Corn boom could expand ‘dead zone’ in Gulf

JEFFERSON, Iowa - Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since World War II. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price.

The nation's corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing "dead zone" — a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.

The dead zone was discovered in 1985 and has grown fairly steadily since then, forcing fishermen to venture farther and farther out to sea to find their catch. For decades, fertilizer has been considered the prime cause of the lifeless spot.
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Our Addiction to Oil: One Molecule Could Be The Cure

From Wired.com:

On a blackboard, it looks so simple: Take a plant and extract the cellulose. Add some enzymes and convert the cellulose molecules into sugars. Ferment the sugar into alcohol. Then distill the alcohol into fuel. One, two, three, four — and we're powering our cars with lawn cuttings, wood chips, and prairie grasses instead of Middle East oil.

Unfortunately, passing chemistry class doesn't mean acing economics. Scientists have long known how to turn trees into ethanol, but doing it profitably is another matter. We can run our cars on lawn cuttings today; we just can't do it at a price people are willing to pay.

Enzymes

The problem is cellulose. Found in plant cell walls, it's the most abundant naturally occurring organic molecule on the planet, a potentially limitless source of energy. But it's a tough molecule to break down. Bacteria and other microorganisms use specialized enzymes to do the job, scouring lawns, fields, and forest floors, hunting out cellulose and dining on it. Evolution has given other animals elegant ways to do the same: Cows, goats, and deer maintain a special stomach full of bugs to digest the molecule; termites harbor hundreds of unique microorganisms in their guts that help them process it.

No walk in the park

For scientists, though, figuring out how to convert cellulose into a usable form on a budget driven by gas-pump prices has been neither elegant nor easy. To tap that potential energy, they're harnessing nature's tools, tweaking them in the lab to make them work much faster than nature intended.

Addicted

While researchers work to bring down the costs of alternative energy sources, in the past two years policymakers have finally reached consensus that it's time to move past oil. The reasoning varies — reducing our dependence on unstable oil-producing regions, cutting greenhouse gases, avoiding ever-increasing prices — but it's clear that the US needs to replace billions of gallons of gasoline with alternative fuels, and fast. Even oil industry veteran George W. Bush has declared that "America is addicted to oil" and set a target of replacing 20 percent of the nation's annual gasoline consumption — 35 billion gallons — with renewable fuels by 2017.

But how?

Hydrogen is too far-out, and it's no easy task to power our cars with wind- or solar-generated electricity. The answer, then, is ethanol. Unfortunately, the ethanol we can make today — from corn kernels — is a mediocre fuel source. Corn ethanol is easier to produce than the cellulosic kind (convert the sugar to alcohol and you're basically done), but it generates at best 30 percent more energy than is required to grow and process the corn — hardly worth the trouble. Plus, the crop's fertilizer- intensive cultivation pollutes waterways, and increased demand drives up food costs (corn prices doubled last year). And anyway, the corn ethanol industry is projected to produce, at most, the equivalent of only 15 billion gallons of fuel by 2017. "We can't make 35 billion gallons' worth of gasoline out of ethanol from corn," says Dartmouth engineering and biology professor Lee Lynd, "and we probably don't want to."

Eat or Drive?

Cellulosic ethanol, in theory, is a much better bet. Most of the plant species suitable for producing this kind of ethanol — like switchgrass, a fast- growing plant found throughout the Great Plains, and farmed poplar trees — aren't food crops. And according to a joint study by the US Departments of Agriculture and Energy, we can sustainably grow more than 1 billion tons of such biomass on available farmland, using minimal fertilizer. In fact, about two-thirds of what we throw into our landfills today contains cellulose and thus potential fuel. Better still: Cellulosic ethanol yields roughly 80 percent more energy than is required to grow and convert it.

For more visit Wired.com

Northern Rock and Bio-Bullshit

From Dr Keith Anderson, lecturer in finance at Durham University:

I hope you are being entertained as I am by the current turbulence around Northern Rock. I went up to photograph the queue outside their branch in Durham yesterday. It is the first physical sign that as a Doctor of Finance I might be able to afford to buy a modest house in Durham in a couple of years’ time, once house prices have dropped by 30%… It was reported that £1bn had been withdrawn on Friday, amounting to 4% of Northern Rock’s deposits. The amazing thing to me is that 96% of people DIDN’T withdraw their money on Friday. If I had had any savings with them, I would have been in the queue at 9.00 on Friday morning. Figures in authority say that there is nothing to be afraid of...

From Engineeringnews.co.za: CEO Madi Ramsamy said that Siyanda had secured a supply of soya bean seed from New Crop Seed, and was planning to plant the first crop in October, near Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal.

The project includes the development of a proposed 100 000 t/y soya bean-based biodiesel plant valued at between R1,2-billion and R1,3-billion. It includes the construction of the soya bean processing plant, an oil cake manufacturing facility, an oil extraction facility and a biodiesel refinery.

The project, should it go ahead, will be a joint venture (JV) between petrochemicals giant Sasol, the State-owned Central Energy Fund and Siyanda.Siyanda has also secured contracts for the supply of fuel and fertiliser for the farms.

However, Ramsamy said that JV partner Sasol wanted to delay the project until a policy was in place. Sasol's widely reported standpoint is that a biodiesel plant in South Africa is not economically viable without government support.

NVDL: The Northern Rock thing just shows the extent to which the stock markets, money markets are operating in a grand delusion. This is just the beginning of the Housing Bubble/Credit Crunch. It's not 'entertainment'; it's in fact something to be very afraid of. Why? Because it spells a global recession, which will make 1927 look like a Fairground Attraction.

The Biofuels Brou ha ha is almost as laughable as the Northern Rock delusion. What happened at Bothaville? The enthusiasm to make money seems to cloud the perception completely. The math is simple: add up all the inputs (not just of harvesting, but preparing the land, planting and irrigation) and then compare these to the outputs. If you get a marginal profit (in terms of total energy output) congrats, you score. Unfortunately, this reality remains incontrovertible (to quote Jim Kunstler):

We cannot run the world's highway systems the way we are running them now on any combination (including all combinations) of alternative technologies. Thus, we have to look at alternative transport infrastructure (rail for example), and not keep forcing the issue of cheap and easy motoring. It's simply not going to happen.

If the USA dedicated all of its arable landmass to bio-fuel development, it might have the energy to run its vehicle fleets. But then there would be nothing left for food. See the dilemma?