Somehow i am against the use of fossil fuels if its replaceable by sustainable / renewable sources, as wood gas is…
Did you know that NG is a fossil fuel ?
Did you know that the % of GHG emitted from scavenging NG equals the amount of NG ?
1 Kg per 1 Kg
That landfill gasses are the biggest GHG contributors ?
If europe would use the landfill gas that is emitted freely to generate electricity, that this would cover 300% of the needed energy ?
That CO2 generated from manufacturing Ethanol fuel is equal as the amount of Ethanol ? but just is being vented in the air ?
That biogas producers are scrubbing the biogass from CO2 but then again this Co2 is just vented ?
Europe wants to have stricter emission law’s for car’s polluting… but what about the macro enterprises who don’t care ?
That isn’t necessarily true. A large number of ethanol plants save the CO2 produced to be used in other processes like welding gas, and carbonization of drinks as an additional revenue stream.
That maybe true where you are, it isn’t true elsewhere. Landfill gases are tapped to be used. The Chevy Bolt is assembled in a factory that uses landfill gas. Our local landfill uses that gas, a number of european landfills recover that gas as well.
the problem isn’t not tapping landfill gas its sending organics to a dump in the first place. Macro versus micro again. Compost bins creating co2 and fertilizer instead of methane and leachate.
That is old, and uses outdated data and politically slanted. . The newer upgraded processes are far more efficient. I will see if I can dig out a more recent study. A later study, which I will try to dig out, uses the newer process, and I don’t even think it uses the newer enzymes that help considerable.
Yup I’m on Sean’s side. Its 9 years old that is 3 lifetimes in the alternative energy world. Having said that it’s a giant pork barrel scheme no question about it.
The data they uses is probably even older. It takes time to gather all the data and assemble and analyze it.
They changed the porkbarreling. It eliminated the money spent for price support for crop subsidies, the subsidies went to ethanol plants, which then replaced MBTE as a oxygenate fuel additive, which was all imported from Qatar, had environmental issues, and pricing issues. even though it came from a single factory, and the price fluctuated considerably.
The net effect is the instead of paying people in qatar, we are paying american workers for a product with similar qualities. .
Those gaps are going to be hard to bridge to achieve a net energy gain. Impossible in the real world.
When we see a distillery firing all it’s processes on alcohol (not the waste, that’s another calculation, and still far more valuable as animal feed ), and coming from farms run on alcohol, there is no possible net energy gain. And as Koen rightly points out, just fermentation emits half the CO2. And we have no trouble collecting CO2 from many other sources. Virtually all those applications still leave it as an emission in the end besides.
In fact I would say the ethanol from food calculations under estimate emissions, as there is no consideration of the fertilizer industry inputs and emissions, and other details. You don’t get from a 10 calorie fossil fuel input system with one end food calorie out to some magic endless source of energy. Corn yields prior to heavy fertilizer use were 1/5th current bench marks.
All the system is, is a luxury ride on a fossil fuel culture, with heavy government subsidies to political and commercial lobbies. With zero chance of addressing our runaway demands for cheap energy.
Perhaps the most telling figure in that article is 97% of the surface area of the US under corn to meet runaway fuel needs, in a negative sum game. Corn doesn’t grow in the peaks of the Rockies, or lakes.
The car culture was a fossil fuel era dream, and will largely go to the pages of history with it. Holding onto fantasy notions of perpetuating it past the end warning signs will be cultural suicide.
You cannot possibly get a net energy gain. Period. You may believe you can if subscribe to overunity theory, but generally accepted physics says otherwise.
There is no food involved. The only other option for price support so farmers don’t go out of business is to put it in the garbage. This is a -FAR- superior program.
However, oil interests are attacking ethanol with the Food for Fuel argument. So you may attack the FF industry, but yet, you are supporting them.
In fact, it seems quite plain that the natural gas used to fire boilers (and produce the majority of the plant power needs) would be more efficiently burnt in vehicles directly.
So why not use a fraction of the industry subsidies to convert vehicles to natural gas? Also, for the sake of energy security it makes far better sense being domestically self sufficient for a while yet, and not needing MBTE, and burning with higher efficiency than liquid fuel.
Agriculture, and all life on the planet has always been based on an energy gain, mostly from solar power from photosynthesis.
We never would have had a civilization if farmers (or hunters, or fishermen) had to put more energy into resource extraction than they got out. The sun has been our over unity free fusion generator.
Fossil fuel chemical bonds are also from that fusion reaction, but unsustainable because you can only have a pyromania century and a half like we have just been through perhaps every 40 million years, and with catastrophic climate / environmental consequences.
Recycling is the lowest efficiency rung of resource management.
And with regards to landfill methane, even a good system (one of few), loses most of the methane to the atmosphere, as 86 times stronger a greenhouse gas than CO2.
It all looks like conscience easing / greenwashing.
Old maybe, but still valid points, the amount of fossil fuel that it takes to make ethanol; tractors spray the fields, plant the fields, spray again, combines harvest, tractor trailers haul it to the plants, then haul it out, then when added to gasoline 4% decreased in mpg. Not to mention it sucks for older engines, and any small engines.
Woodbrook Biomass Community Heating Scheme is the first of its kind - a unique “Eco-Village” in Belfast. Vital Energi was appointed to deliver a £2 million biomass district heating system servicing 358 homes as part of phase one of the scheme.
I have seen online examples of various biomass district heating plants in parts of Europe.
This may be the first built from the ground up development, but I believe I read just recently on one in the Netherlands started several years ago.
One of the biggest has to be the Swedish steam plant capable of running on forestry waste, garbage, or conventional fuel. But the Swedes remain impressed by what it was like to have no petroleum for years.
