The profit motive can change the way farmer’s think about their waste streams including all sorts of manures produced by domesticated farm animals and farm crop residue like easily gathered corn stover: i.e. from a nuisance to a lucrative profit center.
All that is required is to delay the powering of transportation using LENR to provide an economic incentive to the framer for liquid fuel production. The removal of animal waste can be completely automated on the farm for rapid conversion to $3 a gallon biodiesel. The advantage of process heat from cold fusion is that the reactor is safe, inexpensive, and small. Animals could be selectively bred for their effective production of waste. A 5,000 gallon tank holding biodiesel can be filled automatically on the farm by a computerized waste handling system. This fuel could be sent to local filling stations or a nearby airport or the farmer could even setup a roadside fuel station and avoid all the middle man profit taking. In general, LENR will work to decentralize energy production and liberate energy producers and users from the oppression and control of the multi-national monopolies. For the farmer, one of the most important outputs of the Molten Salt Oxidation Process (MSOP) is biochar. In traditional methods of biomass fast pyrolysis, this char is used to fire the bioreactor and is turned into CO2. When nuclear energy from LENR is used, biochar can be saved and reapplied back to the soil. This will immediately and rapidly reverse climate warming from CO2. First off, Biochar is charcoal created by pyrolysis of biomass, and differs from charcoal only in the sense that its primary use is not for fuel, but for biosequestration or atmospheric carbon capture and storage. Charcoal is a stable solid, rich in carbon content, and thus, can be used to lock carbon in the soil. Biochar is of increasing interest because of concerns about climate change caused by emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHG). Carbon dioxide capture also ties up large amounts of oxygen and requires energy for injection (as via carbon capture and storage), whereas the biochar process breaks into the carbon dioxide cycle, thus releasing oxygen as did coal formation hundreds of millions of years ago. If the production of biochar is tied to the high profits from liquid biofuel production, huge amounts of the stuff will be generated on the farm as a result of our insatiable desire for liquid fuels. Biochar can sequester carbon in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years, like coal. Modern biochar is being developed using pyrolysis to heat biomass in the absence of oxygen in kilns and MSOP is an analogous process. High efficiency MSOP is now possible now the Rossi's "Hot-Cat" can provide 1000C process heat to the farm market. However, to the difference of coal and/or petroleum charcoal, when incorporated into the soil in stable organo-mineral aggregates does not freely accumulate in an oxygen-free and abiotic environment. This allows it to be slowly oxygenated and transformed in physically stable but chemically reactive humus, thereby acquiring interesting chemical properties such as cation exchange capacity and buffering of soil acidification. Both are precious in clay and /or nutrient-pore and/or nutrient depleted soils. Biochar can be used to sequester carbon on centurial or even millennial time scales. In the natural carbon cycle, animal waste or plant matter decomposes rapidly after the plant dies, which emits CO2; the overall natural cycle is carbon neutral. Instead of allowing the plant matter to decompose, pyrolysis can be used to sequester some of the carbon in a much more stable form. Biochar thus removes circulating CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in virtually permanent soil carbon pools, making it a carbon-negative process. In places like the Rocky Mountains, where beetles have been killing off vast swathes of pine trees, the utilization of pyrolysis to char the trees instead of letting them decompose into the atmosphere would offset substantial amounts of CO2 emissions. Although some organic matter is necessary for agricultural soil to maintain its productivity, much of the agricultural waste can be turned directly into biochar, bio-oil, and syngas. Biochar is believed to have long mean residence times in the soil. While the methods by which biochar mineralizes (turns into CO2) are not completely known, evidence from soil samples in the Amazon shows large concentrations of black carbon (biochar) remaining after they were abandoned thousands of years ago. Lab experiments confirm a decrease in carbon mineralization with increasing temperature, so ultra-high temperature charring of plant matter increases the soil residence time and long term soil benefits of high temperature biochar. Terra preta soils are of pre-Columbian nature and were created by the local farmers and caboclos in Brazil's Amazonian basin between 450 BC and AD 950. It owes its name to its very high charcoal content, and is characterized by the presence of charcoal in high concentrations; organic matter such as plant residues, animal feces, fish and animal bones and other material; and of nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), calcium (Ca), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn). All of these elements save nitrogen will be found in the ash residuals in the MSOP process. To mitigate nitrogen depletion of the soil, cogeneration of nitrogen based fertilizer via the co-production of ammonia is possible from the gas output of the MSOP process. In conclusion, LENR can get us back to the sustainable farming practices that nurtured mankind even in the earliest and most wholesome days of our civilization as well as remediate global warming.** . Cheers: Axil On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > I wrote: > > >> I was thinking bury the CO2 as CaCO3 as mother nature does but oils >>> would probably work also. >>> >> >> I do not think that nature buries CO2. . . . >> > > Ah. I misunderstood. You are saying bury it as calcium carbonate, not as a > gas. > > Well, whatever is cheapest and most convenient. > > There might be market for carbon or carbon compounds on the Moon or Mars > for all we know. We might send millions of tons a day up by space elevator > and dispatch it around the solar system. I doubt that will happen, but you > never know. > > I doubt the earth will export foodstuffs to Mars. That would be exporting > carbon and water. It seems a lot easier to grow food locally. Fresher and > tastier. > > - Jed > >
