[dohboi]

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/0 ... -biofuels/

New Report Calls On Europe To Meet Its 2020 Transport Fuel Standards Without Reliance On Biofuels

By redirecting corn, grains, and other food crops to use as an energy source, biofuel policy in the United States and Europe has been driving up the price of food and contributing to ongoing international shortages.

(Duh!)

So it’s encouraging that a new report from the consultancy CE Delft — commissioned by Greenpeace, Transport & Environment, the European Environmental Bureau and BirdLife Europe — is calling for Europe to meet its 2020 goal without reliance on biofuels from food crops, and laying out the steps for how to get there.

Here's a link to the actual report:

http://www.cedelft.eu/publicatie/sustainable_alternatives_for_land%20based_biofuels_in_the_european_union/1325

Sustainable alternatives for land-based biofuels in the European Union

[SeaGypsy]

Europe is a lot closer to the die-off patches of Africa than the USA is. Proximity meaning little in practical reality, with grain being shipped globally for a tiny percentage difference, this is about ethics and politics more than anything else. I don't think we should be writing off 'all biofuels' as this would have to include algae, which at least in some applications appears to have some promise.

[SeaGypsy]

I think it's well established that algae can be useful in conjunction with non renewables, as part of a scrubbing system alongside FF generators. Sure aint any kind of panacea.

[sparky]

.
A small consideration is also that it would bankrupt the common farming policy !
it was intended to support farmers by creating incentives to make the common market
food sufficient ( old memories of starving during WW2 ) and easing the traditional farming
toward modern agribusiness , farming used to be 20% of the working population
now , it's more like 5% , quite a few are elderly and will retire over the coming decade .

going for bio-fuels could be a financial black hole when Europe has not much financial fat
to waste

[The_Toecutter]

Hemp could allow us to grow fuel on land little fit for growing food. The U.S. has lots of land that has been depleted of its vital nutrients through repeated GMO corn/soy/cotton mono-cultures that need petrochemicals just to survive. Hemp could be grown on that land, prevent the soil from further eroding, requires no pesticides, can grow fine on sewage sludge or other biomass in need of recycling that is too contaminated with chemicals, heavy metals, or other potential poisons to be used for growing food, and produce a biofuel with a net EROEI significantly over 1.

Diesel engines can run on the seed oil. Methanol can also be produced from plant waste to run conventional ICEs. Both will need modification to do so, but it can be done. Couple that with cars designed to get 80+ mpg(perfectly doable 25 years ago with use of improved aerodynamics, optimized gearing, and diesel engine), and that little bit of fuel will do a lot.

Henry Ford even produced a prototype hemp and wheat straw-bodied sedan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdkXBGKBxjw

10 times as dent resistant as steel and 1/3 of the weight, and nowhere near as brittle as carbon fiber. The tensile strength of hemp fabric is impressive. It makes for an extremely sturdy and light car body, that is damned near indestructible during ordinary driving conditions when placed on a stout chrome-molly chassis with roll cage and provides a large amount of crumple during a collision. The material is extremely inexpensive and everything in it can be recycled.

There are also so many countless household uses for the plant that I shouldn't even waste my time listing them, but suffice to say, a lot less organic matter could be filling up landfills which today literally is nothing but toxic refuse with no use to be put to any longer.

The U.S. has an abundance of wasted land, which has become that way through years of abuse, that could be somewhat restored over time and also become productive with regard to our societies' resource expenditures in the present, drought be damned. We're literally burying our planet as we kill parts of it at a time. Check out a map of superfund sites in the U.S. if you really want to experience a bad trip. Instead, biotech companies are pimping "solutions" such as GMO trees, which have the potential to ruin the remainder of the little "good" land we have left.

In some states, such as Colorado, industrial hemp is rapidly on track to becoming a cash crop. It will even create some jobs, how many, remaining to be seen.

To meet the demand for biofuels in Europe, they could even be exported from the U.S. to Europe.

If one were to have enough cash, there are countless ways to make a lot of money very soon with this plant. It's too useful to ignore.

