This is a Wall Street Journal article concerning global food shortages and what the international community is discussing in regards to solutions. A good argument for home gardening.

A Plan to Fight Food Shortage
By SEBASTIAN MOFFETT And CAROLINE HENSHAW

Agriculture ministers from the Group of 20 nations gather Wednesday and Thursday in Paris facing a growing problem: Demand for food is outpacing supply, which is increasingly hampered by weather shocks and government intervention.

*snip* See link for complete story.
A Plan to Fight Food Shortages

Edited for length. Let me know if you can't see the article from the link. I am not sure if it is available without the subscription.

The two issues are interrelated, without oil for food production for fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides (can be mitigated somewhat using natural gas energy for this production), for tilling the earth (tractor and agricultural machinery fuels) yields would collapse and the top soils of the most productive farming land in the world would blow away in the wind (such as the 1930s dust bowl), for transportation fuels and for the industrial activities of food processing (prepacked meals in lots of plastic covered paper in the hypermarket). Reverting back to practice of medieval crop rotation systems and Clydesdale horses (assuming the top soil can make the transition), which was abandoned 50 years ago will not be a solution to keep the millions of hungry mouths in the Megacities of the world in the next 10-20 years full, just isn't going to cut it.

Bang.

-Sheriff Blast

The full text is not available. Although one can view the article by searching for the headline in Google News and accessing it from that link.

The original news story on the WSJ is now reduced to a summary unless you have a subscription. This link appears to still have the full story.

Bang.

-Sheriff Blast, removing overly political commentary

Bang.

-Sheriff Blast

I stumbled upon this writer, Felisa Rogers, a week or two ago and am hooked. She speaks about the impact the economic downturn has had on her, her return to her frugal roots and a scavenging lifestyle. Every article ends with a recipe which uses foraged and homegrown incredients, complimented when they can afford it, by store-bought foods. The importance of knowing how to grow or forage for your own food is becoming a reality for more people every day.

Here's a link to some of her articles:
http://www.salon.com/author/felisa_rogers/index.html

Her piece entitled "How the recession turned me into a Scavenger" is here:
http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2011/03/01/recession_turned_me_into_scavenger

I lose a lot of sleep over this. There are two additional compounding factors: fresh water depletion and climate change. Put all four together in the next 10-20 years and we've got one humdinger of a problem to deal with.

Commodities trading has a lot to do with food production, the types of food grown, etc. As an example, a year or so ago in China during a bad garlic harvest, entrepreneurs were buying tons of garlic, storing it in warehouses until the price rose to make a significant return. This of course created more volatility, driving prices even higher. So I would think its very difficult to tell the difference between actual food shortage vs. speculation and politics. Food may cost more than people can afford, but higher cost does not automatically equal scarcity. IMO, the issue is affordability, not shortage.

Thanks for the link. Her posts are a thoughtful and entertaining read. Reminds me of Amy Dacyczyn's "Tightwad Gazette" books. Not just "how to," but "why to" -- finding elements of elegance, joy and humour in a very modest, frugal lifestyle.

EDIT: I don't care for the word "scavenging" though. It conjures this image of buzzards descending on a well-ripened corpse. I think scrounging or foraging are better descriptions of what she does.

My pleasure Doug! Thank you for the Amy Dacyczyn "Tightwad Gazette" recommendation. I'll seek them out!

There has been no global shortages int eh last couple of years and there is no shortage presently, or even in the short run. Reserves are up from a few years ago and production is well in excess of need and should, barring unforeseen circumstances, remain well above need even as there remains the expected checkered pattern of droughts, floods, blight, and all the rest of the usual causes of failure.

That said the longer term, thirty years and beyond, looks clouded, if not outright bleak. Anthropogenic global warming, AGW, is pushing rising oceans and climatic shifts that are converting many of the best crop lands into saltwater swamps and deserts.

Then there are the many forms of biological blow-back as insects once under control become resistant to insecticides, herbicides no longer work on weeds, fungus laugh at the fungicides we throw at it, and antibiotics, necessary for industrial scale meat and egg production, loose traction.

Then there is the energy side of the issue. Industrial farming is energy intensive to start with. Most of the fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, are made from fossil fuels and require motor fuels to ship and apply.

On the other end of the equation human populations are going up. Even worse billions of people who barely used motor fuels and fed themselves on a handful of rice and a few vegetables want to drive a car to work, eat burgers and fries, run big screen TVs and air conditioning, and flush a porcelain toilet with drinking water. They want to live like we do and, as Lincoln said 'There aren't enough teats on the sow'.

