Current Events, Discuss current events around the world!

I piped a wedding the other day where they'd hired a 1950 Chevrolet as a limo. It's 1950 Straight 6 engine gets about 18 MPG, about the same as an average American SUV today.

Keep in mind that (A) it takes more than a gallon of oil to create a gallon of ethanol (it uses more energy than it produces), and ( a tankful of ethanol is made from enough grain to feed one human being for a year. 9 million people starve to death annually. That's 25,000 people per day starving to death, 1041 an hour, 17 a minute, most of them children, all of them poor.

Something to think about the next time you fill your massive SUV and congratulate yourself for "going green" when the pump says "contains at least 10% ethanol".

There's a lot of misinformation going around on what Ethanol is, and how it is produced. Everything you just said about Ethanol is true, but only for one process using only Corn based feed-stocks. But this is simply the currently popular process of making Ethanol. There are many up and coming Ethanol (some refineries are under construction as we speak) which use zero food-stocks, and require no cultivation. So there is no food being taken from any mouths and no forest being lost to increased production.

Cellulosic Ethanol, holds very much promise, as it can be made from virtually any organic bio-waste (corn husks, wood chips, grasses, etc.) which would only be going to a landfill to begin with. It can be made for $1/US Gal., and the process of producing the fuel is far greener (fewer polutants and no deforestation required) than any of the current (petroleum, corn-ethanol) fuels on the market.

Brazil doesn't have a car on the road that burns less than 20% Ethanol, which is made very cheaply with Sugarcane, and 3 Million run on pure 100% Ethanol. Their people are not starving for it, and they have saved roughly $50 Billion in oil imports since their Ethanol program began in the 70's. Altogether, about 40% of their vehicle fuel is Ethanol.

Then there is Algae processed Ethanol. http://jalopnik.com/394479/sears-tower-or-...d-car-adventure
It uses algae, obviously, and photosynthesis to produce fuel. There are a couple of different technologies like this which use non food-stocks and sunlight to capture CO2 (making it a carbon neutral production process, which is supposedly unthinkable) for conversion to liquid fuel (one such process makes a fuel virtually identical to gasoline).

Bio fuel is the answer. Food for fuel just happens to have been a moronic gateway to the future.

People do not think about those things. Ethanol will never be a viable alternative to hydrocarbon based fuel. The administration floated that idea to raise farm prices. (and maybe make some inside profits) That is of no assistance to the average citizen. It will soon cause food shortages in this country. "Soy diesel is not being used by many farmers due to the cost and that too compounds the food crisis. It causes one to wonder who's side our Government is on or if they are just STUPID. Hybrid electric cars will never solve the problem either. Oil can be extracted from coal too. The Navaho indian reservation has a tremendous reserve of coal.

I see hydrogen as the only alternative. People now think of hydrogen as a gas as in propane or natural gas. Though it could be accomplished in that manner it might cause some real calamities on the roadway. Service stations would have pump hydrogen into the vehicle's storage tank. Oil companies could control that! About 10 years ago I had an advertisement for a hydrogen generator that produced electricity, for your house "hydrogen gas" to heat your house and to fill a hydrogen tank in your auto for local use. There was an installation fee of about $15 K and a monthly fee as in rental.

We have a Fork Lift manufacturer, locally, who presently makes "Brown's Gas Gemerators" for their equipment. As an option one can have a Fork Lift that runs on hydrogen. They are "on demand" units (the ultimate in safety) and by hand making each one the cost is approximately $100 each. They feel that if the demand is great enough, they can be produced for less than a dollar. They only work in a warm environment or in a heated building though, as water freezes. I built one to play with and it produces a small extremely hot flame. I doubt you will see it commercially until the oil exec's find a way to profit from it.

NOW---FOR SOME BAD NEWS! as if the above was not enough.

In the news Sunday, the inflation rate for may was announced. It was only .2 percent. That is not too bad but, "ENERGY AND FOOD" were "STRIPPED" from the calculation. I can not strip those two items from my budget. I remember when "whole beef cuts (steak/roasts) were replaced by the same pork cuts, pork then was replaced by hamburger, hamburger then replaced by sausage, then chicken became the protein. Protein then became peanut butter. Now food isn't even in the mix at all! Personally as I look into the distance, I think I see the 4 horseman riding!

