UPDATE:
Lab tests show the problem was may be caused by paraffin wax – a derivative of Diesel Fuel. See this report:
http://nbb.grassroots.com/resources/BloomingtonBusReport.pdf
This bus design does not allow for heating of the filter by the engine.
h/t to Kum Dullison
UPDATE2: There is new information, from E.M. Smith in comments, citing that possibility of “methylester that solidifies at >10F vs Paraffin wax” could be a contributor. The lab did not test for that, so the question of fuel quality remains unresolved.
==========================================
Excerpts from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 16th 2009
Biodiesel fuel woes close Bloomington schools
“All schools in the Bloomington School District (Minnesota) will be closed today after state-required biodiesel fuel clogged in school buses Thursday morning and left dozens of students stranded in frigid weather, the district said late Thursday.
Rick Kaufman, the district’s spokesman, said elements in the biodiesel fuel that turn into a gel-like substance at temperatures below 10 degrees clogged about a dozen district buses Thursday morning. Some buses weren’t able to operate at all and others experienced problems while picking up students, he said.
We had students at bus stops longer than we think is acceptable, and that’s too dangerous in these types of temperatures,” Kaufman said.”
. . .
The decision to close school today came after district officials consulted with several neighboring districts that were experiencing similar problems. Bloomington staffers tried to get a waiver to bypass the state requirement and use pure diesel fuel, but they weren’t able to do so in enough time, Kaufman said. They also decided against scheduling a two-hour delay because the temperatures weren’t expected to rise enough that the problem would be eliminated.
In 2005, a new requirement went into effect that all diesel fuel sold in Minnesota had to contain 2 percent biodiesel. Kaufman said that some school districts keep their buses in temperature-controlled garages, and that the First Student bus service, which contracts with several metro-area school districts, keeps its buses in garages or idles them through the night.
Meanwhile, in other news:
Minnesota Boosts Biodiesel Initiative from 2 to 20%
(h/t to Popular Technology)
California now prohibits and limits idling by large trucks (more than 10,000 pounds), as shown in this document. Supposed to keep the air cleaner by not emitting diesel smoke with its known carcinogenic properties.
Good luck, truckers, in the cold weather when those bio-diesel regulations go into effect.
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/truck-idling/factsheet.pdf
Will there be a boom in pour-point depressants for diesel?
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
High temperatures in that area last Thursday and Friday never got anywhere near as high as 10F. Maybe UHI might help them to get to 0 F. I don’t think anyone in Wisconsin would try to use biodiesal in a school bus, but many of those districts wimped out and cancelled due to -40 wind chills. The only unusual thing here is they were already closed Wednesday which last week was a “warm” day.
I expect a lot more than one Minnesota district closed, I don’t know of any that stayed open in Western and Northern Wisconsin. Perhaps Bloomington was the only area school system silly enough to have diesel in the first place or perhaps other districts leave the diesels running all night which is pretty common with trucks here.
Mister Jones (07:47:17) :”Current run of colder winters = reduced crop yields = less for ‘biodiesel’.
Anyone care to do the obvious follow up thinking?”
Uh, Soylent Gold at the filling stations?
Your statement implies that the production of bio-fuels reduces total food production.
That is not the case. In the case of ethanol production from corn for example, all the nutrition and protein of the corn is preserved in the brewing process. Ethanol production uses only the fermentable sugars and starch’s of the source grain. The leftovers distillers dried grain and solubles (DDGS), actually has a higher protein content that the grain it was produced from, thanks to the added nutritional value given by the fermenting yeasts used to produce the alcohol. Each bushel of grain used in the ethanol-making process produces 2.7 gallons of ethanol; 18 pounds of DDGS. The DDGS is in turn, used as a high quality animal feed, and there are also trials to use it as a soil amendment (non-fossil fuel fertilizer).
In addition, the corn used to produce ethanol is not the sort of corn used as human food, it is field corn, which is essentially an industrial product source for things like animal feed, corn starch production (much of which is used in industrial product manufacturing including production of bio-degradable plastics not food for export).
The ethanol and biodiesel are methods to provide yet another value added product from existing farm production. Food shortages in the third world are not due to a lack of food production, but supply problems due to high energy costs of transportation, and profiteering by intermediaries. They are also caused by intentional destruction of local food crops to grow industrial crops. Much of the rice shortage which made the news last year was due to the voracious demand for rubber in China resulting in rice plantings being replaced by rubber tree plantations in Asia.
