
#422798
Can you add up the poll results FSpankee2004?

In decent society the 1 person who voted for himself in the light of a unanimous verdict of deceit would do the honorable thing

yet you have come back to reignite this debate??????

Did you bring some facts or just a smiley??

The real moderators might have to point out to you that you are breaking a forum rule by turning up to provoke a reaction
#422808
Can you add up the poll results FSpankee2004?

In decent society the 1 person who voted for himself in the light of a unanimous verdict of deceit would do the honorable thing

yet you have come back to reignite this debate??????

Did you bring some facts or just a smiley??

The real moderators might have to point out to you that you are breaking a forum rule by turning up to provoke a reaction


Come back with an answer to this, or I will find it hard to continue to be civilised in my dealings with you

Plants extract and store carbon
If we dont grab them to use the carbon remains extracted from the air
Why would we want to grab that plant and burn it, releasing all the carbon, and then capture part of that carbon to expensively store deep down in the earth and call it negative carbon emission?
The plant has already done 100% extraction
If we leave it its negative extraction already
We dont start at zero as long as there is a plant doing what nature intended
If we listen to the useless idiots grabbing the plant is starting at zero, then after as long as we only release less that the plant stored plus what it cost to grab - then they say thats negative emission
they have to store the extracted carbon - thats the problem no one has cured yet
Storing it back in the earth takes up resources and affects or already fragile system
why not leave the fkn plant and its stored carbon in first place
They say we need the energy cos its better than oil tho it brings a world of new issues
Solar is to grab the same energy but bypass the plant, the plant can stay with its stored carbon
we just grab energy without carbon emission or having to store it

Explain your reasons for carbon negative biofuels or STFU
#422809
I think the main thing this poll shows is that 57.14% of the forum want Hammer.

You know Hammer voted for himself.


No way. Refuse to believe that. Hammer is a better person than that.


Ofcourse he is, anyone who deserves to moderate guys like LRW and I has to be of the highest integrity. This person would also need to have earnt the respect of the membership through his actions.

In fact anyone who has become the object of derision or resorts to fake IDs to save face is by definition no longer able to execute moderation functions effectively and that situation is untenable

I hope we dont have to test whether the old proletarian methods of strike and silent protests carry over to the internet forums
#422836
ok todays look at the damage useless idiots are causing by attempting to falsely influence others to reject electric cars chargeable today with zero emission renewable energy sources. The inconvienience of charging and the marginal current emission cost of depending on soon to be history fossil fuel power stations has been a major weapon used to misinform others and present biofuel promotion campaigns which are largely sponsored by the Oil companies.
As electric charging and battery tech becomes more convenient, we find useless idiots are increasingly pushing a new angle - the carbon negative effects of extracting energy from biofuels. So apparently we should be happy to drive around in cars emitting 60-80% less carbon than oil because while we are releasing this harmful emission we are ALSO magically removing more than we are releasing
Any one with a brain would wonder - why release carbon from our exhaust pipes when there is an alternative at hand with todays technology? Ah because of human rights abuses in China where these rare Earths materials are mined, never mind that our laptops and mobile phone batteries use the same elements

So instead of waste time with the oil industries useless idiots lets collect and post some info here that has had no hugely funded marketing campaign behind it. Lets see how absurd we can make the single vote above for biofuels over available electric. Basically biofuels come with huge disadvantages and damage to our fragile world and societies that the useless idiots ignore when explaining that we can continue to drive ICE cars and emit almost as much as before but biofuels solve the emission after we emitted it. Lets do the dirty and then clean i up after instead of lets be a little inconvenienced now and breath better and have a slim chance of providing a world for our kids

(before they turn up to complain about being forced to read lengthy posts or moan about 'circular debates - to the usual b!tching moaner - STFU already)
lets start with this to set the tone
Image

Real lives affected by biofuels
The global land grab is forcing violent evictions around the world, robbing land and livelihoods from some of the poorest communities, leaving them unable to feed their families.

Mario Cucul Cu, 29 and his wife Candelaria Choc Pau, 26 with their children in the house they rent in the K'Quinich community.Candelaria Choc Pau, 26 struggles to feed her children since being evicted from land their family had farmed for generations

In the Polochic Valley, Northern Guatemala, indigenous communities were violently evicted from land that has been in their families for generations to make way for plantations growing sugar that could be turned into biofuels to fuel European cars.

>> Learn more about the impacts of land evictions in Guatemala


Interested? ready to move on to the hard stuff?

Biofuels were once touted as the miraculous answer to our energy shortages and fears around climate change. But mounting evidence has exposed this supposedly ‘green fuel’ as the ultimate red herring. Meeting global biofuel targets could force hundreds of millions more people into hunger by 2020.

Industrial biofuels present a false solution to climate change and divert attention from the real changes needed. They were introduced as a ‘renewable energy’ but are not living up to that promise. Far from tackling climate change, most biofuels emit just as many greenhouse gases as the fossil fuels they were designed to replace.


