Kublikhan wrote:
This further undermines your argument of using municipal waste for TDP, it does not strengthen your argument.
While it one sense I obviously see TDP as valuable, I am more interested in the truth, what ever that may be. When I started posting here, I beleived that TDP could supply about 78% of our current oil consumption. See my welcome post, I came here as much for an education as anything else
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Posting here has changed my thinking. Where I am at numerically is at or about 50% from existing feedstocks. I am trying to figure out ways to verify that figure.
Kublikhan wrote:
This source confirms much of the waste is used as fertilizer or is already used for fuel
It also confirms that much of the fertilizer is WASTED by putting too much of it in the soil - more then the soil can handle. One analogy would be like putting 10lbs of food on your dinner plate and you only eat one pound. The question becomes one of what exactly is TOO much. At this point, easily found facts and figures become rather thin. I'm sure they are out there, but finding them apparently requires better google foo then I have.
We both wrote:
TomSaidak wrote:
Thanks for the energy breakdown. I notice we both got to 23% oil equivalent. The upshot of your figures is most of the energy is electrical.
Source?
I saw a table that I have not been able to relocate that broke US oil consumption by sector. I remember many of the numbers, passenger cars and light trucks use 40%, large trucks use 24 or 26%, Farmers use 6.6% for their machinery. Industry uses 20%. Using math, 23%-6.6% is 16.4%. If we are assuming oil is used, where is it being used? And how exactly is it being used. Nothing I can find suggests that we are using 10%'s or our oil consumption for fertilizer and pesticides. That article said specifically that transportation to the store for sale and transportation to get us to the store and back home was NOT part of the calculation. You yourself said that storage was included. Dunno about you cobber, but no oil is used to refridgerate MY food. I use electricity. Since none of my electricity comes from oil, that part of the energy budget is NOT oil. The article specifically talked about milling and processing to cereal. As far as I know, that is all electrical. No plant is buring oil to do this.
Most of the established recycling for wood and excess manure is for making electricity. I would suggest that this may not be the best use of the materials. We use only a small percentage of wood waste as it is because something on the order of 60% is "unrecoverable". It could turn out that is the gold mine for TDP because it doesn't care if it is buried in something else - the 2nd step in the process is crunching it all up.
Kublikhan wrote:
Again, even if you minimize the amount of fossil fuel energy spent on processing and transporting the food, it still takes more oil to grow the food than you get out of TDP. You will still come out net oil negative using TDP if your feedstock is AG waste grown using modern agricultural methods.
We have not established that yet. It is the crux of the equation. TDP is a pathway to energy. At 6 billion tons AG Waste, using CWT's 10% conversion (10 tons yields 1 ton of oil), you get a whopping 52% of US oil consumption. The question becomes two fold, a) is that a realistic conversion number and b) does using that much AG Waste cause problems for the farming community. We appear to be circling around that.
I do want to clarify one thing. The 10:1 energy ratio is not about putting energy INTO the Ag products. It is about what we do to GET that Ag product. It ignores the product left behind. For every 1/2 lb hamburger/steak you eat, 40 lbs of manure were created, and .15 lb of the carcass was left behind as indedible. The fertilizer does not add one calorie to Ag products. It allows the Ag products to get their energy from the sun. Pesticide does not add one calorie to Ag Products. It makes sure that more calories are available for processing and delivery.
Kublikhan wrote:
....it still takes more oil to grow the food than you get out of TDP. You will still come out net oil negative using TDP if your feedstock is AG waste grown using modern agricultural methods.
Going with the 1/2 burger analogy.......
Lets do the math..
At time of slaughter, your average cow weighs 1260 lbs, is 25 months old, and has produced 54,750 lbs of manure in the last 12 months of its life.
Your (corporate you) 1/2 of hamburger represents .65 lbs of former living cow, and 40.34 lbs of manure. The calorie count at 80% lean for your hamburger is 576 food calories, or 576,000 thermal calories. Manure has 2110 btu/lb WET. At 0.0039683 btu per thermal calorie, 1lb wet manure has 5317138.321 thermal calories in it. At 40.34 lbs of manure left behind by your hamburger, your hamburger left behind 372.4640574 thermal calories per thermal calorie you ate. At the 10:1 ratio, your 1 thermal calorie of hamburger required 10 to thermal calories to make it, and left 362 thermal calories of potential energy behind. So yes, TDP can potentiall extract more oil then was required to produce your food. And yes, to make the calculation I multiplied the food calories by 1000 to compare thermal to thermal. Something I have not been able to confirm was done for the 10:1 ratio often cited in our forums here. This does NOT include the .15 lbs of cow left behind by your 1/2 lb hamburger. I hit my peak math abilities for the day.
Sources include but are not limited to:
http://tammi.tamu.edu/ManurtoEnrgyE428.pdf
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/heat-units-d_664.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_calo ... round_beef
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_manu ... ce_per_day
http://www.herdplus.com/services/herdpl ... report.pdf
Every problem has its solution, and every solution has its problems....