John Ikerd of the University of Missouri and Mark Ritchie of the Institute of Trade and Agriculture Policy discuss the prospects for new vitality in the countryside that was once the heartbeat of America. Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Guests: John Ikerd, Mark Ritchie
Listen: http://audio.aworldofpossibilities.com/audio/ikerd_ritchie24kb1203.m3u
DIY projects from Lifehacker. Whether they are building computers, backyard projects, or turning office supplies into artillery, they are always tinkering. Most popular DIY projects of 2009 are one click away.
Over the past several years, there’s been no shortage of talk about alternative energy, and its potential to change the world. The problem is that most of it is just that — talk. But tonight, a report that aired on 60 Minutes showed one alternative that is not only real, it’s already being tested by companies such as Google and eBay. You simply have to watch this. Bloom Energy are producing tiny fuel cell boxes they call “Bloom Boxes.” Two of these can apparently power a U.S. home (and only one for homes in countries that use less power). So how small are they? Look at the picture above, each device isn’t much bigger than a standard brick. Of course, they need to be surrounded by a larger unit that takes in an energy source (such as natural gas). But still, these units look to be about the size of a refrigerator and can easily fit outside of a home, providing it with clean, cheap energy. Currently, these boxes cost some $700,000-$800,000, but eventually, founder K.R. Sridharenvisions one in every home — and he thinks he can get the cost below $3,000 for a unit to make that happen. And he’s talking a 5 to 10 year timeframe for this. Naturally, there are plenty who are skeptical of something like this ever working. There have been no shortage of fuel cell ideas over the years, but none get their own segment on 60 Minutes showing working units. And none get to highlight the fact that they’re already installed at companies like Google, eBay, FedEx and others. In fact, four of these Bloom Boxes have apparently been powering a Google datacenter for the past 18 months. eBay says their five boxes have saved them over $100,000 in electricity costs over the past nine months. Bloom Energy also has former Secretary of State Colin Powell on its board of directors, and he talked up the Bloom Boxes on 60 minutes tonight also. And the company has something in the neighborhood of $400 million in funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins and others. Kleiner’sJohn Doerr is also featured heavily in the 60 Minutes segment, talking about why he thinks this company can change the world perhaps even in a more profound way that another company he backed, Google, has. Bloom Energy was Kleiner’s first green tech investment. Again, just watch the video and decide for yourself whether to be skeptical or amazed at this point. Right now, I’m definitely in the latter camp considering this thing is already being tested out. Apparently, Bloom Energy is due for a big formal public unveiling on Wednesday in San Jose (they have a countdown up on their site) —expect to hear a lot more then.
"Residents understood the influence of prevailing wind, geography and the impact of the many industrial plants in the area... People seemed resigned to the fact that a life with middle class problems will go on."
Within the plume of emissions from Grain Processing Corporation and thirteen other Muscatine County point source emitters permitted by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, a group of us met with more than eighty residents yesterday at the Garfield Elementary School Gymnasium to discuss air quality.
HD-80 Representative Nathan Reichert organized the meeting and sent invitations to area residents. The panel consisted of Representative Reichert, Dr. Maureen McCue and myself from Iowa Physicians for Social Responsibility, Patrick O’Shaughnessy from the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health of the University of Iowa, Leland Searles from the Iowa Environmental Council and Jim McGraw of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Air Quality Bureau. The meeting went from 1:00 PM until 4:30 PM and the audience remained engaged throughout. The corporate media was less engaged, with one local television station covering the meeting. He left after 45 minutes and was apparently not there to cover most of the information presented by the panelists.
My participation was brief, framing the discussion after Representative Reichert made introductions and answering a couple of questions at the end. The residents seemed to understand that the air quality in Muscatine is and has been bad for a number of years. There were no real answers to the question “what can we do about it?”
There were other issues on people’s minds. Residents were concerned that the Garfield Elementary School, where the air quality monitor is situated, would be closed and consolidated by the school board. I was asked whether specific community health problems had been caused by emissions from the GPC plant that locked workers out back in 2008 in a contract dispute. Some residents left during the course of the meeting, and at the end about 35 remained to socialize with the panelists and each other before returning home. Residents understood the influence of prevailing wind, geography and the impact of the many industrial plants in the area. They understood that continuing to live in Muscatine may present health problems because of the air quality. People seemed resigned to the fact that a life with middle class problems will go on.
