What plants might be grown, just for bio-fuel?

[Michaelangelica]

The question is: which ethanol?

Right now, the biofuel market is being grossly distorted by subsidies and trade barriers in the United States and the European Union. These make it rewarding to produce ethanol from corn or grains that are far less productive than sugarcane ethanol, divert land from food production (unlike sugarcane), and have dubious environmental credentials.

What sense does it make to have a surplus of environmentally friendly Brazilian sugar-based ethanol with a yield eight times higher than U.S. corn ethanol and zero impact on food prices being kept from an American market by a tariff of 54 cents on a gallon while Iowan corn ethanol gets a subsidy?

“It would make a lot more sense to drop the tariff, drop the subsidy, and allow Brazilian ethanol into the United States,” said Philippe Reichstul, the chief executive of a biofuel company in São Paulo. “Pressure on U.S. land will be slashed.”

The United States and Europe should maintain their biofuel targets. Pressure to scrap a European plan for renewable fuels to supply a tenth of all vehicle fuel by 2020 must be resisted while rethinking the policies that favor the wrong biofuels.

The real scam lies in developed world protectionism and skewed subsidies, not the biofuel idea.

Blog: Passages Opinion Blog International Herald Tribune

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/op...4cohen.html?hp

One of the top reasons to believe we have reached peak food is that we have apparently reached peak oil. In his book, "Eating Fossil Fuels," Dale Allen Pfeiffer shows how utterly dependent modern agriculture is on fossil fuels, not just for the machinery that plants and harvests, but for the energy to irrigate fields, and for fertilizers. About 30 percent of farm energy goes to fertilizer, much of which is made from natural gas. Like oil, natural gas is becoming increasingly expensive as production nears peak. Without oil, we might not drive cars, but without fertilizer, we might not eat.

Food and fuel are intimately connected. Not only is fuel essential to produce food, but because food can substitute for fuel, the price of food is now locked into the price of oil - a price that is going nowhere but up.

A Timely Report Shows the Way Forward

Why More Food Is Not the Answer
There is certainly oddles of Gas in Austeralia? Owned by Chevron Mobile
I suspect that a lot of the hysteria about ethanol and biofuels is being 'fuelled' by Big Oil.
When you can make bio-fuel for $65 a barrel rather than $115 for oil you can see bio-fuels are a threat to Big Oil.
Bio-fuel production is spread among thousands of farmers and producers not centralised into the hands of 5-6 Big Oil companies. Big Oil must be scared stiff by that.

ALSO
Last night the ABC News ran a segment the NY stock exchange and food prices.
. Money, they said, was flowing into food futures at an ever increasing rate (One BILLION a day now) as the stock market and the housing market had lost their appeal to Fund Managers and other Investors.
It seems to me this is one of many reasons food prices are going up.
Climate change, bad weather, drought are a few more

[Michaelangelica]

BTW
Would this ancient oil producing plant be a possiblity?
you can eat it or produce oil in hot dry climates
Olive Cultivars

[Michaelangelica]

'Lipstick plant' offers to bring new meaning to the term plastic flower


Published Date: 30 April 2008
By TOM CURTIS IN PERTH AND EMILY PYKETT
IT MAY look like a weed, but the Arabidopsis plant could end the need for fossil fuels in the manufacture of household items such as paint and lipstick.
Australian researchers have genetically engineered a specimen of the plant – a member of the mustard family – to produce an unusual fatty acid normally only found in petrochemicals.

Scientists at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CISRO) say the acid can be used to make polymers – the "building blocks" behind plastics and some paints and cosmetics.

As a "green" alternative to using fossil fuels to make plastic, its potential is seen as enormous as oil supplies dwindle and prices rise. It is hoped the same technology can now be engineered into a type of plant called the safflower, which would be suitable for growing on a large scale in Australia.

The CSIRO Plant Industry team was due to present its findings at a conference in Chicago last night.

Dr Allan Green, of CSIRO, said: "Our achievement is to engineer into plants the production of components of the oil that can be used to make polymers.
. . .

"Plants do have massive potential to become factories and the nice thing about plant factories is that they don't have chimneys," he said. "They use light energy as a renewable energy source so they don't make any net contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or climate change. They require minimal inputs so they can be used to provide raw materials for a large number of products where we currently rely on petrochemicals."
. . .

http://hypography.com/forums/terra-p...ust-bio-8.html

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Mick

...The perils of producing too much plastic
100 million tonnes of plastic produced each year.

1 million sea-birds killed each year by ingesting or getting tangled up in plastic bags, according to Greenpeace.

275,000 tonnes of plastic used each year in the UK – that is about 15 million bottles per day.

500 years How long it takes plastic to decompose.

4% The rate at which the use of plastic in Western Europe is growing.

||54|| Number of recycled plastic bottles that would save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for 3 hours.

600,000 tonnes of plastics litter that Dutch scientists estimate lies on the bed of the North Sea. The litter can smother the sea bottom and kill marine life.

90 days How long it takes for a new type of biodegradable resin manufactured in America called Plastarch Material to break down by 70 per cent.

That plastic garbage business in the ocean...I saw a bit from Cousteau I think on the plastic soup in the Pacific gyre.