Although the spike in food prices was “attributed” to bio-fuels, followup studies showed that the majority of those costs increases were driven by higher fuel costs for transportation and speculative buying of foods as commodities investments. Much of that attribution of “food vs fuel” was an intentional marketing campaign by industries which had a vested interest in super cheap corn like Tyson foods that did not like paying fair market value for corn to feed their chickens. They have been buying feed corn for years at costs that barely met cost of production and were in effect being subsidized by the farm price supports programs. Their food vs fuel propaganda campaign was intended, like the global warming propaganda campaign, misdirect the public from the facts and give them an easy scape goat to blame, and preserve their unfair market advantage.
For example the true market value of the cost of the actual corn in a box of corn flakes is about 5 cents at the corn prices that preceded the spike in food commodities. Even if the cost of corn doubled, the cost of that box of corn flakes should only have increased by 5 cents due to the corn content, not the 25% – 50% some foods saw. Prices of food that did not even use corn increased and it was blamed on biofuel production rather than the costs of energy for production and transportation and speculators bidding up futures contracts much like the housing boom bid up the price of homes.
The spike in commodities like oil and food spiked as the mortgage market imploded as investors dumped mortgage based investments and scrambled to find an alternative investment to put their money in. Much of that money found its way to the commodities market and bid up prices far above fair market values.
Larry
Notice that the newspaper, the Star Tribune, is leftist and has declared bankruptcy. Then read the comments to that newspaper’s article and notice the comment ratings are tending to the anti-left/anti-government-control side. Maybe the potential customers aren’t interested in giving them money.
OT, but, the Big List begins. So future generations will know who to blame for “screwing the planet”. It was some AGWer named “Smiths” suggestion, from frustration with all the skeptics, apparently. Guess he didn’t realize how happy we’d be to oblige. LOL!
Sign the Big List!
Pages 5-9 of this report does a nice job of laying out the refinery solution:
http://agr.wa.gov/bioenergy/docs/RenewableDieselWhitePaperFINAL.pdf
This link shows that it’s approved for the biofuels tax credit:
http://www.dieselnet.com/news/2007/04epa2.php
A generally well done story about Neste and how they are doing it:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/magazine/story?id=51462
The bottom line is that this is a transient problem as folks learn that all biodiesel is not the same. The bad news is that ‘our leaders’ will be learning this at the expense of parking lots of Diesel users by the side of the road in blizzards. “Lord protect me from my government”…
liquefied natural gas is probably the way to go for buses. maybe some other form sort of methane. maybe electricity–batteries and such.
The problem with renewables, except for hydro, is their extremely low energy density. That means they require hunungous areas of land to produce a real amount of energy. Renewables need hundreds of square miles just to produce the same energy that a 1000 MW power plant can produce on a single sq. mile of area.
Almost half of the biofuel one produces is needed for its own production.
That is true of some of the classic biofuel configurations like early generation ethanol and biodiesel, but there are options that greatly mitigate those problems.
Many of the current generation of fuel ethanol plants are actively pursuing use of biomass > methane, and crop waste to steam in fluidized bed boilers that can burn just about anything from cow dung to corn cobs for process energy. This greatly reduces the “energy cost” of production as you are using energy inputs that are outside the normal energy cycle and are relatively low cost.
Some of these plants are co-locating with cattle feeding operations, they take in grain, their “waste stream” instead of being dried to DDSG is fed directly to the cattle wet, eliminating drying and shipping costs, then the manure produced by the cattle is collected and using bio-mass t > methane generation is used to power most of the plants process energy.
You still have the acreage required for the crop, but that is also changing as new biomass sources come on line, like cellulose > ethanol and algae to bio-diesel and ethanol. Many of those crops can be grown with very low supplemental support like fertilizer, tilling and also use terrain that is not usable for any other crop.
I suspect that the highest energy returns will come out of the algae based processes currently under development, as their conversion efficiency of solar energy to useful biomass is much higher than plants like corn, soybeans, sorghum etc.