The area surrounding the school includes industry, railroad tracks servicing industry and small houses with about 1,000 square feet of living space. It is a working class neighborhood that seems to be drifting into poverty, where residents have few options to get out. Representative Reichert encouraged them to organize as a community and hopefully they will. Banding together to deal with poor air quality may be their best hope in a world that easily could forget them after the panelists and the PowerPoint presentations are gone.
Paul Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County.
- BlueLeaf Inc. of Drummondville, Quebec, Canada and Dynamotive Energy Systems Corp. (OTCBB: DYMTF) announce results today from two years of agricultural field trials of BlueLeaf using CQuest™ biochar from DynaMotive as a soil amendment. These trials were undertaken to experiment with biochar in a commercial farming operation. Char provided by Dynamotive was applied once at the initiation of trials. They are also the first biochar field trials undertaken in northerly latitudes (45° north). Over eighty five parameters were verified during the course of these trials during a period of two years.
Key results include increases in biomass produced with biochar amended soils versus non-treated control areas. In the case of soybean in 2008, a 20% increase in grain yield was shown and for a forage mixture in 2009 a 100% increase in fresh biomass was obtained. Other parameters showing increases with CQuest Biochar included earthworm, nematode and mycorrhizal root colonization, supporting the hypothesis that biochar may serve as a refuge for soil microbes. Surface soil water infiltration was also greater in biochar amended soil.
The results of these trials reinforce other research pointing to potentially important advantages for the use of biochar as an agricultural soil amendment, both for economic and environmental reasons. Barry Husk, President, Blue Leaf Inc. commented: “This study makes a significant contribution to the growing body of knowledge regarding the positive impacts that biochar can have as a soil amendment.” Tom Bouchard, Chief Operating Officer, Dynamotive added, “We are pleased that Barry and the BlueLeaf team continued the study over a 2-year period. This enabled the collection of longer term data regarding how one relatively light application (at the initiation of the trials) of CQuest biochar behaves as a soil amendment under real world conditions.”
Full details of the Blue Leaf Report is available athttp://www.dynamotive.com/assets/resources/BlueLeaf-Biochar-FT0809.pdf
About Blue Leaf Inc.
BlueLeaf is a social purpose private corporation active in environment issues related to water and agriculture.
About Dynamotive
Dynamotive Energy Systems Corporation is an energy solutions provider headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with offices in the USA and Argentina. Its carbon/greenhouse gas neutral fast pyrolysis technology uses medium temperatures and oxygen-less conditions to turn dry, waste cellulosic biomass into BioOil for power and heat generation. BioOil can be further converted into vehicle fuels and chemicals. Photographs of the Guelph and West Lorne plants may be seen on the Company’s website www.dynamotive.com
Planet Earth has so many parts and subparts, elementary speaking. Many of these are finite, however they are distributed in ways that are out of balance. Carbon, for instance, is finite but in different forms and spread into places where it may be very detrimental to the natural weather processes that we feel everyday. The best set of non-technical comments regarding biochar, a field that is sure to become a new science, are in the below excerpt by Victoria Kamsler, D.Phil. Each of us can make a tiny difference that when combined with all other tiny contributions can actually make the change we need. Please take the time to read the following with great interest and learn about biochar: The following is courtesy of Victoria Kamsler, D.Phil, Chief Ethics Officer and Research Director, Greenfiniti "Here is a brief description of Biochar, which may be helpful for you.
Biochar is the modern version of an ancient Pre-Colombian technology invented by the Mayan civilization to enhance soil fertility. Similar to charcoal, it is created by pyrolysis (burning in low oxygen conditions) of biomass: agricultural waste, dead trees, etc. Called terra preta (prepared earth) in Brazil, the first thing to know about biochar is that it is a way of permanently removing CO2 greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. The carbon from biomass, when pyrolyzed, can remain in the soil for hundreds or thousands of years. We know this because some of the terra preta soils of the Amazon are 2000 years old. And these ancient soils are still so fertile after all this time that there is an industry in Brazil to collect these soils and put them in bags to sell as potting soil.