Just one more tool we could be saving our country with; to truly save it though, the government and military-industrial-prison-surveillance complex needs its OWN dose of austerity, well before that should ever be considered for the people. The middle class is being destroyed intentionally by the power elite, even though some of the destruction is self-inflicted.

[SeaGypsy]

The drug war is being severely lost. The UN is turning it's rhetoric around and starting to push for broad decriminalization. The only way to take the power from the gangs they get from selling illegal drugs, is to remove the profit motive. Once national governments wake up and stop the stupid drug war, we will see hemp gain it's proper place in agriculture: a vital and unparalleled source of fibre, food, energy and erosion control. The fact some people might decide to get stoned on multi purpose hemp should not be enough reason to hinder the progress towards a hemp economy.

[SeaGypsy]

No lunch at all for the 10,000 a year dead in the current Mexican drug war.

[The_Toecutter]

Toe, hemp is not a panacea. Hemp is an agriculture crop like any other bred over the millenia for many purposes. You want THC? You plant a variety with plenty of THC. You want fiber for clothing and paper? Plant one hybridized for long cellulose strands. How about an oil crop? Buy a variety that has been bred for oil. "Hemp" does not exist. Any more than a "mustard" plant exists. We call it kale, cabbages, cauliflower, rapeseed, turnips. Like hemp you eat some, you produce industrial oil with others. Hemp is many things but not a simple solution.

Oh. And if you expect it to produce any of the above (food, fiber, or buzz) in profusion, then you'd better plan on applying a crapload of nutrients. In fact the nutrient business is a HUGE bidness around here. Copious quantities of expensive, select chemistry is applied to indoor and outdoor alike. There is no free lunch.

I was speaking not of the variant with which to pursue recreational desires, but of the variant used for the purposes I outlined above: raw materials and fuel.

Do you even know what a decorticator is?

The plant doesn't necessarily have to be specially bred for any one trait(best fiber, best oil yield, ect), as all of the products I discussed above can be produced by material taken from the exact same plant without any special breeding required, even if breeding for given traits will produce a variety that excels in production of one item over the other. The feral variant can grow in deserts with very little nutrients available at all. It doesn't strip phosphorous or potassium from the soil to anywhere near the same degree as most other plants do, and it can even render otherwise inert nutrients in the soil available for later use by entirely different agricultural crops planted at a later date. Most of the nutrients that the plants do absorb end up in the roots and leaves, which have little practical use relative to using the rest of the plant for its fiber and oil, wherein recycling those nutritious but not as useful parts back into the soil only makes sense, preventing their removal from the environment while still delivering a product. If the soil it is grown on is so depleted that it does need outside nutrients, there is an abundance of material available that is not used in conventional crops that winds up being wasted and serves as nothing more than an environmental hazard, such as sewage sludge or organic matter reclaimed from landfills. Then there is the issue that it also needs very little water.

It's literally a fucking weed, with the characteristics of a fucking weed. It is highly resistant to any and all pests(exception being the kind grown for recreation uses, which the industrial variety would render unusable if its pollen contaminated it). It grows in a wide range of conditions, including ones unfit for virtually any other crop.

Not a panacea for everything, but it could definitely contribute hugely to reducing our ecological footprints without reducing our living standard in the least, while also saving family farms from destruction. It has historically not been allowed to be cultivated for political reasons, and nothing more. It's just another example of real solutions being held back in the name of maximizing some private corporations' profit margins; there are thousands of such examples in our world, some greater, others lesser, in size and impact.

For biofuels, it certainly makes more sense than corn ethanol or most other conventional stocks.

[SeaGypsy]

Between Indica and Sativa, there are hundreds of known varieties native to a vast spread of south Asia, the middle east and north Africa. There are then thousands of cultivated varieties. Massive genetic diversity and very rapid adaptation-mutation cycles mean you can take a supposedly THC free hemp strain and within a few generations turn it's offspring into very fine hashish, as you can take a hydroponics bred skunk polyploid, breed and starve it back to it's original stock plant with very low THC and high fibre- seed output.

