Frederick Sparber writes:
> We are in agreement on most of your argument, Jed. > > However, burning of the 32 lbs of starch or glucose in a bushel of corn at > a LHV of > 6,530 BTU/LB in a compression ignition engine, give ~209,000 BTU/Bu without > all of the production energy and political pork required for fuel ethanol.
A twofold improvement, in other words, and probably less wastewater, other energy inputs, and so on. This kind of technology is under active development in Japan. I saw a documentary about it the other day.
> Same argument applies to cellulose derived from waste straw and corn stover. > If Nature produces 253 Billion Tons annually..... go figure. :-)
Does it produce that much? I think you have dropped a few orders of magnitude somewhere. Pimentel's numbers are carefully worked out, and confirmed by the Agriculture Department and many other places. Table 3.1 shows total annual plant biomass in the U.S.:
Farmland Cropland, 810 dry Mt (million metric tons) Cropland idle, 84 Mt . . . Grassland in pasture, 549 . . .
Total biomass for all farmland, other land, urban, marsh, desert: 2,827 Mt (2 billion tons).
Also, as I mentioned before, the problem with waste straw and corn stover is that most of the energy in a plant is concentrated in the seed, and that is the part we are evolved to eat, for obvious reasons. In other words, we or our livestock eats most of the available energy from crops. This was true of the original wild varieties of corn, wheat and other crops, and it is even more true of the domesticated ones. They could not survive without human planting and care. In domesticated corn, there are so many seeds, crammed so closely together, the plant would not survive in the wild.
- Jed