Ok so the useless idiots have not countered this by promising 'MAGICAL' Algae which will actually extract carbon while we drive and are apparently the only solution becasue we have crossed the TIPPING POINT where reducing carbon is not enough - we have to reduce it (get this) ONE CAR JOURNEY AT A TIME - the car journey means we buy oil mixed with algae bio diesel, but the good part is we are now extracting carbon as we drive

When asked to prove this things get vague, and the shouting and ridiculing of those who 'dont understand the maths' starts, the useless idiots are basically teling us about a small experiment that worked in the lab, and extracted carbon while delivering energy BUT they forget to mention that it is completely unscaleable because (wait for it) there are yards of side effects and consequencies we know about and a sh!t load more we will discover as we change things.

They tell us the carbon extracted can be easily and safely LOOKED away, just like that, without cost - magic. when pressed they will say, 'we can use it in construction, there are lots of uses for it'
So nature extracts carbon through trees and plants and feeds it through the natural ecosystem which is self balancing. We come along and grab those plants, release the carbon, then capture PART of it and store it away in a place better than nature intended (nature intended deep in the ground to become fossil fuel locked) - we gonna store it around us as walls and 'lots of other uses' and this will all be very dandy becos the useless idiots say so, and they have predicted and researched everything? lol

Sound familiar?? - YUP thats exactly what happened with the disastrous first wave of bio fuels that are now discredited because they compete with food growing, push up prices etc etc even though the same useless idiots were equally convincing before (see above)

Now the big problem is that for every useless idiot that spews this stuff on a forum, most of the members will see through it and stay silent or ridicule it. However there will always be one who is so dumb and thick that they blindly agree, as they always agree and empathise with the countersocial losers who stand out. And so another level of useless idiot is created, and this level is just as dangerous and ignorant as the first one because by definition it will have an even thicker skin and so will be able to carry the useless idiot manifesto into other areas, like schools or places of worship etc etc

When you have a chain reaction of useless idiots who buy into moronic stuff and will defend them to the last people start thinking they might have a point and so they end up adding their voice to harm their own interests. Lets watch the process - the second level of useless idiot will turn up soon to instinctively side with the first level by complaining about this post, and they wont have read it at all because I can write anything here and they wont know lol

Final quote for today is to look at how the next generation biononsense is already manifesting behind the expensive campaign and useless idiots

See what action aid say about the magical algae and compare it to the snake oil claims and excitement of the useless idiots
Whereas first-generation biofuels (industrial biofuels) use conventional technology and compete with land and crops for food, advanced or second generation biofuels are made using new technological processes and often non-food crops.

These include biofuels from forestry and agricultural wastes, such as stalks from wheat and maize or wood waste. Third-generation biofuels include those made from algae.

ActionAid welcomes any attempt to reduce greenhouse gases and the use of truly waste products. However the sustainability of advanced biofuels is far from guaranteed and member states, including the UK, must put in place sufficient policies and safeguards – such as robust, binding social sustainability criteria - before we embrace this technology.

ActionAid is concerned that creating a market for biofuels from organic waste material, such as straw or wood waste, through setting new targets for advanced biofuels, could inadvertently lead to straw and wood being actually produced primarily for ‘waste’ if the price they fetch as biofuels is higher than for conventional uses. In addition, many waste materials have well established uses that would need to be met if these materials are diverted into biofuels production.


I urge you all to have a look at this site, especially the UK dwellers
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/food-not-fuel?slide=1
#422859
Thanks for the detail Cookie.
What stands out to me is the huge damage first generation did and is still doing.

Second generation ( using the waste from food, stalks etc) will, as action aid said, lead to growing FOR that waste product. Why? Because there's greedy people, money and corrupt governments in the equation.

Third generation? Still too many questions. But first and second don't bode well. Money, resources and brain power would be best used elsewhere. Like fusion, like more efficient capture of solar. And I can't help but think of the huge power in the sea...looking harder into capturing that.
#422863
The biggest part of the problem as action aid outline is that the public are allowing a few people to make these big decisions with such far reaching consequencies - greedy people more interested in money - thats fair enough - there are allways those types - but the tragedy is that most people dont want to know, and even if told are not interested - until the consequencies affect their lives - then its too late

I created a seperate poll just to illustrate this, so far we have all heard how exciting 3rd gen biofuels promise to be, when the info of all 2 gens are laid out and a pol created - the first response was - We dont need to be told more, by someone who actually saw the fallacy in the maths when pointed out

And we complain that a greedy minority are getting away with murder??

Its laughable
#422880
So Spankee has not returned to answer the questions put to him on behalf of the people :rolleyes:

Hopefully he is just gathering his case facts and stats before rejoining the debate, and we will see him soon

ofcourse we may not see him for exactly the amount of time he feels will be enough for everyone to forget and so when he rejoins he can laugh it all off as a joke

In that case we are going to need zurich alan and his professional help in trying Spankee and returning a verdict in his absence, then we can get on to the fun part of deciding his penalty for attempting to mislead the people :hehe:

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