I'm tired of all the silly debates about the merits and dangers and how these should translate into legislation. Cannabis only needs to be policed when it is a risk to safety on the road or worksite; otherwise the government should just get out of it (ie. tax it like any other business they know about and accept that there will always be a black market). White drugs can be dealt with through the medical system like they already are. I am firmly of the belief that a farmer should be able to try any crop in any combination which does not create a biohazard.

To have an entire avenue of useful application of natural products cut off from allowable practice is damned stupid on it's own, besides serving to enrich those prepared to break the law.

[careinke]

Cannabis would make a great addition to any permaculture system.

[cephalotus]

Europe is a lot closer to the die-off patches of Africa than the USA is. Proximity meaning little in practical reality, with grain being shipped globally for a tiny percentage difference, this is about ethics and politics more than anything else. I don't think we should be writing off 'all biofuels' as this would have to include algae, which at least in some applications appears to have some promise.

I do not believe in algae as a fuel substitute. Will we even try to rape our seas because of our car addiction?

Die off?

Germany alone produced around 50 million tones of grain per year on around 20% of its area. This grain would be enough to feed 250 million people (on a pure grain diet). Our main problem is our addiction to meat.
France is an even larger grain producer...

Germans are already used to pay almost 20€ct for 1kWh of gasoline (taxes incl.)

You can produce synthetic methane from wind energy for 25€ct/kWh (maybe even cheaper when the technology matures).

So for me methane (and some electricity) is the fuel of the future car mobility in Germany/Europe...

---

Fuel from biomass is more often a multiplicator for the worlds problem and rarely a solution. We should limit is to those few niches where its usage is beneficial...

http://websrv.leopoldina.org/uploads/tx ... nal_02.pdf

[Ibon]

Get in a small plane and fly at low elevation over the lowlands of Thailand, Vietnam, Maylasia and Indonesia. You will see a vast monoculture of Oil Palms. This is one of the biodiversity hotspots on the planet. Want to see Orangutans in Borneo. Look out the window as you fly into the national park. You will see a vast vast monoculture of oil palms with a token tiny reserve in the center which is the national park.

When I witnessed this first hand I immediately rejected biofuels. For me it has nothing to do about the fact that kudzu Apes have to pay more for food because of industrial crops. It has everything to do with threats to biodiversity.

[SeaGypsy]

Yes, Ibon and it's still spreading. The Indonesians seem hell bent on turning the entire archipelagos forests into a giant palm plantation. Ever noticed the lack of bird life in populated areas in SE Asia? In my wife's rural village in the Philippines it is rare to see any non domestic bird bigger than a sparrow. Because?- They have been eaten. Large bodies of fresh water with no water birds. Overpopulation is with us now in many parts of the world.

Ceph, those famines in Africa are what would be 'Die Off' patches if not for food aid pouring in. This has been the case for decades. There are other places getting closer to the brink. A drought in China this year could cause famine there. Wherefore does the fantasy arise that Die-Off is necessarily global or synchronous? This petri dish isn't flat.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Germany alone produced around 50 million tones of grain per year on around 20% of its area. This grain would be enough to feed 250 million people (on a pure grain diet).

You have 230 Germans per each 1km2 of land.
This makes about 0.45 ha for each German, assuming all land is for agriculture.
If only 20% is for agriculture, then you have only 0.09ha, eg a square 30 X 30 meters of land to feed each German.
That is already unsustainable without pouring copious quantities of oil products on said land (and doing so devastates that land as time pass).

We have about 80 millions of Germans.
Now you are claiming that this land can feed 3 times as much of peoples (250 millions), eg a strip of land 10 X 30 m can feed a person for a year on sustainable basis.

That is an *absurdity*.

You can produce synthetic methane from wind energy for 25€ct/kWh (maybe even cheaper when the technology matures).

So from where your carbon will come?
I assume hydrogen will come from water.
BTW, Methane has a formula CH4.