biofuels in the desert

[mr friendly guy]

I think one of the arguments which has hurt the use of biofuels is that it takes up land previously used for farming and hence will cut down food supply, increase food prices etc, at a time when the world sometimes can't feed itself (I am aware that the lack of food is partially due to distribution rather than production, but the problem looks like increasing as the world population increases).

One of the solutions to make biofuels workable has been to used discarded parts from crops which will go to waste anyway. IIRC India did it with a crop whose name eludes me for the moment.

The other thought that occurred to me is to plant in the desert (where it won't be competiting with crops for land). I had initially thought about genetically engineering plants to better grow there the same way the Chinese have engineered crops to grow in salty coastal areas, but then a simple google search reveals that people are already working on it with plants which already can grow there.

So to those more knowledgeable in this area, how much of an impact will this make. We have plenty of desert, but I assume you would grow less plants per acre than in more arable land. How much energy extraction can we get from these, and how much of a dent would that make in lessening our reliant on petroleum.

[someone_else]

huh, to have any decent amount of biomass in a manageable area you need to pour water on them.
And that is a pain for most deserts.

I'd say algae tanks have far better chances of colonizing the deserts. They still need fertilizers though.

[Spectre_nz]

I'm gonna go with "Not at all useful"

Desserts are deserts because they have low productivity. If you could raise the productivity to grow more biomass, it’s more profitable just to grow food there anyway. The magnitude to which you would have to increase the productivity of the deserts to make a difference is staggering.

You're better off aiming for solar collectors and electric vehicles.

I see biofuels as heading more into commodity chemicals and plastics rather than replacing petroleum fuels. We (or rather, the US) simply use too much oil.

(disclaimer: These were back of the envelope calcs I did a few months back when Wong pointed out the magnitude of US oil consumption, if you really want to trust them I'd want to re-run the numbers and double check everything)
For some sobering numbers: Using gas to liquid technology to convert Carbon monoxide and syngas into ethanol, assuming ideal efficiency, from the given sources:
Annual US steel production: 90 million tons; 9 million tons of Ethanol = 71.8 million equivalent barrels of oil
Annual US municipal solid waste, assuming it can all be gassified to CO (which it can't); Approximately 250 million tons; 25 million tons of ethanol = 198 million equivalent barrels
Annual US agricultural output in 2003 (if wiki is to be trusted) Ballpark 640 million tons; 64 million tons of ethanol = 508 million equivalent barrels.

Total fuel production from diverting major industrial waste, all MSW and essentially ALL current US agriculture: 775 million barrels, give or take.

Daily US oil consumption: 20.8 million barrels a day; All your efforts made 37 days of fuel.
I’m using some pretty rough and ready approximations to do those conversions. Still, If I’m too low by an order of magnitude and you get 370 days of fuel, you still need more or less the entire MSU, waste industry and agricultural output of the united states to do it.

[mr friendly guy]

I'm gonna go with "Not at all useful"

Desserts are deserts because they have low productivity. If you could raise the productivity to grow more biomass, it’s more profitable just to grow food there anyway. The magnitude to which you would have to increase the productivity of the deserts to make a difference is staggering.

The thing with growing in the desert, is that it doesn't compete with arable land for food. So it occurs to me that this particular opportunity cost isn't there, and since the desert aren't being used anyway...

You're better off aiming for solar collectors and electric vehicles.

I did think about that. There has been a study done about the lack of Lithium for electric vehicles. The study assumes that lithium producers will crank up as much as advertised, that includes the untapped reserves of Bolivia and China increasing production as much as they predict. They still worked out you can't produce that many electric cars. It did work on some assumptions that the electronic industry output will increase at current rates with the car companies getting the remainder lithium (although I find that debatable if car companies start competing for the lithium). I don't believe it studied recycling the lithium, which IIRC China and the EU are trying to do.

Also it didn't focus on the 2nd largest lithium reserve, most likely because we can't access it at present. Where is it? Afghanistan.

However it does show that it will take a bit to make electric vehicles in large quantities viable, which is why I am thinking in the near and mid term, biofuels will come into play.

I see biofuels as heading more into commodity chemicals and plastics rather than replacing petroleum fuels. We (or rather, the US) simply use too much oil.