Biochar is the only true carbon *reductive* technology that exists. Other technologies that claim to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, like geoengineering, and traditional carbon capture and storage (CCS) are fatally flawed from a technical point of view, although it now appears that oil, coal, and mining companies are about to put 100's of billions of dollars into CCS that won't work (so they can make money taking carbon out of the earth and then make more money putting it back into the old mines). Other 'green' technologies, like solar and wind, merely reduce the amount of CO2 that goes in to the atmosphere. Biochar takes carbon out of the air and puts it in the soil, where it makes the soil fertile. So biochar is unique in its ability to help humanity solve the climate change problem by taking carbon *out* of the atmosphere.
Harold, because of your interests I will quickly say here that biochar can be used as an addition for *smell free* humanure composting toilets. The carbon controls odors, and the resulting compost can be much more fertile than humanure alone. I can recommend people in the Biochar Offsets group who have done this research or know about it. Regarding Boudewijn's interests, I believe that biochar can be used as an addition to pavements. I know less about this, but if you are doing zero- or low-carbon concrete, there may be applications that could help make some of your building projects carbon *negative* instead of just carbon neutral.
Biochar is also a source of revenue, especially for developing countries. There are many different pyrolysis technologies available and in development. All of them produce char, which can be sold or used on site. Biochar may soon be eligible for agricultural soil carbon credits both from the UN and in the US and Canada cap and trade systems. My Biochar Protocol subgroup of the Biochar Offsets group is right now drafting the world's first offset validation protocol for biochar which we anticipate will be ready in late June. And some biochar technologies are also capable of producing different forms of renewable energy: bio oil, syngas, heat and electricity. These can be used for electricity to light homes so people can work and read at night. These renewable energy components of biochar production are already eligible for the UN's CDM (Kyoto compliance) market offsets. These are the most valuable offsets on the global market and the easiest to sell. Prices now are around 30-40 Euros per offset (representing one tonne of CO2 equivalent).
But this just scratches the surface of what we know about what biochar can do. Biochar is the Swiss Army knife, or the "killer app" of climate solutions. Here is a quick list of some applications:
1) Soil Fertility
Field tests by Biochar Fund in Cameroon
http://www.biocharfund.org
have demonstrated up to 220% yield increase in maize crops in degraded soil in one season with addition of biochar to the soil. Although it works in many different soil conditions, and possibly all, we know that biochar works especially well in degraded soils, and in the tropics. That is where the results are truly spectacular. Biochar Fund recently received a $300k grant from Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai's organization for additional biochar projects in Kenya, after their spectacular results in Cameroon.
2) Farms & gardens
Biochar holds nitrogen and water. This means that farmers can use less water and less fertilizer. They can make biochar from their wastes and use It in their own fields without transportation. Different technologies are being developed that are optimized for different agricultural inputs, like rice husks, coconut shells, etc. Less fertilizer use also means:
3) Pollution prevention
Biochar prevents runoff of nitrogen into waterways, thus preventing human deaths (blue baby syndrome) and preventing the growth of "dead zones" from nitrogen-induced algae blooms in the ocean. Biochar may also be able to remediate other soil contaminant chemicals, though people in our Invasives, subgroup know more than I do.
4) Invasive species control
It just so happens that the characteristic features of invasive species (like kudzu in the southern US, cat tails and striga in Africa, and water hyacinth in Africa and India) map almost exactly on to the list of most desirable characteristics for biochar production. I don't know which invasive species you have in Haiti, but this is what to do with them. The manager of our Invasives subgroup is a well known expert who has compiled the evidence for this conclusion.
5) Reforestation
We all know that Haiti is one of the most severely deforested places on earth. Look at an aerial photo of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic: green on one side, brown on the other. This is one of the main causes of the critical clean water situation in Haiti, which was already a huge problem before the quake. Biochar is ideal for smart, integrated agroforestry and reforestation programs. It will literally "change the earth."
There are many other things to mention, but I will conclude with:
5) Stoves
As you may know, the World Health Organization estimates that approximately 1.6 million people, mostly women and young children, die *every* *year* from smoke inhalation from traditional cookstoves. Biochar stoves are emission free and can solve this problem while creating biochar for fertile kitchen gardens, and some stoves can even create electricity for home lighting or cellphone charging.
