When I mentioned biodiesel, I never had any intention that it should replace all other forms of fuel. The one size fits all attitude is kind of silly in my opinion, we should be reaping our power from wherever we can. In the case of biodiesel what it can do is provide a certain level of competition with petroleum until there is something of an equilibrium. Hell if the military weren’t buying up so much petroleum to run M1 tanks, Blackhawk Helicopters or F-16s we’d be burning through those reserves much more slowly. Perhaps biodiesel can take off some of the strain.
As far as restaurant grease goes and how much you can get from one, obviously it depends on what kind of restaurant. We were able to get about ten gallons on average from your standard diner type establishment when we were travelling around on the bus. The bus gets about 9 miles per gallon from that, some restaurants have more some have less. There was also oil that was too dirty to run in the veggie bus but wouldn’t be too dirty to convert to biodiesel. There is a whole lot of waste grease that ISN’T being used for biodiesel, and there are crops that produce oil in addition to food, the whole “Corned Earth” scenario that always comes up in one of these discussions is off-base as clearly we’re not going to go with any one source for all of our power needs.
What do people think about depolymerization?
You’re right, the idea of “sustainable” does require a time frame, and the idea of pumping oil with wind and solar power is quite interesting. In the case of oil however, I would think that it’s not so much the power to pump it that’s a big issue, but more the power that goes into finding it, aquiring it, shipping it and killing the people who live over it that is what detracts from it’s overall efficiency. I’d imagine that the pumping of it is probably a fraction of the overall power cost to get it into my gas tank.
It costs more energy to produce a gallon of biofuel than the biofuel itself produces. It’s not a cost issues. Basically, you have to expend energy to create whatever the fuel is made of. Then you need to expend energy to convert it to biodiesel or whatever. Apparently it’s more energy than the biodiesel itself which means you are better off not using it.
Wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and solar are pretty sustainable but they require specific geographies. They certainly are profitable though.
I’ll buy that for bio-ethanol as it’s currently produced, but that study claims wood also produces no net energy. It takes more energy to plant a tree and cut it down when it’s grown than you get from burning it? What are they assuming, growlights and heated greenhouses? Every tree has to be transported 2000 miles before it’s burnt?
Reclaimed waste grease from restaurants has already been harvested and the oil extracted for a seperate purpose. What percentage in those ridiculously misleading figures accounted for the harvesting and oil extraction portion of the process?
Also the wonderful thing about biodiesel is that there is plenty of interest in the private sector that companies will get ample Venture Capital and start springing up all over. It’s doubtful you’ll see the product at your local gas station, it’ll probably remain a niche market that sells to commercial traffic, but that would still make a major dent in our petroleum dependency. The article mostly talks about ethanol, and there is no need to get the “government” or even big oil to care about biodiesel.
It’s not my study so I don’t really know. There’s more to it than just walking outside and chopping down the nearest tree. Consider that you need to fuel the trucks. You need to power the lumberjack related activities (figure that feeding, clothing and housing them are a sunk cost since you would have to do that anyway, regardless of their job). You need to power the saws that cut the trees into little usable pieces. And then you need to transport the wood to wherever it’s going (which is probably at least 50-100+ miles away). I think that the study probably is trying to take into account all the energy used in the process.
That’s why people do studies and don’t simply go on gut feelings, intuition, or whatever.
So what? Reclaiming waste products from petroleum products and turning them into petroleum products is not a sustainable energy source. That’s the issue with all the bio fuels. They all require products that are derived from the petroleum economy - agriculture, garbage, burger grease. To a certain extent it’s like paying off one credit card with another.
I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the study, but is there some reason that you think the numbers are ridiculous? I mean other than you just don’t agree with them?
Well you can do both! My gut feeling was that the figures for wood are off.
The problem I have with the figures for wood is that people have been using wood as a primary fuel supply for tens of thousands of years, and in many parts of the world still do. Stick a seed in the ground, twenty years later you have a few tonnes of fuel. You can cut it down with a chainsaw, chop it up on site with a chainsaw, use it to heat your home. If the gasoline used by the chainsaw during this operation contains even 10% of the energy available in the wood I’d be surprised.