(disclaimer: These were back of the envelope calcs I did a few months back when Wong pointed out the magnitude of US oil consumption, if you really want to trust them I'd want to re-run the numbers and double check everything)
For some sobering numbers: Using gas to liquid technology to convert Carbon monoxide and syngas into ethanol, assuming ideal efficiency, from the given sources:
Annual US steel production: 90 million tons; 9 million tons of Ethanol = 71.8 million equivalent barrels of oil
Annual US municipal solid waste, assuming it can all be gassified to CO (which it can't); Approximately 250 million tons; 25 million tons of ethanol = 198 million equivalent barrels
Annual US agricultural output in 2003 (if wiki is to be trusted) Ballpark 640 million tons; 64 million tons of ethanol = 508 million equivalent barrels.

Total fuel production from diverting major industrial waste, all MSW and essentially ALL current US agriculture: 775 million barrels, give or take.

Daily US oil consumption: 20.8 million barrels a day; All your efforts made 37 days of fuel.
I’m using some pretty rough and ready approximations to do those conversions. Still, If I’m too low by an order of magnitude and you get 370 days of fuel, you still need more or less the entire MSU, waste industry and agricultural output of the united states to do it.

37 days is still what, a bit more than 10% of your annual use.

http://www.ehow.co.uk/list_6664399_biof ... lants.html

Gives a conversion from biofuels.

Euphorbia Tirucalli
# Euphorbia tirucalli is a tropical to subtropical plant commonly known as milkbush. According to M. Calvin, as cited by Purdue University, the plant is capable of producing between 10 to 50 barrels of oil (biodiesel) per acre.

Algae has a lot of promise as a biofuel producer. According to Thomas F. Riesing, Ph.D, microalgae can produce between 5,000 to 15,000 gallons of oil per acre per year. Desert land is ideal for the large ponds' space requirement, but Dr. Riesing also notes some hurdles to overcome.

How would these figures affect your calculation is any?

[Spectre_nz]

The thing with growing in the desert, is that it doesn't compete with arable land for food. So it occurs to me that this particular opportunity cost isn't there, and since the desert aren't being used anyway...

The point I was making was that deserts aren't used because they aren't very productive. In order to make them productive, you need things like massive irrigation efforts. Once you start spending money to green the desert, it becomes much more attractive to grow food there, to make a better return on your investment.

If you don't green the deserts, then their productivity isn't really enough to get enough biomass to be significant, IMO.

I could make a better call if I could get some good data on the area of current agricultural land use in the US, un-utilized land suitable for agriculture and desert.

Basically; The US has already greened a lot of desert and uses modern methods of intensive farming to achieve high agricultural productivity.
Despite that, if you took all that existing agriculture and devoted it to bio-fuel, you only get few weeks worth, and you've expended all your food to do it.

However it does show that it will take a bit to make electric vehicles in large quantities viable, which is why I am thinking in the near and mid term, biofuels will come into play.

The magnitude of the demand is simply too great for biofuels to be a short term solution.
You're trying to phase out a stockpile that represents millions of years of carbon capture for a 'real time' point source carbon capture. We basically have to capture 10% of the total worldwide primary biomass productivity annually at 100% efficiency to meet our current annual oil use. If you use a more realistic conversion efficiency you need to utilize 50 to 60 % of it. This includes oceanic phyto plankton. This is not feasable.

If solar/nuclear/wind electric vehicles are not feasible, then the remaining option is to drastically reduce our consumption of energy.
I'm not arguing that electric is the better option, I'm arguing that biofuels are not an option, not to phase out fuel use in vehicles anyway. So, electric or bust.

37 days is still what, a bit more than 10% of your annual use.

And you have to devote more or less all of your food and waste to do it. (I'm probably actually doubling up on my calcs, as agriculture in gets represented again in the municipal solid waste in)

How would these figures affect your calculation is any?

It doesn't. I worked from a core conversion of 3CO + 3H2 --> CH3CH2OH + CO2 assuming you simply take every ton of available biomass and turn it into one ton of syngas in an ideal ratio.

The point being; If the entire agricultural output of the US only gets you ~8% of your annual fuel requirement, you need to convert an ungodly amount of desert into high quality arable land to be of any benefit. It has to be that productive because you need huge amounts of carbon capture.

If the US, a modern country using advanced agriculture techniques that has already undertaken to ‘green’ a lot of previously unproductive land can’t produce enough biofuel to sustain itself even with its entire agricultural output, then how is greening more desert going to help anyone?
Can the US really increase its biomass output ten-fold by utilizing its deserts?

I'm kinda rattling this off quickly at work, I'd give a more direct answer with;
Total current world agricultural land area
Total current world desert area
Total current agricultural output in tons

Or alternately, the figures for one country.