We have never seen mass starvation here in America (hunger yes) but outside of Canada and the UK, (if they are able) we should not expect much help.

I know this is depressing but we should all be planning for some tough times.

Slàinte,    

Patch    

I've been watching some of the international news (one of our PBS stations gets BBC World News and the English-language Journal from DW-TV, the German state TV network), and even the big European banks are feeling the heat from the subprime mortgage crisis. Royal Bank of Scotland is in particular because they own Charter One here in the US. Others, like Deustche Bank, are feeling it because they agree to take on loans by other banks who are acting as middlemen.

P.S. It is quite astonishing that our family's former little community bank is now part of a multinational corporation. Our old community bank got bought out several years ago by one of the downtown Chicago banks. That bank then got bought out by then Cleveland-based Charter One. Charter One then got bought out by the Royal Bank of Scotland.

There is a critical flaw in using Hydrogen as a fuel. It requires more energy to separate the Hydrogen from a molecule than it can produce as a fuel. Unless we have solar furnaces in every corner of the world, it will be a loss and that spells expensive, no matter how you see it. You thought $6/Gal. was scary. Then there's the incredible danger of storing and transporting Hydrogen. I'm just waiting for our first celebrity casualty, as his/her gifted Hydrogen 7 (BMW passes these out to celebs. all the time to get attention for their green technology) makes a 50' crater out of a stretch of Interstate. It is inevitable, as cars powered by gasoline and diesel catch fire and explode quite regularly. Hydrogen will be far from immune. It would be nice, but the nature of the fuel will never, in my lifetime, be cheap or safe.

You can't say "Ethanol will never be a viable alternative to hydrocarbon based fuel." as it already has been proven a viable alternative in other markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

Please read that! It will give you facts on Ethanol use as a fuel, rather than generated fears for some campaign.

Remember, Corn does NOT equal Ethanol. It simply can.

What people fail to see about biofuel is that it is the same thing we are pulling out of the ground. Oil is just broken down biomass, and these new processes are simply doing the job that took nature 100,000+ years.

Every time you hear some new claim about how biofuels will be the end of the first world, ask why the naysayers never seem to mention how much energy and oil it takes just to pull petroleum out of the ground. On top of that, there are refining costs (energy cost and environmental cost), transportation costs, etc. I've heard the argument that wind power is the wrong choice because it takes X# of Gj to build the turbine in the first place. The funny thing is I don't seem to remember coal powered powerplants and oil refineries sprouting up out of the ground of their own accord.

When it comes to massive changes to industry and infrastructure, there will always be more people with the power to make the change who won't want it than there will be who do.

My daughter worked as an "Investment Counselor" for for 5th 3rd in Ohio. From conversations with her, they were lending in the sub prime market. They made the loans and then sold them to investment banks like Baer Sterns. Baer Sterns had no "accounts as in checking and savings and as near as I can tell was not covered by the FDIC insurance program. The government was under no obligation to protect their holdings with our tax dollars. However they negotiated a "take over" for two dollars a share to keep the bank afloat so to speak. The big stock holders of Baer Sterns screamed foul and the Government then backed the sale at TEN dollars a share. This mostly with your and my money!! As I see it, there were a lot of big political contributors invested in Baer Sterns, and they owned some politicians. I doubt that is the end of the crisis and we may not be hearing about what is going on with other similar banks now. People are "gambling" on everything. We call it Investment banking, the stock market and the futures market. It is like the "atmosphere" of the late 1920's. people were making thousands "on paper" and they thought the party would never end. The scary part is that we are back to gambling on a "margin", as was the case in the late 1920's. That is very dangerous!

When I first had bank dealings in the late 1950's all banks were local. My bank knew me , my family, what I had and most things about my personal life. Now as you say, we are all probably in one way or another connected to international banking.

It is easier to "scam" a bank today. We had one locally where the president of the bank took them for many many millions and invested in gambling boats. Many of the investors had over the FDIC maximum and lost a lot of money. A School district, some villages and businesses lost big time too. The president "rolled over on some of the people in organized crime where he invested the money and got his sentence reduced. His life may be interesting when he is released! We were better when the financial institutions were smaller. If someone at the bank suddenly found a financial wind fall people were looking at them.