A bit of digging for the details of the study gives this:
The study is refering to producing ethanol from wood, not burning wood directly. As I said before, I can buy ethanol production not being worth it.
Other quotes from the cite:
"Although Pimentel advocates the use of burning biomass to produce thermal energy (to heat homes, for example), he deplores the use of biomass for liquid fuel."
"He says the country should instead focus its efforts on producing electrical energy from photovoltaic cells, wind power and burning biomass."
The bubble may be wobbly, but it’s hanging in there!
Your second quote is misattributed - I didn’t say that. I’m not convinced about biodiesel either, other than a means of cutting bills by using a waste product as fuel. Of course, if everybody did it then it would cease to be a waste product and the price would rise.
My problem with the article is that the numbers are EXTRAORDINARILY vague. They might be more meaningful if there had been a little more detail. I’m tired of seeing articles with “studies” that are taken barely in context and fed to an illiterate populace who will see a few numbers and have their curiousity quenched while learning very little about the subject at hand.
The thing you seem to not be getting is that with waste grease a very energy intensive portion of the refining process has already occurred in order to turn it into cooking oil, so the source of the oil that is going to be further refined is plentiful. Biodiesel is not going to out and out replace petroleum, but it does stretch what fuel products CAN BE aquired domestically. The reason aquiring your fuel source domestically is a good idea is because it eliminates a big amount of the bloat required to ship it from the other side of the world prior to the refining process. Oil may pack a ridiculous punch pound for pound, but that punch is diminished by the energy cost of running the pumps to get it out of the ground, running the tanks to kill the people that previously owned it, and running the gigantic pipelines and ships it requires to transport it. Biodiesel is aquired domestically so that’s one source of drain on it’s efficiency eliminated, it can be refined from a waste product that we produce ANYWAY, and is already through part of that refining process when it even reaches the refinery, thus the figures in that article are not very accurate because they only reflect biodiesel created from crops grown specifically to produce biodiesel.
Currently biodiesel is made from soybean oil, it was a major push by the soybean industry to find a way to create a larger marketshare. However, it is one of the stupidest ways to aquire biodiesel, and is the reason why biodiesel is so expensive and inefficient. Generally the naysayers will provide some ludicrous way of manufacturing biodiesel as evidence as to why it’s an inferior product. However, waste grease biodiesel manufacturers will start popping up over the next couple of years, significantly lowering the overhead of biodiesel manufacture.
Agricultural society in general is based upon an idea of excess. We cultivate more food than we can eat “Just in case”, so our society as it currently is, is not sustainable, but by using the products we currently use more effectively, for instance getting the most from waste grease, we can become MORE sustainable as we seek out new solutions.
The truth is that the current way we use our technology is extraordinarily inefficient. Sustainability isn’t a matter of the product not requiring energy, and not being effected by entropy, it is being able to come in under the Earth’s ability to replenish itself, right now we are devouring the planet because we are devouring at a rate that is faster than the Earth’s ability to replenish itself, one of the ways to minimize this is by using renewable resources and recycling everything we possiblly can. Biodiesel just happens to be one of those technologies that really fits that bill.
I wouldn’t say the concerns of nuclear proliferation, when it comes to the materials used at nuclear power plants, are “all-too-reasonable.”
The grade of uranium/plutonium necessary to make an atomic bomb is known as “weapons grade”. It requires a very very high percentage of U-235 (or Pu-239). The grade of uranium/plutonium used in nuclear power plants is known as “reactor grade”. It consists of material that contains very little U-235 (or Pu-239). In order to turn reactor-grade fissionables into weapons-grade fissionables, you need to put them through an enrichment process.
My understanding is that it’s just about as hard to enrich reactor-grade fissionables to the weapons-grade level as it is to enrich uranium you’ve just smelted out of freshly-mined ore to the weapons-grade level. Thus, if you steal fuel from a reactor, it won’t make it any any easier for you to make atomic bombs.
Cite please.
This appears to be a total non sequitur. Why does cultivating more than is eaten result in unsustainability? How is it even linked?
