On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 06:57:15AM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > Some more background on the commercialization of butanol (and assorted > isomers) here [1]
Converting cellulose (nevermind lignin) to something useful is hard. Animals manage to do it only with help of symbionts, wasting most of the potential energy in the process (bugs have to eat). If you go alcohol, you still have to destill the dilute (own waste stunts and then kills bugs), and be it a vacuum destillation. Efficiency of photosynthesis is 0.1-1% for higher plants, 0.84%-1.26% being the total photosynthetic efficiency of the planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency Photovoltaics approaches 50%. There's plenty of potential in circulated (100% recycled) electrons, and for everything else there's synfuel. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
