Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Merijn Knibbe — Already!

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Already!
Merijn Knibbe

7 comments:

Ryan Harris said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dan Lynch said...

FWIW "renewable" includes biomass which is not necessarily a good thing and not necessarily carbon neutral.

Tom Hickey said...

Good point. Ethanol, which has become an economic staple here in Iowa, is an example.

Ryan Harris said...

The first cellulosic ethanol plant opened in Emmetsberg, Ia last week. It takes husks, leaves, stalks from corn and makes it into ethanol.

Matt Franko said...

"At full capacity, it will convert 770 tons of biomass per day to produce ethanol at a rate of 20 million gallons per year, later ramping up to 25 million gallons per year"

ok we currently use 134,506,764,000 gallons of gasoline per year so if we build 5500 of these we could do it (if there is enough biomass available as feedstock...)

There are about 3000 counties in the US so that would be less than 2 per county...

Ignacio said...

Better to change to a model that does not make the planet even warmer, it (biomass) works exactly like fossil fuels: captured energy 'in the ground' (in form of biomass instead of minerals or) is consumed (burned) to generate electricity and the byproducts of the chemical reaction released (partially) into the atmosphere.

So unless you are using some efficient (although total efficiency is impossible) form of carbon-capture technology it's not the solution at all (ofc unless you don't care about rising the average temperature in the glove).

Ryan Harris said...

Prior to this plant, cellulosic ethanol plants were in laboratory and experimental plants on very small scales. Since this new plant is only the first commercial scale plant, I'd expect these plants will scale up as they spread, in the same way as the corn-ethanol plants did. There is no single energy source large enough to to completely replace gasoline and diesel. So we're going to have to have a patch work of new energy sources and this is a fairly responsible way of using doing it.

They should be able to produce butanol pretty soon too, which is a drop in replacement for gasoline. And is better than ethanol because it can be shipped in pipelines without corrosion problems. Still a few years out.