Pyrolysis equipment exists in different sizes and many different types, from small and very cheap ($6-8 dollars, some may be less, and I think some can be made with local scrap) all the way to municipal scale.
This is why people in the Biochar Offsets group are so passionate about this emerging technology and why we started Biochar Haiti. We believe that biochar can play a key role in the sanitation, health, and food security needs of the Haitian people. It is why people like Bill Clinton support biochar for economic development. Our Biochar Haiti wants to help bring a new biochar industry to Haiti to restore the forests and make the soil fruitful for the people of Haiti, while creating jobs and income.
You can find out more at the excellent website of the International Biochar Initiative:
GMOs Health & Disease — by Jeffrey M. Smith February 22, 2010
Something doesn’t quite add up about genetically modified (GM) foods
It looks the same—the bread, pies, sodas, even corn on the cob. So much of what we eat every day looks just like it did 20 years ago. But something profoundly different has happened without our knowledge or consent. And according to leading doctors, what we don’t know may already be hurting us big time.
In May, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) publicly condemned genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food supply, saying they posed “a serious health risk.” They called on the US government to implement an immediate moratorium on all genetically modified (GM) foods, and urged physicians to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients.
GM-What?
Genetic engineering is quite distinct from selective breeding because it involves taking genes from a completely different species and inserting them into the DNA of a plant or animal. The long term effects of this for our health and our planet’s biodiversity are unknown.
AAEM, an “Academy of Firsts,” was the first US medical organization to describe or acknowledge Gulf War Syndrome, chemical sensitivity, food allergy/addiction, and a host of other medical issues. But the potential for harm from GMOs dwarfs anything they have identified thus far. It can impact everyone who eats.
More than 70% of the foods on supermarket shelves contain derivatives of the eight GM foods on the market—soy, corn, oil from canola and cottonseed, sugar from sugar beets, Hawaiian papaya, and a small amount of zucchini and crook neck squash. The biotech industry hopes to genetically engineer virtually all remaining vegetables, fruits, grains, and beans (not to mention animals).
The two primary reasons why plants are engineered are to allow them to either drinkpoison, or produce poison. The poison drinkers are called herbicide tolerant. They’re inserted with bacterial genes that allow them to survive otherwise deadly doses of toxic herbicide. Biotech companies sell the seed and herbicide as a package deal, and US farmers use hundreds of millions of pounds more herbicide because of these types of GM crops. The poison producers are called Bt crops. Inserted genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus Thuringiensis produce an insect-killing pesticide called Bt-toxin in every cell of the plant. Both classes of GM crops are linked to dangerous side effects. ...
My mom taught me this simple trick several years ago. As a fan of vintage furniture it has come in handy again and again. Like magic, watch as a single walnut covers up the small dings and scrapes in your wooden furniture. We aren't promising miracles here, but with a project this easy it is definitely worth a shot.
What You Need
Ingredients [OR] Materials
dinged up wood furniture
one walnut
Instructions
1. Identify areas of your wooden furniture that are unsightly because they have been bumped or scraped.
2. Get your walnut.
3. Rub the walnut on the damaged area.
4. Watch in amazement as the damaged area begins to darken.
5. Step back and admire your work. Hey, you didn't even break a sweat!
Greenhouse is a Go! - I'm getting antsy to start planting! If the difficulty I had ordering from Johnnyseeds.com was any indication so are a lot of other folks.
I've made a deal to sell starts at the local feed store this year. We decided to compete with our little greenhouse in town and the big stores 20 miles away by only selling "heirloom" plants mostly. Along with that we are expanding our garden out to market size - maybe an acre this year. Plus putting in some brambles...
Anyway, the GH project is to a place we can at least get started. Here is the south side with the recycled storm windows finally installed: ...
"Some terms defy definition. "Sustainable agriculture" has become one of them. In such a quickly changing world, can anything be sustainable? What do we want to sustain? How can we implement such a nebulous goal? Is it too late?" ...