I know some of the tellers at my bank and a branch manager. The president of the bank does not talk to me and I would not recognize him. He might if I belonged to the country club but that is out of my league.

I suspect we are headed for some "interesting times"

Slàinte,    

Patch    

http://www.leftlanenews.com/green-crude-fu...the-future.html

There's the Algae based fuel I was telling you about, that uses wastewater, algae, and sunlight to produce a fuel from a natural carbon capture process that is virtually identical to gasoline (petrol). How ironic that it's green and burns identically to gas. Looks like gasoline isn't the great evil it was thought to be; drilling for oil is.

I read the article and links and found no links to detailed information.

Slàinte,    

Patch    

This stuff goes way back -- picking up technical articles on this topic from the beginning of the 80s. Picked this one up searching through Google Scholar (go through the advanced search button on your Google screen -- keywords "green algae fuel"). I can e-mail a link to the article to you if you are interested -- do you have an e-mail in your profile?

Microalgae: a green source of renewable H2

Maria L. Ghirardia, Liping Zhangb, James W. Leec, Timothy Flynna, Michael Seiberta, Elias Greenbaumc and Anastasios Melis, b

a National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO 80401–3393, USA

b University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3102, USA

c Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6194, USA


Available online 27 November 2000.

Abstract
This article summarizes recent advances in the field of algal hydrogen production. Two fundamental approaches are being developed. One involves the temporal separation of the usually incompatible reactions of O2 and H2 production in green algae, and the second involves the use of classical genetics to increase the O2 tolerance of the reversible hydrogenase enzyme. The economic and environmental impact of a renewable source of H2 are also discussed.

Author Keywords: biophotolysis; green algae; hydrogen production; photosynthesis; renewable energy; sulfur deprivation

Article Outline
2. Two-stage photosynthesis and H2 production in green algae
2.1. Anaerobiosis in C. reinhardtii cultures upon sulfur deprivation
2.2. Photoproduction of H2 upon S deprivation in C. reinhardtii
3. Single-stage photosynthesis and H2 production in green algae
4. Future prospects
Acknowledgements
References

Thank you I will read more

Slàinte,    

Patch    

I read in todays news that the price of corn passed $8.00 per hundred lb. shelled. The increase was attributed to flooding in the "corn belt" of the nation. That will just about wreck ethanol production.

Slàinte,    

Patch    

Hydrogen from Algae. That's something different altogether. I was talking about what is essentially a non fossil-fuel petroleum product. I'm all for finding a replacement that doesn't require us to completely reinvent the automobile (the less that changes, the cheaper the cars).

I'm sceptical that there will ever be a sustainable Hydrogen industry. Sure, it hugs butterflies, and makes the sky invent a new shade of blue, but it's a terrible medium for storing energy, and I don't know how much we would be able to produce.

But there's room for all sorts of solutions to the problem. Every litre of Ethanol, biodiesel, bio-petrol, Hydrogen, etc., is one less litre of fossil-fuels needed to suply the world's energy needs.

Are you sure it's not the same thing?

Anyway, I think you're correct that no one alternative to burning stored carbon is going to do it.

Unless I'm confused, it's the difference between pure Hydrogen and a Hydrocarbon, like petroleum. I think it's time to give the claim of flex-fuel a push to mean a lot more than it does now. Some manufacturers are working on variable compression technology, and paired with today's engine controls, we could have cars that will adaptably run on anything.

I can't wait to see what the next five years entails. I could probably due without the likely fuel prices in the mean time.

"Stored" hydrogen will always be dangerous to some degree. We have a fork lift manufacturer in Northwest Ohio that is producing "demand" hydrogen generators for their fork lifts. They work on engines that are not exposed to sub freezing temps. I am certain that engineers could solve the freezing problem in short order. I put one together that produces a burnable gas. It would seem that with the proper pressure regulator one should be able to burn it in conjunction with other fuel and double or better your vehicle's gas milage. I can not attest to that yet. I would like to get a good used auto to experiment with.

Slàinte,   

Patch