Bio-fuels are not a total solution in and of themselves, but as part of an “all of the above” approach to energy independence, they have their place. In the case of ethanol its primary advantage is one of fuel quality. Its high octane allows use of lower quality base gasoline stocks that are easier and cheaper to refine. When ethanol is added to enhance fuel octane and burn characteristics you get more usable energy from the same base stocks. E85 for example, allows much higher compression ratios than are usable on conventional blends of gasoline. This increases the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine, making it possible to use much smaller displacement high efficiency engines than are possible on straight gasoline. In highly optimized engines it is capable of reaching thermal efficiencies that are not possible in spark ignition gasoline fueled engines, and exceed some diesel engines.
Larry
Larry
poetryman — re natural gas buses
We use compressed natural gas CNG in California for buses, seems to work pretty well. A lot of energy is used to compress the gas, though. The CNG is used for improved air quality — eliminating diesel smoke.
Some CNG stations use LNG, pump the LNG to desired pressure and then vaporize the liquid before it enters the bus storage tank. It depends on the availability of natural gas lines.
http://www.metro.net/news_info/2007/metro_163.htm
TonyB (06:09:27) :
I entirely agree about burning rubbish-however most greens are against it as they think that will encourage people to treat it as disposable rather than recyclable.
Well, there are some other ways to recycle tyres, but cutting them up uses a lot of energy. The pyrolysis process I saw produced a megawatt of recycled electricity from 40 tyres an hour, and the waste products were high grade steel wire and printer toner.
If only engineers were accorded as much respect and promotion as lawyers and snake oil salesmen…
To Jeff Id (07:41:05) :
Not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but with a PhD from Cambridge University in Plant Physiology, I believe I can write with some knowledge. Under optimal conditions, with C4-type plants (e.g. Maize) you can get up to about 5% quantum efficiency (conversion of light to chemical energy). Out in the field with water stress, sub-optimal light and temperature, nutrients, plus pests and diseases, you are lucky to get 1%.
Then that is total biomass. What you need to do then is look at the harvest index. That is the ratio of the harvestable product (what you either eat or process to biofuel) to total biomass. A good harvest index is 0.5, typically you are looking at lower than this. Add extraction and refining losses and I reckon you are looking at a final conversion of less than 0.2%.
Supporters of biofuel tend to be optimistic!
Leon Brozyna (23:38:56) : […]Will anyone then be able to connect the dots to worldwide famine?
The classical problem in ag econ has always been overproduction. It still is. The EU mandate for rape seed oil biodiesel is largely just a replacement for farm subsidy programs to prevent over production. We are not anywhere near a point where land is limiting to food supply.
GeoS (00:49:36) : A passenger airplane recently crashed short on approach – […]Could it be they’ve been trying out biodiesel in jet fuel?
Not a biodiesel test. These things are highly regulated. The present renewables tests are focusing on fuels that are not esters. Rentech RTK makes the jet fuel from trash that the military is using in their type certifications. Trash takes no land from food production…
http://www.rentechinc.com/pdfs/Rentech+MSW+Release+3.11.08.pdf
Alan the Brit (01:51:19) : The old trick used in the sub-tropical UK was to place an electric light bulb under the engine bay […]Not possible now incandescent light bulbs are to be banned!
Sub-tropical? In the gin again, eh? 😉 Given the cool UK temps, banning incandescents just moves the energy usage from the light bulb to the heating bill. Oh Well…
If the US?? & Europe are serious about reducing car emission […] add COMPULSORY electric heating systems
If only… I would love to have a block heater built into all cars sold. The addition of comfort (heater works at startup!), safety (no windscreen fog!), and fuel efficiency make it a real ‘no brainer’. But no, they are ‘options’. I can get one retrofit to my car for about $300. It would be about $20 if done at assembly of the vehicle.
It concerns me that people go on about reliable & renewable fuel supplies when these are based upon crops. Crops can fail you know!
This, IMHO, is the big elephant in the room everyone is ignoring. We have forgotten about crop failures. When I was a child, last millennium ;-), rice & corn was harvested and stored in grain silos for a year or two as you used it. We could ride out a ‘bad year’. Now grain is harvested and used ‘just in time’ and transshipped from hemisphere to hemisphere. We have about a 3 month to 3 week supply depending on season. A single year of crop failure, on a global basis or just a hemisphere basis, and we are in ‘deep doo’.