Photo courtesy of Trends Updates (this is not a picture of the actual turbine)
In an attempt to make offshore wind farms more profitable, Norway plans to build the world's largest turbine standing 533 feet tall with a rotor diameter of 475 feet. It will also be the most powerful by generating 10-megawatts to power over 2,000 homes, making it three times more powerful than current turbines.
"We are aiming to install it in 2011," said Enova's head of new technology, Kjell Olav Skoelsvik. The prototype will cost $67.5 million to build and Enova's committed to $23 million of it. ...
"The guru of the permaculture movement came to Duke last week. To hear him tell it, Toby Hemenway is an ordinary guy. To see him in person, you get the sense nothing could be further from the truth. The 300 people that crowded into Love Auditorium underscored that with a standing ovation for his talk on 'How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth but Not Civilization.' The lecture was jam-packed with information ranging from human evolution to gardening and delivered by a far-from-ordinary guy."
Canadian Gasifier, is a biomass to energy gasifier, design and pilot project, build & research company.We Design and build small to mid-scale "Fuel / Heat / Cogen" Gasifiers.These gasifiers are used for various functions, they can be mounted on trucks & cars, or used to heat water for "district heating" of a home & shop or larger applications like a large farm operation or small business, or even run an electric generator for (off grid) applications, or, selling back to an electricity utility company.What is a Gasifier ?
Gasifiers (our gasifiers in particular) run on a clients feedstock, usually consisting of types of grasses or woodchips from a renewable perennial planting of hay or wood(generally switchgrass or willow) the client has made the commitment to themselves to be "as green as can be" or is simply tired of the energy companies always having a "hand in their pocket".
Gasifiers generally run on a portion of the supplied feedstock as well as converting the balance of it to a fuel for other applications by a process known as "thermally driven, chemical reduction of biomass" or in easier terms, they burn part of the feedstock to attain the heat needed to reduce the rest of the feedstock into elemental gases, like hydrogen (H2), Methane (CH4), Ethane (C2H6), Ethylene (C2H4), Argon (Ar), and Nitrogen (N2). this mixture of gases is much the same as natural gas or propane, and burns with almost the same power. All of our gasifiers, are of the downdraft style, and are self fueling, require only small amounts of electricity, (under 15 amps) they need little to no maintenance other than a routine check, and periodic feedstock bunker (fuel) re-filling (like filling your car). ...
If I were to ask 10 random people what they would expect would be a sign of the arrival of “peak oil”, I would expect that all 10 would say “high oil prices”.
Let me tell you what I think the symptoms of the arrival of peak oil are
1. Higher default rates on loans
2. Recession
Furthermore, I expect that as the supply of oil declines over time, these symptoms will get worse and worse—even though people may call the cause of the decline in oil use “Peak Demand” rather than “Peak Supply”.
This post is also published at Oil and Gas News.
Let’s think about what happens when oil prices try to increase. From the perspective of a consumer who is already spending pretty much all of his income, it seems to me the result is something like this:" ... click post header for more...
Gail E. Tverberg
Gail E. Tverberg graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1968 with a B.S. in Mathematics. She received a M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1970.
Ms. Tverberg is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. Much of her early career was spent with CNA Insurance Companies in Chicago, Illinois. There she was involved in both pricing and reserving of casualty insurance coverages. Her later career was spent with the Tillinghast business of Towers Perrin in Atlanta. At Towers Perrin, she performed consulting services, primarily for organizations writing medical malpractice insurance.
Ms. Tverberg began writing articles on finite world issues in early 2006. Her first article, discussing the reasons to expect oil shortages expected impact on the insurance industry, was published under the title "Oil Shortages: The Next Katrina?" in Emphasis Magazine, published by Tillinghast business of Towers Perrin.
More recently, in May 2007, she wrote the wrote the lead article in Contingencies Magazine, published by the American Academy of Actuaries titled Our Finite World: Implications for Actuaries
Since March 1, 2007, Ms. Tverberg has been working for Tverberg Actuarial Services on finite world issues. She is also a frequent contributor to the TheOilDrum.com website, under the name "Gail the Actuary". Her web articles have been published by TheOilDrum.com andEnergyBulletin.net.
Gail often writes on energy-related websites under the name "Gail the Actuary" or "GailTheActuary"."