IF you want to include that then
“In June 2004, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its 2002 analysis of ethanol production and determined that the net energy balance of ethanol production is 1.67 to 1.1 For every 100 BTUs of energy used to make ethanol, 167 BTUs of ethanol is produced. In 2002, USDA had concluded that the ratio was 1.35 to 1. The USDA findings have been confirmed by additional studies conducted by the University of Nebraska and Argonne National Laboratory.”
SO your information is older then 2002.
“Ethanol can reduce pollution. … However, ethanol is considered atmospheric carbon-neutral because corn and sugarcane, the two major feedstocks for fuel ethanol production, absorb CO2 as they grow and offset the CO2 produced when ethanol is made and burned.”
That was the first thing that came up on google
and I had to get off computer
The Holly Steam Combination Company was the first steam heating company to commercially distribute district heating from a central steam heating system.
Consolidated Edison of New York (Con Ed) operates the New York City steam system, the largest commercial district heating system in the United States.[85] The system has operated continuously since March 3, 1882 and serves Manhattan Island from the Battery through 96th Street.[86] In addition to providing space- and water-heating, steam from the system is used in numerous restaurants for food preparation, for process heat in laundries and dry cleaners, and to power absorption chillers for air conditioning.
The city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin has been using district heating for its central business district since the Valley Power Plant commenced operations in 1968.[7] Amazingly, the air quality in the immediate vicinity of the plant, based on the sensor located on César Chavez Drive, qualifies as the best in Southeastern Wisconsin, at least with regard to ozone concentration. The recent (2012) conversion of the plant, which changed the fuel input from coal to natural gas, is expected to further improve air quality at both the local César Chavez sensor as well as Antarctic sensors [8]. Interesting to note about Wisconsin power plants is their dual use as breeding grounds for peregrines [9].
On July 18, 2007, one person was killed and numerous others injured when a steam pipe exploded on 41st Street at Lexington.[87] On August 19, 1989, three people were killed in an explosion in Gramercy Park.[88]
Denver’s district steam system is the oldest continuously operated commercial district heating system in the world. It began service November 5, 1880 and continues to serve 135 customers.[89] The system is partially powered by the Xcel Energy Zuni Cogeneration Station, which was originally built in 1900.[90]
NRG Energy operates district systems in the cities of San Francisco, Harrisburg, Minneapolis, Omaha, Pittsburgh, and San Diego.[91]
Seattle Steam Company operates a district system in Seattle.
Hamtramck Energy Services (HES) operates a district system in Detroit that started operation at the Willis Avenue Station in 1903.
Lansing Board of Water and Light, a municipal utility system in Lansing, Michigan operates a heated and chilled water system from their existing coal plant. They have announced their new natural gas cogeneration plant will continue to provide this service.
Cleveland Thermal operates a district steam (since 1894) from the Canal Road plant near The Flats and district cooling system (since 1993) from Hamilton Avenue plant on the bluffs east of downtown.
Fort Chicago Energy Partners L.P. operate district heating/co-generation plants in Ripon, California and San Gabriel, California.[92]
Veolia Energy, a successor of the 1887 Boston Heating Company,[93] operates a 26-mile (42 km) district system in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also operates systems in Philadelphia PA, Baltimore MD, Kansas City MO, Tulsa OK, Houston TX and other cities.
District Energy St. Paul operates the largest hot water district heating system in North America and generates the majority of its energy from an adjacent biomass-fueled combined heat and power plant. In March 2011, a 1 MWh thermal solar array was integrated into the system, consisting of 144 20’ x 8’ solar panels installed on the roof of a customer building, RiverCentre.
The California Department of General Services runs a central plant providing district heating to four million square feet in 23 state-owned buildings, including the State Capitol, using high-pressure steam boilers.[94]
District heating is also used on many college campuses, often in combination with district cooling and electricity generation. Colleges using district heating include the University of Texas at Austin; Rice University;[95] Brigham Young University;[96] Georgetown University;[97] Cornell University,[98] which also employs deep water source cooling using the waters of nearby Cayuga Lake;[99] Purdue University;[100] University of Notre Dame; Michigan State University; Eastern Michigan University[101]; Case Western Reserve University; Iowa State University; University of Delaware;[102] University of Maryland, College Park[citation needed], University of Wisconsin–Madison,[103] and several campuses of the University of California.[104] MIT installed a cogeneration system in 1995 that provides electricity, heating and cooling to 80% of its campus buildings.[105] The University of New Hampshire has a cogeneration plant run on methane from an adjacent landfill, providing the University with 100% of its heat and power needs without burning oil or natural gas.[106] North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo, North Dakota has used district heating for over a century from their coal-fired heating plant.[107]
The heat goes up in the room when ever I am on computer
I can not post anymore
I will put that in the same category with USGS resource estimates, of wildly tilted by geopolitics and vested interests.
If you can show that North American food production takes substantially less than 10 calories of fossil fuel energy in, to 1 calorie out, then yes, there’s grounds to discuss. Otherwise it is preposterous.
As has been pointed out, tillage, planting, manufacture of spray, spraying, spraying again, petrochemical fertilizer inputs, harvesting, highway trucking, fall tillage, and add maintenance and manufacture of needed machinery, including the smelting of the iron, then building of an industrial distillery process facility, and all related energy expense of running and manning the facility, and finally trucking out the product. Ethanol is an energy loss, but a financial gain due to tax concessions and other subsidies.
That is why poor countries, which would supposedly benefit most from finding endless biofuel wells in their fields don’t use this fantasy system. Brazil utilizes cane sugar, that seems to be a different equation. China doesn’t turn food into fuel, they buy fuel abroad for cheaper.
It would be a beautiful dream to find an eternal fountain of energy in a corn field, but only a very rich country can maintain the fantasy for any length of time.