One big rock into the pacific that causes a large wave to sink the shipping fleet and millions to billions of folks will be starving. Think Tunguska at sea. The probabilities are known. It ought to be about a once in a few hundred years event. Would you bet millions of lives on a 1:200 odds?
That is the major reason I advocate CTL and GTL rather than BioTL even though I really like biodiesel…
Barry B. (05:56:55) : All diesel fuel blends “gel” at low temperatures. A 2% blend of biodiesel changes the gel temp only slightly.
The problem with the 2% blends is the cloud point, not the gel point. That 2% still solidifies at the same temp it always did. You get a few crystals of esters clouding the fuel. You are now in a race condition to heat the fuel system (via bypassed warm fuel) faster than those crystals accumulate in the fuel filter and clog it…
DaveM (06:09:52) : 50% kerosene (max!) is and should be the only solution to the high gel point issue
Alkane type biofuels is a best solution. 50% K1? Um, not always max. The US Army has gone to a single fuels program. They had a bunch of Stanadyne (I think!) rotary pump failures (they use the fuel as lube, unlike the Bosche that do it right 😉 on pure Jet-A in Iraq. Turned out that the 130F+ in Iraq and the thinner spec Jet-A from Saudi was just too thin to lube at 100%. The addition of a quart of motor oil per tank is a temporary fix. The ‘takeaway’ was that at low temps (i.e. Alaska) it works OK, but at high temps it’s too thin and needs a lube additive.
The bottom line is that each engine has it’s own quirks dependent on the type of injection pump, injectors, et. al. and the 50% max is a good general rule; but you can ‘cheat it’ a bit of you have specific information and a good mechanical shop. (And it helps if you are in Alaska 😉
I also tried biodiesel but abandoned it after my fuel lines started dissolving. Any diesel before 1996 will have that issue. Some even newer.
I forgot to mention that… Thanks. Biodiesel is a great solvent. Here in California we went through the dissolving fuel lines problem back in about 1988? when they took out sulphur and biodiesel started as a fad.
The short form: Sulphur makes regular rubber swell a little & seal well. Less sulphur, the rubber shrinks. This is bad if it’s a seal or fuel line and causes cracks & leaks. The transition to ultralow sulphur fuel caused a lot of fuel lines and pumps to be replaced for seals failures. Biodiesel will cause the same rubber to puff up and become weak (‘dissolve’). If you have ultralow sulphur Diesel, you will already be replacing those rubber parts with synthetic rubber / polymer parts anyway (nitrile , viton). After the late ’80s – early 90’s, engines came from the maker with such parts. (European first, then US.)
John Galt (06:12:23) : What about the new clean burning diesels? Can those burn kerosene or jet fuel without damaging the engine or some other important system?
Read your manual. The new ‘common rail’ systems have very close tolerances ( 3 micron fuel filter instead of 10 micron!) and computerized injection systems. The VW system, for example, as a viscosity sensor. If you get too low or too high it will prevent you from running (even if the fuel would work mechanically… just ‘out of spec’ will shut you down).
There is no technical reason that I know of why Kerosene at the 50% level would not work (it’s basically just saying #1 Diesel) and the easy check would be if your manual says something like “Run #1 Diesel in winter”. But dump in a tank of straight Jet-A and the viscosity sensor will likely shut you down. 50% I’d expect to work, but let viscosity be your guide…
Robp (06:33:31) : There has got to be a better and cheaper way.
Block heater, heated fuel line, heated fuel filter, heated fuel tank. $400 or so. Does it make economic sense? Depends on how much fuel you burn idling in winter…
hotrod (07:26:41) : Likewise with ethanol fuels they only have cold weather separation problems if the fuel is wet (ie does not meet specifications), at low ethanol fuel blends.
Just a nit: The low blend anhydrous fuels tend to absorb water from the air. You need a sealed fuel system in humid environments to avoid ‘issues’. Not a problem with modern smog rules cars, unless your fuel vendor has leaky tanks…
Jeff Id (07:41:05) : The real problem is that bio-diesel, even in its best form is a mode of incredibly inefficient solar. The land area required to fuel anything of consequence is beyond prohibitive and it distracts from solving our real energy needs.
I am a great fan of biofuels and I have to support this statement. Dang it.