Jeremy Rifkin: The third industrial revolutionMy sense is that we're nearing an endgame for the modern age. I think we had two singular events in the last 18 months that signal the end. First, in July 2008 the price of oil hit $147/barrel. Food riots broke out in 30 countries, the price of basic items shot up and purchasing power plummeted. That was the earthquake; the market crash 60 days later was the aftershock. It signaled the beginning of the endgame of a great industrial era based on fossil fuels. The second event, in December 2009, was the breakdown in Copenhagen, when world leaders tried to deal with our entropy problem and failed.
John Michael Greer: Why factories aren't efficientLast week’s Archdruid Report post fielded a thoughtful response from peak oil blogger Sharon Astyk, who pointed out that what I was describing as America’s descent to Third World status could as well be called a future of “ordinary human poverty.” She’s quite right, of course. There’s nothing all that remarkable about the future ahead of us; it’s simply that the unparalleled abundance that our civilization bought by burning through half a billion years of stored sunlight in three short centuries has left most people in the industrial world clueless about the basic realities of human life in more ordinary times.
It’s this cluelessness that underlies so many enthusiastic discussions of a green future full of high technology and relative material abundance. Those discussions also rely on one of the dogmas of the modern religion of progress, the article of faith that the accumulation of technical knowledge was what gave the industrial world its three centuries of unparalleled wealth; since technical knowledge is still accumulating, the belief goes, we may expect more of the same in the future. Now in fact the primary factor that drove the rise of industrial civilization, and made possible the lavish lifestyles of the recent past, was the recklessness with which the earth’s fossil fuel reserves have been extracted and burnt over the last few centuries. The explosion of technical knowledge was a consequence of that, not a cause.
The 2009 Bio eConference—“Growing the Bioeconomy: Solutions for Sustainability”—is a 12-state alliance of simultaneous state conferences. These co-host sites will be sharing content through high-speed communication systems to promote agriculturally-based sustainable solutions to global climate change and energy supply. The conference will tackle the sustainability challenge by:
Exploring a systems perspective on biorenewables.
Offering solutions to current questions regarding grain ethanol.
Examining the potential role of biochar as an agent for carbon sequestration.
Discussing the implementation of new ideas for land stewardship with biofuels agriculture.
Keynote address: James E. Lovelock, Ph.D.
One of the world’s most renowned thinkers on global environmental science, Dr. Lovelock has called upon farmers to convert agricultural residues to biochar for incorporation into the soil as the only solution to global climate change.
University of Illinois researcher Dr. Tom Voigt is standing next to a test plot of miscanthus, an ornamental grass that scientists say may be a new plant source for creating ethanol. Long used in landscape design, miscanthus can grow more than 12 feet tall. Tom points out, "It's been used on golf courses to divide fairways from driving ranges. It's been used in large landscapes because it can be quite dominant. I've always said that this is a great grass if you've got a neighbor you don't like."
But there are lots of things that researchers here do like about miscanthus. According to Tom, once planted the thick stands of fast growing grass spread quickly through root- like structures called rhizomes. "We plant the rhizomes at about 42 to 43 hundred per acre. At that planting density, we can start to get a harvestable crop at the end of the third growing season."
This joint research project between the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley uses sophisticated equipment to monitor growth and field conditions. Dr.Voigt says researchers suggest miscanthus offers real options for energy alternatives. "It produces large volumes of biomass is another reason why we're looking at this species. It's adapted to our part of the country. So it's a grass that fits into the scheme of things here in Central Illinois."
Illinois is one of the top corn crop producing states in the nation, a significant portion of which already goes into ethanol production. So why grow miscanthus instead of more acres of corn? American will consume nearly 400 million gallons of gasoline everyday so replacing even some of that with ethanol would be an important part of the picture. Scientists in Illinois say that an acre of corn will yield about 475 gallons of ethanol while an acre of miscanthus will yield about three times that amount.
Researchers Tom Voigt and Dr. Stephen Long spend a good deal of time in the test fields. They are assessing everything from moisture needs to photosynthesis and also, how cellulose in the plant's woody stalks can effectively be chemically converted to sugars to create ethanol, just like corn. Dr. Long says, "You break that complex down to the sugars, then you ferment those to alcohol in the same way, of course, that we make beer. Once you've made the beer, you then distill off the alcohol and that is the fuel. And, of course, already in the Midwest about ten percent of our gas is ethanol from corn grains."