Originally Posted by Wiki

Phenomenon
The center of the North Pacific Gyre is a relatively stationary region of the Pacific Ocean (the area it occupies is often referred to as the horse latitudes). The circular rotation around it draws waste material in and has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces, still polymers, eventually become individual molecules, which are still not easily digested.[1] Some plastics photodegrade into other pollutants.

The gyre is discussed in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us as an example of the near-indestructibility of discarded plastic. ...

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We need a plant that breaks down plastic into fuel. I got nuthin'.

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by Turtle

That plastic garbage business in the ocean...I saw a bit from Cousteau I think on the plastic soup in the Pacific gyre.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We need a plant that breaks down plastic into fuel. I got nuthin'.

I'm not sure about plants, but bacteria perhaps...
As mushrooms have been shown to "eat" oil, I wouldn't doubt if some fungus can digest plastics.

The wiki link above mentions Alan Weisman's book "The World Without Us". I looked up the site and found this great video interview from The Daily Show. Alan mentions plastic-eating microbes in the vid.

Hmm....perhaps this should be in a different thread...

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Turtle

That plastic garbage business in the ocean...I saw a bit from Cousteau I think on the plastic soup in the Pacific gyre.

This was only recently discovered because it is away from shipping routes.
One of the worrying problems about it is that the currents also concentrate phytoplankton.
The plastic (said to be an area bigger than Texas) is breaking down into minute particles which are being taken up by the phytoplankton and thus entering the bottom of the Ocean's food chain. In much the same way as many pesticides such as DDT. We know that some of these pesticides

• 1.interfere with the ability of phytoplankton to reproduce.
• 2.Concentrate in higher mammals in the food chain causing behaviour abnormalities (Seals when birthing- and living off their fat reserves -where the pesticides are- become confused at distress calls of their babies and beat them to death.)

We have no idea what plastics do -yet.

PS
those plastic figures are just for Scotland and/or the UK

[Michaelangelica]

[quote]Hydrogen production from algae

Listen Now - 26042008 |Download Audio - 26042008

Conventional hydrogen production is expensive. A cheaper method involves using algae. The algae live in a series of ponds. Hydrogen is collected as it bubbles to the surface. An advantage is microalgae can be located on non-arable land and don't compete with food production.
Ben Hankamer: One question we often get is; is it actually feasible to produce any biofuel, whether it's hydrogen or oil or whatever, on the scales that we need globally? Say if you had a solar voltaic panel right now at 12% efficiency, the area you would need for global energy, to supply the entire global energy demands would be about 4% or 5% of the Sahara desert. It's actually doable. Every year we receive 8,000 times the amount of energy we require to drive our economy from solar energy, which we just really don't use.

[/QUOTE]
transcript or audio available here:-
Science Show - 26April2008 - Hydrogen production from algae

[Monomer]

Cloth-Eating Fungus Could Make Fuel

It sounds like something out of a bad science fiction novel. During World War II, a fungus called Tricoderma reesei ate its way through US military uniforms and tents in the South Pacific. It chewed up the cloth and used special enzymes to convert the indigestible cellulose into simple sugars. Now that infamous fungus is getting some good publicity. It looks like it might hold a key to improving the production of biofuels.

Scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory published a paper on the fungus’s genetic sequence in this week’s Nature Biotechnology. The organism uses a surprisingly small number of genes to produce its cellulose-munching enzymes. Scientists say this means its production is extremely efficient. They hope to capitalize on the genetic information to find more efficient and cheaper ways to break down cellulose for ethanol in biofuel production. That cellulose could come from a native plant like switchgrass, or even from municipal waste. And fuel from waste, say scientists, is a more carbon-neutral way to power our cars. Which might make veterans forgive the fungus that ate their shirts.

[Nitack]

Originally Posted by Turtle

That plastic garbage business in the ocean...I saw a bit from Cousteau I think on the plastic soup in the Pacific gyre.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We need a plant that breaks down plastic into fuel. I got nuthin'.

And here comes Nitack to save the day...
Giant microwave turns plastic back to oil - earth - 26 June 2007 - New Scientist Environment

You'll get a kick out of that. You can use a special microwave to break plastic down to the oils that it was originally created from.

[Michaelangelica]

Moringa oleifera

Moringa as a source of biogas

Moringa plants (approximately 30 days old) were milled together with water. The fibre was separated by filtration through a mesh with 5 mm pores and the liquid fraction produced was then added to a biogas reactor. With an average feed of 5.7 g of volatile solids the gas production was 580 liters of gas per 1 kg of volatile solids. The average methane content of the gas was 81 %

.
FROM
The potential of Moringa oleifera for agricultural and industrial uses

Foidl N., Makkar H.P.S. and Becker K.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Animal Production and Health Section, Wagramerstr. 5, A-1400 Vienna, Austria; University Hohenheim, Institute for Animal Production, Department of Aquacultural Systems and Animal Nutrition in the Tropics and Subtropics, Fruwirthstrasse 12, 70599 Stuttgart, Germany (e-mail: inst480@uni-hohenheim.de)

The above photo, by Anthony Simons of ICRAF, is a
classic example of the characteristic "drumstick" pods of
Moringa oleifera.

moringa

SEEDS
http://seedman.com/