[mr friendly guy]

I'm kinda rattling this off quickly at work, I'd give a more direct answer with;
Total current world agricultural land area
Total current world desert area
Total current agricultural output in tons

Or alternately, the figures for one country.

Thanks. No biggie. I wasn't thinking in terms of biofuels replacing petroleum one hundred percent, but more supplementing it and keeping the costs down.

On another note, the other thing that has been suggested in these threads by a poster (Shep) is to use nuclear to replace your coal power plants, and then convert the no longer use coal into petrol. A bit off topic, but you seem knowledgeable on the subject and I would like to get your take on things.

[mr friendly guy]

Of added note. The other thing we can do to provide petrol is draw the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to petrol. The first time I heard of this was in the Australian edition of popular science, July 2010. These include a carbon capture device proposed by a Professor David Keith at Calgary university, and a plan using nuclear plants to convert carbon emissions into petrol by a F. Jeffrey Martin (nuclear scientist). The second option is carbon neutral, although it occurs to me that some countries for security reasons have an oil reserve, hence if the petrol was produced via sucking out carbon and stored in times of emergency, it will be carbon negative if no emergencies come up.

[Spectre_nz]

Quick edit:

You're trying to phase out a stockpile that represents millions of years of carbon capture for a 'real time' point source carbon capture. We basically have to capture 10% of the total worldwide primary biomass productivity annually at 100% efficiency to meet our current annual oil use. If you use a more realistic conversion efficiency you need to utilize 50 to 60 % of it. This includes oceanic phyto plankton. This is not feasible.

I should point out I mean the newly produced primary biomass, not total primary biomass each year.

Oh, also, when I calc'd total US agriculture I guess that was ready-for-market. There'd be a lot of waste stalks and off cuts you could use for fuel. Also, that 640 million ton figure included all the animals. They gassify just like plant mass...

You know what? Convert people into biofuel. Reduce demand and increase supply.

Thanks. No biggie. I wasn't thinking in terms of biofuels replacing petroleum one hundred percent, but more supplementing it and keeping the costs down.

On another note, the other thing that has been suggested in these threads by a poster (Shep) is to use nuclear to replace your coal power plants, and then convert the no longer use coal into petrol. A bit off topic, but you seem knowledgeable on the subject and I would like to get your take on things.

I'm of a similar opinion. Additionally I dream of Fusion. I also work for a biofuels company, but tragically, the position did not come with rose-tinted glasses.
Coal does have the volume available to provide enough liquid fuel to meet demand, but doesn't stop us pumping out more CO2. Although I guess it's just coal that would otherwise be burnt in powerplants.

Stop gap and keeping costs down are the best biofuels can do, but once you start running the numbers, the drop in the bucket that even a massive biofuels infrastructure provides makes it all very depressing. There would be a lot more gap and very little stop, and the degree to which prices would be lowered would be small, for an equivalent US market anyway.

Waste feed stocks for biofuel are in a similar vein to utilizing deserts in keeping costs down. You still struggle to break $1.20 USD a gallon once you tack infrastructure on there. And really, I think you'd be lucky to get 1% of your total fuel replaced by ethanol taking the US as an example. So, currently, say, fuel is $2.50 a gallon; swap out 1% of that for a $1 a gallon alternative and your fuel blend is $2.485 a gallon. Or if you target a 10% blend, 10% of your fuel is $2.35 a gallon and the other 90% is still $2.50.

Of added note. The other thing we can do to provide petrol is draw the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to petrol. The first time I heard of this was in the Australian edition of popular science, July 2010. These include a carbon capture device proposed by a Professor David Keith at Calgary university, and a plan using nuclear plants to convert carbon emissions into petrol by a F. Jeffrey Martin (nuclear scientist). The second option is carbon neutral, although it occurs to me that some countries for security reasons have an oil reserve, hence if the petrol was produced via sucking out carbon and stored in times of emergency, it will be carbon negative if no emergencies come up.

Yeah, I like these in principle, but without knowing there efficiency, I can only guess at the cost and scale of implementing such a system. Cracking atmospheric CO2 is attractive, and coupled with biological biofuel production you can get even higher conversion by cracking CO2 evolved from the ferment down to CO and feeding it back in. (edit: actually, you coudl couple it to an inorganic catylist conversion just as well)
Basically you're running hybrid-photosyntheis if you run it on solar power. Crack carbon dioxide, get microbes to split water and capture the carbon into hydrocarbons.

If cost and maintenance is no issue, it sounds awesome. But then, I'm not sure how much that kind of thing would cost to develop, make, run and maintain. You wouldn't get cheap fuel out of it. You'd get fuel you could use if there was nothing else left.