Researchers say while corn can yield more than 160 bushels per acre for ethanol, miscanthus yields 17 tons of material. In addition, it requires less work from farmers.
And according to Dr. Long, there's another benefit for growers, "For corn, you've got many more inputs. You've got to till the land every year or at least you've got to plant your corn every year. You've got to add a large amount of nitrogen. With miscanthus, we've achieved this 17 tons per acre without any of those inputs, so the cost to the farmer in the long term is a great deal less." Dr. Long maintains there are significant other benefits to grass alternatives like miscanthus, "A lot of motivation for growing a potential crop like this is to help to mitigate global change. So we're growing a renewable fuel, but we also want to add carbon to the soil as well. If we get a carbon gain into the system that is offsetting carbon we're adding to the atmosphere."
Miscanthus has been grown as a fuel in many parts of Europe for more than a decade. But there, the woody stalks that look like bamboo are harvested, burned and used to generate electricity. Doctors Voigt and Long say this research could reveal exciting new options. Dr. Voigt says, "My wife gives me a hard time because when I told her I wanted to study grass, she thought that was going to be somewhat of a frivolous pursuit and it's come back now to be much more positive than either of us ever anticipated." Dr. Long adds, "I think for 19 years, people thought I was crazy and now they're beginning to think. Perhaps there's something in this."
Illinois Fuel Facts
Illinois farmers already play a major role in "crop to fuel" alternatives. 17 percent of Illinois corn goes into ethanol production. That corn is used to make some 40 percent of the ethanol consumed in the United States.
I was raised on a small farm in Illinois. My wife, Eileen and I and family have worked together hand and hand on this farm (and adjoining land we bought) since 1966. I attended and graduated University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL. I received a Bachelor of Science Degree (Cum Laude)in Agricultural Engineering in 1970.
I worked as a registered Professional Engineer for the Rock Island District, US Army Corps of Engineers for 33 years, before retiring. I held several supervisory positions while at Corps: Chief, Regulatory Branch, Assistant Chief of Operations Division, Chief of the Lock and Dam Branch, and Mississippi River Project Manager. One highlight of my career was developing NIC (Google "NIC - Navigation Information Connection") during the early 90's, in a joint effort, with the District's Information Management personnel and Navigation Industry Representatives.
My wife and I have 2 grown children and 4 grandchildren. We have businesses associated with farming, "live edge" furniture making, vegetable produce, and graphics. We enjoy pursuing our hobby interests.
DIY projects from Lifehacker. Whether they are building computers, backyard projects, or turning office supplies into artillery, they are always tinkering. Most popular DIY projects of 2009 are one click away.
Over the past several years, there’s been no shortage of talk about alternative energy, and its potential to change the world. The problem is that most of it is just that — talk. But tonight, a report that aired on 60 Minutes showed one alternative that is not only real, it’s already being tested by companies such as Google and eBay. You simply have to watch this
. Bloom Energy
Planet Earth has so many parts and subparts, elementary speaking. Many of these are finite, however they are distributed in ways that are out of balance. Carbon, for instance, is finite but in different forms and spread into places where it may be very detrimental to the natural weather processes that we feel everyday. The best set of non-technical comments regarding biochar, a field that is sure to become a new science, are in the below excerpt by Victoria Kamsler, D.Phil. Each of us can make a tiny difference that when combined with all other tiny contributions can actually make the change we need. Please take the time to read the following with great interest and learn about biochar: The following is courtesy of Victoria Kamsler, D.Phil, Chief Ethics Officer and Research Director, Greenfiniti "Here is a brief description of Biochar, which may be helpful for you.
GMOs Health & Disease
My mom taught me this simple trick several years ago. As a fan of vintage furniture it has come in handy again and again. Like magic, watch as a single walnut covers up the small dings and scrapes in your wooden furniture. We aren't promising miracles here, but with a project this easy it is definitely worth a shot.
by Denise O'Brien
Photo courtesy of Trends Updates (this is not a picture of the actual turbine)
Gail E. Tverberg graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1968 with a B.S. in Mathematics. She received a M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1970.
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