By this ‘logic’ a population of 10 that grows 5 tonnes of food on an acre of land is unsustainable because they are producing more than they could eat. But a population of 10, 000 that grows the same 5 tonnes on the same acre is sustainable or at least more sustainable because they are growing exactly what they eat.
That appears to be absolute nonsense. Can you please provide a reference or at leats osme valid logic t suport your contention that agricultural sustainability is linked to consumption?
One would think so. But as I said, seems like there’s more to an industrial lumber operation than just going out back and spliting a few logs. The other thing is that not all forms of energy are usuable in every instance. For example wind isn’t so great for powering cars. It must be converted to something usuable and often energy is lost in the process. That’s why solar or wind powered pumping of oil has an appeal. Sure there may be a net energy loss, but it’s endlessly renewable energy that makes horrible car fuel.
Well you certainly seem full of yourself. Some folks have neither the time nor the inclination to spend hours researching a topic just to satisfy intellectual curiousity. For most of us, “how’bout that…biofuel” is about the extent we plan to think about it until it becomes an option at the pump.
In any case, I’m not saying recycling grease is a bad idea. It’s just not a “sustainable” fuel source. It’s a method of extending our exixting fuel usage.
I don’t know exactly what to cite for this I’m sorry. If someone more knowledgeable can cite something I’d appreciate it.
The logic is that in an agricultural society, we create excess to take care of ourselves in an emergency. What this has historically led to is rather than sustaining the current population, the abundance encourages breeding, or at least discourages dying from starvation. So inevitably the human population grows to meet the current store of food, and an increase in consumption is required to maintain a surplus, and feed the growing population. As the population grows we start to run into problems such as waste management. Much of our technology was created to keep our food sources away from our offal. Also, an agrarian society must remain near it’s food supply, meaning that it cannot migrate to warmer climes in the winter, so we have to build houses to protect us from the elements. Houses lead to heating and air conditioning, and a need for access to material resources to manufacture those parts.
It all seems inherently logical to me, I’m sorry that I don’t know what to look for, I just don’t want to provide some vague cite that agrees with me just for the sake of it.
msmith537: The issue I have is one I have with cites in general here. People will show a cite that is relatively meaningless. We get all these facts and figures with no real idea of the methodology used to create those facts and figures. Then either people will tacitly accept the cite, or they will argue about the cite’s validity, oftentimes it will get bogged down by someone who will provide 50 cites in a row, and then bitch at you later for not having actually read their cites. Then if you want to debunk their cites you have to go through aquiring other cites subject to a similar method of peer review, meanwhile nothing is actually being learned because the bulk of news sources that are cited don’t explain their methodology because that methodology would be lost on the average audience of your average newspaper. In this particular case, ethanol hadn’t been discussed much, and your cite didn’t address biodiesel aquired from waste grease at all.
So I apologize to everyone about getting the semantics of the word “sustainable” wrong, in the future I will word a query into this subject differently.
So IOW msmith you can’t support your claim that sustainability is linked in any way to excessproduction.
That’s OK, This is GQ, it’s for factual repsonses and we’ve just determined that yours isn’t factual. You just feel that it ‘stands to reason’ without being able to logically explain how the same production on the same land by two groups could be simultaneously sustainable and non-sustainable.
Hopefully you will one day learn the rarely learned straightdope lesson, that just because someone doesn’t know how to prove something, doesn’t make it incorrect. If you want to fight ignorance, keep that in mind.
Hopefully Erek you will one day learn that GQ is the place for *Factual responses. Not unprovable stuff that you think might be correct because it “stands to reason”.
Keeping “excess” food in case of an emergency, is “extra consumption”. I don’t need a cite, it is as it is defined. If you can’t see that, I can’t help you. It has nothing to do with your shallow pretensions regarding this forum.
In Brave New World everyone is cremated. It’s been a while since I read it, but they might have recovered some energy from that. (It’ a net loss, because of the energy you have to put in to burn them, but the heat used and generated might have been used for power. I don’t remember.) The chemicals in the body were returned to the environment, and some of the elite class thought it unfair that the bodies of the elite and the bodies of the lowest class yielded the same amount of chemicals.