[Spectre_nz]

It looks like the US DOE has already crunched a lot of numbers in this regard.

http://feedstockreview.ornl.gov/pdf/bil ... vision.pdf

They reckon they can get a billion tons of biomass annually without too many changes and still keep food supply where it is. So it looks like the US could get a little over 10% of it's liquid fuels from biomass and still feed itself. Hey, who knows, maybe with some super-agricultural trickery they could get to 20%.

I've really only skimmed that. I'll have a better look later to see if there's a paragraph of making use of deserts.

[Singular Intellect]

Why the hell attempt massive undertakings to convert desert land into biomass fuel producers when it would be vastly easier to just use them as ideal energy spots for solar farms as they are?

[mr friendly guy]

Why the hell attempt massive undertakings to convert desert land into biomass fuel producers when it would be vastly easier to just use them as ideal energy spots for solar farms as they are?

Presumably you can't use that solar energy to drive around in a car yet. You need liquid fuels. Now you could I suppose convert the coal you no longer use because of the new solar plant into fuels.

[Rabid]

About the need for lithium :

Do you know that they are already trying to find out a way to produce superior batteries that does not use Lithium ? How do you do that, will you ask. "Simple" : Carbon nanotubes. They are searching a way to mass-produce super-capacitor using them.

A quick overlook on the subject : here


About solar power :

Europe is working on an agreement with the various countries of North Africa in order to construct a network of solar power plants. 10% of the energy produced is to be sent to Europe, the rest is to be consumed locally. Or is it the contrary ? I don't recall. Anyway, the projection is that almost half of European's electricity will be produced in the Sahara by 2040-2050.
Egypt is more than enthusiastic about this project. And Israel will be part of the deal, too (on the consumer side). Isn't that funny ?
I only hope that they don't politically fuck that up. I don't want to see some fanatics pulling the plug on Europe energy grid... I guess that will just accelerate the integration of North Africa into the European Union.

More informations here.

[Steel]

Interestingly if you go for algae you have a significant advantage over normal crops for biofuels. Firstly, certain types of algae can produce between 10-20 times as much bioethanol per hectare per year as a traditional crop like oilseed rape. Another major advantage is that your algae do not lose water due to transpiration and so if you place them in an area with limited water supply you don't need to supply inordinate irrigation as with normal crops, just replace evaporation from your algae ponds (evaporation can be minimised with a little extra work). Another advantage of algae is they can be grown at sea, and so don't even need to take up land area at all.

To give some numbers:

UK land area:
24 Million Hectares

Area needed to provide UK annual diesel supply from oilseed rape:
17.4 MHa

Area needed to provide UK annual diesel supply from oilseed rape:
0.8 MHa

So while it would be feasible to get our fuel needs from oilseed rape (there are other normal crops that are ~twice as good) would take about 70% of the land area of the country, it would need only about 3% with algae.

Of course the largest algae farm in the world is only about 400Ha at the moment...

[Spectre_nz]

Eeh, colour me sceptical about the feasibility of algal biofuel.
It's all fine and good that your biomass productivity is massive because they multiply like... well, microbes, the problem is the way that is usually archived is by constantly diluting out the culture, so your actual concentration is rather low.
Or if its one of those oil producing algae, you've got the problem of extracting your oil from the algae and water in an energy efficient manner.

The three factors you have to juggle are;
1) Metabolite concentration in broth - if its ethanol you're producing you really need to keep this up at 50g/L or better, otherwise you spend more energy recovering it that you gain back from your pure fuel. The numbers are different for other compounds depending on their affinity for water however. Like, for example, Butanol. That can be separated out of water much more easily. Unfortunately, it’s much more toxic to life in general and you don’t reach the high broth concentrations like you do with Ethanol.
2) Dilution rate: Combined with your broth concentration this will give you your volumetric production. It’s no good if your 10,000L tank only drips out broth at 10L an hour. 8% alcohol/volume is great, but if you only get 240L a day to purify, there's no point making a 10,000L tank to do it.
You need to be able to maintain a high broth concentration of your metabolite of interest while at the same time, diluting out the volume of your tank at a high rate continuously. If it's an alcohol you have to distil it out, if it’s an oil, you have to separate it from the biomass - and oil removal from algae is a lot harder than oil removal from larger plant crops.
and
3)Maintain a high utilization of Feedstocks - generally this is just for cost efficiency. When you're cranking high output and high throughput, you usually end up wasting a larger portion of your feedstock.

