Friday, October 26, 2012

Using Winemaking Waste For Making Fuel

Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.

I think you flunked earth sciences. The lawn needs those things; It composts and reduces to fertilizer for the next year. Same with leaves and such. The reason our crop yields are falling and most of our cities are basically slabs of clay with a few inches of top soil over the top is because we're constantly trimming, mowing, and raking away all the nutrients that the plants need to survive and replacing it with pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and all manner of chemicals that are dangerous to us.

I'm not discounting the source: I'm simply pointing out it's already marked for a different use, courtesy mother nature. Ethanol is a supportive technology, like solar, wind, or hydroelectric. But it can't replace the fuels in our vehicles because there's no way to produce enough of it to completely offset oil. In fact, all the alternative energy technologies that are commercially feasible can't do it. It's called energy density, and so far we haven't been able to find a fuel that has both high energy density and a low conversion cost that can match dead dino fuel. Some of them have reached the point where they may be useful for daily commutes in an urban environment, but there is nothing yet created that I can put 80 pounds of it in my car and drive 400 miles, and then stop, wait for 5 minutes to refuel, and then continue. The few technologies that offer decent conversion efficiency and energy density usually have significant drawbacks. Natural gas, for example, has to be compressed to several hundred PSI in order to get a reasonable amount into a car. At those pressures, a hairline fracture in the tank will not only destroy the car, but anyone within a hundred feet of it... I'm not sure I like the idea of riding a bomb to work every day. That's just one example; there are many others, but they all suffer from the same physics problem: Energy density and conversion efficiency.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/E9knmwfQaiM/using-winemaking-waste-for-making-fuel

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