We can grow a lot of biofuels and it can help, but replace all our oil use? Yeah, we could do it. I figured the land area at about 100 x 1000 miles. A nice chunk of the USA. (And that was with generous assumptions). The only other possible is algae. (I put that somewhere between the blue sky dreamers and your estimates).
My support of biofuels hinges on the incredible price inelasticity of oil consumption. A 5% or 10% addition of biofuels can have a 20% to 50% impact on oil prices… But 100% bio? Nice dream. One I cherish. Not likely… Thus my support for both biofuels and coal to liquids…
Sean (07:45:23) : It does not receive much press here in the states but the use of biofuels has already produced catastrophe. It is estimated (by Oxfam)
Right there you can put a period and walk away. They just made up some scary stuff for a press release. Sound familiar?
75% of the increases were attributed to biofuel production. There were food riots in 14 cities over the price of things like rice and corn meal doubling.
And this confirms that fantasy. The rice shortages have nothing to do with fuel farming. Nothing. It was far more closely tied to this:
http://deltafarmpress.com/rice/070528-class-action/
A GMO contamination of the foundation seed stock for some of the most widely planted rice in the USA. THAT then lead to prohibitions on import of all US rice. Gee, major rice exporter off line, rice shortages. Any connection? Nahhhh. Must be corn use…
Notice the lack of mention of rape seed? The biofuel source of choice in Europe? Wouldn’t want to offend / blame the Europeans…
Finally, another excellent post has already covered the point that field corn is not the corn people eat, it is used to make bioplastics, starch, animal feeds, et. al. I would only add that the fermentation not only leaves the protein in the feed & adds some, the yeast raises the vitamin content greatly. Oh, and a good feedlot can capture the animal poo and make methane from it. It’s just a more efficient total cycle with the corn, not a removal from the food chain.
And a final point on corn: It’s just a distractor in the area of biofuels. A ham handed way for the Feds to hand out farm subsidies. Any real biofuels ethanol program would concentrate on cellulosic with about 10x better energy yield. Corn ethanol is not a fuel program, it’s farmer welfare.
Orangutan habitat as rain forests in Indonesia are cut down to make way for palm oil plantations to satisfy biofuel demands.
IMHO, another misdirection. Palm oil is the replacement of choice for hydrogenated oils since we have found out that trans fats are lethal. It’s the tonnage going to replace hydrogenated corn and soybean oil world wide. The spike in palm oil prices started with the trans fat swap, not the biodiesel use. Why blame a science mistake by MDs and ‘settled science’ if you can blame America? Sound familiar again?
Think of all the acres planted with soybeans and corn. Look at all the oil extracted. Look at the amount that was hydrogenated to make the shortening that goes into all your potato chips, cookies, breakfast rolls, breads, chip dip, margarin, salad dressing, etc. ad nauseum. All that hydrogenated oil must be replaced. The non-Palm alternatives have gone down in flames one after the other…
The Europeans were so alarmed there is actually talk of backing off the biofuel requirements already written into law.
So reducing the rape seed oil used in EU is going to increase the rice available in Asia? Ok…
Bill Junga (07:46:56) : I think it is a “sin”to use good agricultural land to make fuel instead of food. Looks like we’re going backwards where at one time crops had to be grown and used to feed the draught animals to do the work, this time mechanical devices.
Two topics here. Tractors are far more efficient than oxen with fuel. Even if we did grow crops to run the farm, doing it with biodiesel is much better than doing it with oxen (from a fuel efficiency perspective) Second, it’s only a ‘sin’ after you reach the production limit. We are far from that limit.
Food shortages have nothing to do with production. They have everything to do with politics, religion, and distribution.
TonyB (08:37:19) : […]most on this site are also pragmatic realists […]
There’s your key! Good call!
IMHO that means for the next twenty years or so the biggest game in town remains nuclear/coal/oil
Yup. And putting coal and oil ‘off limits’ is incredibly dumb. Nuclear will always be ‘biggest’, followed by coal, then oil (in terms of potential).
Roger Sowell (09:37:39) : Parts of California also get cold enough to cause bio-diesel problems in winter, e.g. northern parts and in the mountains. […] California now prohibits and limits idling by large trucks (more than 10,000 pounds), as shown in this document. […] Good luck, truckers, in the cold weather when those bio-diesel regulations go into effect.