I'm not as familiar with Algal methods as I am for bacteria in liquid broth, but the limitations are broadly similar.
You've got to separate your biofuel from both the water and the algae, and you've got to do it at a reasonable rate, and be energy efficient about it.

From what I understand, Algae just aren't tolerant to high levels of metabolites like bacteria are, which makes the extraction step costly, possibly to the point of being counter-productive.

[Spectre_nz]

Having read over that DOE report a bit more, I’ll also add the following;
The DOE is wagering on much better utilization of existing resources and utilization of what is currently discarded – Items of particular note are logging residues and corn stovers.

They really seem to like corn stovers – the bits of the corn you don’t use currently – stalks, leaves and cobs. The report says currently there are 75 Million dry tons annually of corn stovers that could be utilized, plus a few dozen million tons of various other residues. Logging residues and ‘fuel treatments’; what they call the waste removed as part of fire management strategies and you end up with another hundred million tons annually. They’ve also got a couple of scenarios of increased use of alternate crops and changes to land use to improve yields to give 150-250 million tons of corn stovers and 150-375 million tons of perennial crop biomass. That’s a lot of additional biomass with little or no changes to current practice, with minimal infrastructure change required, and no competition to foodstuffs.

And that’s all from land currently utilized. So it’s got roads, rail and hopefully some existing biofuel infrastructure, or infrastructure that could be repurposed.

Compared to what you need to turn the desert into a biofuel region – means to plant and harvest biomass plus road and rail to transport industry in and fuel out, or transport biomass to processing facilities elsewhere, as well as the vehicles to do the moving. You run the risk of spending more energy than you gain, and you definitely will run a loss in the early years when you have to put in all that infrastructure from the ground up.
There’s probably also a lot of terrain that is steep, rocky and generally unfeasible to move a vehicle over – and that means you can’t easily plant, tend or harvest crops on a large scale there, not without considerable difficulty and expensive equipment at any rate.
And if that desert has crap productivity because, well, it’s a desert, then things are doubly unfavourable. Given low productivity, you need large areas of crop, meaning large areas to harvest over, and large travel distances to carry your harvested crop to the processing facility.
Triply unfavourable.
Better to stick a solar collector in the desert and move your energy out over powerlines. Or forget the desert all together.

In summation;
Deserts have crap biological productivity
There are other biofuel feedstocks that are under-utilized or discarded that also do not compete with foodstuff requirements
Existing agricultural areas already have some infrastructure

All of this makes growing biofuel crops in the desert unattractive.

I’ll look into the potential biomass you could get out of some American deserts, but if it’s less than the 300-400 million tons you could get from easier, existing resources, well, there’s the easy answer why not to try and plant deserts for biofuels.

[someone_else]

Presumably you can't use that solar energy to drive around in a car yet. You need liquid fuels. Now you could I suppose convert the coal you no longer use because of the new solar plant into fuels.

Why you say that we need liquid fuels?
You never heard of Tesla Roadster? It's price is supercar-ish (on the cheap side, though) but its performance is supercar-ish too.
I don't see affordable electric cars as a so distant future.

[Rabid]

Presumably you can't use that solar energy to drive around in a car yet. You need liquid fuels. Now you could I suppose convert the coal you no longer use because of the new solar plant into fuels.

Why you say that we need liquid fuels?
You never heard of Tesla Roadster? It's price is supercar-ish (on the cheap side, though) but its performance is supercar-ish too.
I don't see affordable electric cars as a so distant future.

If you want to buy american (and expensive) : Chevy Volt

If you want to buy French (cheaper but not-on-the-market-yet and with a look that will endanger your manhood) : Peugeot Ion [no price specified, but likely around 15,000 to € 20,000] (or more macho friendly : ) Renault Flence Z.E. [€ 21,000, battery pack not included]

The prices are 1.5 to 4 times the ones of a normal car, but the economy of fuel is worth it in many case. In Europe, an autonomy of 150 km is largely sufficient for easily 90% of the trips (and the battery for these things can be recharged at more than 60% in 30 minutes or less). The Chevy has the advantage of having an on-board fossil-fuel generator for when the battery run out of free electrons - but it trade this for a decreased autonomy on all-electric mode.

Surprisingly, it seems that Toyota (The Prius, remember ?...) hasn't at least revealed that they are going to release an electric model, as much as my half-assed research have shown.


All in all, it seems that the various electric technologies needs to mature for 4 to 6 more years, but it seems to me that things are on a good way as far as technological progress goes. And, well, hopefully, in 10-15 years, we won't need lithium anymore for our batteries.