Truckers are smart pragmatic folks. Just expect that it will become very hard to get goods shipped through the Sierra Nevada and I5 north of Sacramento during winter. They just won’t take the chance of getting frozen stiff in the mountains in the winter. Were I a trucker with an LA to Portland load, I’d take I15 to Las Vegas and do the Nevada run… Expect to see large growth in the “Bunny Ranch Truck Stop” 😉 and trucks parking for dinner just outside the California border. Short haul inside the state will convert to CNG or add fuel heaters.
hotrod (10:14:49) : Your statement implies that the production of bio-fuels reduces total food production.
Very well done! All I could add is the big vitamin boost from yeasts. (Don’t know which critters need the B complex though.) Didn’t know about the rubber angle. Interesting…
Roger Sowell (13:48:47) : Reference your comments concerning the use of natural gas in California. Australia offered to supply your state with enough LPG for centuries of use. Your Governor said, ‘No Way’!
E.M. Smith
It gets better (worse?) re trucks in California. The air quality (that is an oxymoron in the South Basin) is so important that the state Air Resources Board requires older trucks to install smoke combustion devices (like catalytic converters on cars), and all new trucks must have EPA Smartway ™ additions. At the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, only new trucks will be allowed within a few years. Truckers also must use diesel with bio-fuel in it, and cannot idle more than 5 minutes. They must have a separate (state-approved) vehicle heater for sleeping warmth, and I suppose the vehicle heater will also heat the fuel system and engine block.
Truckers are indeed smart and practical folks. I have some in my extended family. They cuss like you would not believe over these California rules. Makes one wonder how goods are going to get shipped around in the Golden State. We can thank AB 32. And Obama wants the same rules nation-wide!
As for state-border truck stops, yes, they are there already, primarily because California charges around 7 percent per gallon sales tax, and border states do not.
F Rasmin,
Yes, the state enviros take a dim view of building LNG importing facilities in California. None have received permits, although many have tried. One company (Sempra) went down the coast just into Mexico to build their LNG receiving facility, regasify, and ship the gas into California. The Mexicans were not so picky. As a result, they (Mexico) have a large industrial site, receive tax revenues from it, and employment.
We would be happy to buy Aussie gas, if you could figure out a way to deliver it to the Mexican import facility! Have you talked to Sempra?
California is turning into a tourism and transportation state due to AB 32. The ports at San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego will likely never shut down, they are too important to the national commerce and by extension to the world. But all the rest is “at risk” as they say. We should likely never run out of legislators and lawyers, either. And, a few people to write the environmental studies to justify denial of construction permits.
There is not enough water for agriculture, no funds for building any infrastructure (see Los Angeles Times today for article on that one) so pretty soon the kiddos will walk to classes held outside under the sky. On ground planted with native plants, irrigated by polluted recycled water because lawn irrigation with potable water will be prohibited. Cannot spare the water, you see. Never mind the children contracting illnesses and diseases from the recycled water.
The electric power will be off-and-on, as the 33 percent renewable energy mandate takes hold in 2020, yet no large utility has ever managed to supply reliable power with more than about 20 percent renewables, as far as I know. But, the air will be cleaner.
And, the CO2 will be less, so the oceans will not rise and the average temperature will start to fall. — RIGHT!! as if California can affect global CO2 concentrations…California uses around 2 percent of the world’s energy. Cutting energy use to zero would not be noticed in the CO2 measurements.
Sorry, did my cynical side show through?
tallbloke (14:14:24) :
Well, there are some other ways to recycle tyres
Hmmm… Another common thread… Fungibility confusion.
Folks seem to think that all seed plants are the same, when they are not. Thus the confounding of rape seed (grows well in cold northern Europe) and rice (grows well in hot wet places). Similarly, we have all trash treated as highly fungible when it isn’t. And all Diesel fuels as fungible by our legal system fuel mandates, when they are not at low temperatures… And all biofuels as fungible when corn alcohol is vastly different from cellulosic and algae oils. Interesting how people think…
Rubber tires are incredibly hard to recycle as rubber. About 10% to 15% max ‘crumb’ from ground up tires can go back into new tires before the quality suffers. There isn’t much else you can do with it. (There are only so many playgrounds that can be ‘paved’ with recycled rubber mats…)
The next best usages tend to be from the resource substitution side. Use it as fuel, or use it for pyrolysis to fuels with materials recapture. This is, IMHO, a kind of ‘recycle’ yet it is confounded with ‘disposal’ rather than thought of as ‘recycle’ even though the steel is recovered even as the rubber is burned. Why? Because other ‘trash’ is 100% recycled and we have a fungibility error in thinking that applies to tires, too…
If only engineers were accorded as much respect and promotion as lawyers and snake oil salesmen…
Ahmen… It never ceases to amaze me that politicians, lawyers and managers can think that the laws of physics, chemistry, economics and engineering can be overturned by fiat. (I can say that since I’ve been a manager and I’ve seen many of my fellow manglers at work… not a pretty sight…)
I suspect that this comes from our ‘tracking’ folks into technical and non-technical paths in school when in reality anyone in a position of decision making needs a technical skill set in the modern world.
I haven’t read all this thread, it’s too damned depressing.
As far as I can see, as long as we have LAWYERS in the hot seat, it’s not going to get much better 🙁
DaveE
e.m. smith,
Thanks for the informative comments.
“Yes we can” = “Great Leap Forward” We all know how that came out, well, some of us do anyway.
E.M.Smith, thanks for the much needed dose of reality – although I’m afraid your attempt to set the record straight will mostly fall on deaf ears. Much like the global warming alarmists, the anti-biofuel advocates care very little about the facts. To them, it’s a matter of ideology rather than rationality.
Thanks hotrod for the sane discussion. We are no where near starving people because we can’t grow enough food. If we are starving people, it isn’t because there isn’t enough land to grow food on. I have several really good tracts of land that are out of production due to conservation programs that not only keep production down, but keep erodible land from being eroded by making sure there is ground cover while it sits idle. Trust me, if there was a way to guarantee the slimmest profit year in and year out by taking these fields out of conservation programs and growing something, I would. But because of price controls on my unfinished product, there is no guarantee to me that I will make a profit. I can’t change what I charge for a truck full of wheat, regardless of what my costs are. The grocery owner can. The middle man can. But the farmer cannot. And if by chance the populace decides to get rid of conservation programs and farmer welfare, allowing us to charge enough to make a product, you will not like grocery shopping. Why? It will swing up and down just like the price of gasoline. Would you like to pay $2 for eggs today but $6 dollars next month? I thought not.
There is no decision here for me to make in a volatile cost market. I have to go with the profit guarantee. Therefore land sits idle and I get a reliable paycheck. It sucks but it will remain this way until people are willing to suffer the swings of food prices that would be the case without price controls on farmers.
TJ (17:44:53) : e.m. smith, Thanks for the informative comments.
Barry B. (17:45:25) : E.M.Smith, thanks for the much needed dose of reality – although I’m afraid your attempt to set the record straight will mostly fall on deaf ears.
You are most welcome. I try to remember that most folks can change when confronted with truth and that lack of knowledge is not a sin. Often that puts me in the middle taking rocks from both ideologic sides :={
I also happen to be one of the few folks on the planet who have been doing hands on alternative and biofuels experiments for about 40 years! It’s a passion for me… Ran my lawn mower on ethanol for about a decade; just needed to turn the fuel mix screw… Ran ethanol / gasoline mix in my Ford in 1969 with a similar ‘conversion’! But I also have to admit that the least cost and lowest impact solution would be coal to liquids. We need both, belt and suspenders.
I really would like to have 1/2 the planet set aside for wildlife (it’s about 1/3 now), and that takes added energy into the ag system, not out of it. I’m hopeful that the (just entering production!) algae farms will show that the projected yields are not fantasy hand waving (a 200 x 200 mile algae farm in the desert for the whole countries’ motor fuel would be ‘nice’ and I really hope it doesn’t turn out to be 2000 x 2000 miles …)
Hotrod, E.M. Smith
Excellent comments.
Let me add one thing. Stanford University did a study, and found that there are between 1.0 and 1.2 Billion Acres of Arable land lying “Abandoned” worldwide. That could, quite likely, power every car, truck, and farm tractor in the world.
Jes sayin.
lol. whata disaster