Water, fuel, and arable land are in short supply. Water used for crops can't be used for drinking, and neither can be routed to wetland. If the wetlands run dry fish populations in the oceans plummet. With many populations getting a good share of their protein from the oceans so shortchanging the wetlands to irrigate crops may end up yielding less food, not more.

This is typical of these issues. Easy answers will cause more harm than good. There are no simple solutions. Good solutions are only going to be implemented by understanding the situation and its dynamics, science, and sitting down and negotiating like adults, politics.

Not making any of it any easier is the fact that for thirty years there has been a concerted effort to discredit both science and politics. So we have largely crippled our ability to know reality and take action collectively.

There is good news. None of these very ponderous and vicious birds will come home to roost for thirty years and they won't bite hard for another forty. So there may be time on some of these issues but how you navigate all this without information and collective action is a mystery.

Storing food and growing a garden is barely a drop in the bucket. It might help some but it is clearly not an answer. Good luck. IMO there is little to nothing an individual, or small group, can do. These are national and global issues that are amenable only to national and global scale solutions.

There is one small fact that I take great comfort in: In forty years I will either be dead or so old that it won't matter. All the young bucks out there who claim to know it all and have easy answers better be right. You have thirty or forty years to come together and get it right.

Not to minimize a serious concern. 39 times 1.7% [assumes immediate reduction rather than whatever the actual decline rate may be] equals 66.3% according to my cellphone calculator, meaning a shortfall of 2.7% to address over the next 39 years, assuming the growth in production rate holds, of course. The biological sciences and all forms of food production have shown remarkable ability to improve yields - so far.

For the USA at least, a shortfall of that magnitude might help us deal with chronic obesity...

In fact, obesity may get worse...in the scramble to produce more food, costs need to continue to come down, which means additional additives for shelf stability and flavor...high fructose corn syrup being just one example. It's a travesty when a gallon of water costs more than a gallon of soda. I'm doing my part by having my own garden, as are our neighbors. I also cook almost all meals, so freshness and flavor are guaranteed without all the additives. I recently saw a show that stated in the 1800's families spent 10 cents per dollar on food, that figure today is 70 cents per dollar. People simply grew most of their own food.
If anyone has more accurate info, that would be great. Please share.

70 cents on the dollar seemed rather high to me, as in my mind that equates to 70% of my income which would be preposterous. I did a quick search because, "Hey maybe I am completely off". I can't confirm the ideology of the writer but this article goes over the national percentages for family budgets. Food is listed as about 14%.

Another website I looked at did research on the food totals of a family of four at around $770 per month, which the percentage is arbitrary to the food lifestyle of the family and household income.

I don't think that 10% would be all that hard to imagine for a family in the 1800 given that in America we were still very much a rural society until the late 1800s. Thus we raised or hunted much of our own food for consumption, sale or trade.

Another 10 vs 70 statisitc I have seen a number of times is the percent of income spent for your average American (I believe defined as a household income of $55,000) vs a family in the developing world. So, 10% spent on food for Americans vs. 70% for people in poor countries. So, what seems preposterous to you or me is everyday reality for billions of people.

I think much of the press about that G-20 meeting referred to in the OP use the wrong headlines. It's really not food shortages that are the immediate problem that they were meeting to discuss, it's the rapid price volatility that is crushing so many of the world's poor lately. I have read that 98% of the world's hungry are from developing countries, and if they have to spend most of their income on food, you can see how sudden spikes in food prices can be catastrophic, especially for growing children.

While it's true that the total global food production is enough to theoretically feed everyone, there really are food shortages in many areas above and beyond the fact that food is getting too expensive for people to buy. When a major wheat producer like Russia bans exports this year so its own people don't riot over rising food prices, there isn't necessarily a lot of reserves to take up the slack in the marketplace, which is partly why wheat prices doubled in a short time. Countries that can pay get the wheat, and those that can't, do without, or do with less. Over time, higher prices should lead to more production, but that takes time and people still have to eat in the meantime.

We are lucky in that the raw cost of food is only a percentage of the price we pay, so spiking food commodity prices don't cause such dramatic spikes in the final price of food for us. However, that may change if economic conditions take a precipitous nosedive. It would probably only be a temporary condition, but it's a good reason to have longer-term food supplies to ride out such disruptions. Actually, on a global level, better food reserves would allow poorer countries to also ride out situations like this, similar to how the IEA announced releasing petroleum from its strategic reserves in response to high global oil prices, but food reserves are quite thin in most countries nowadays. Gardening could likewise provide a cushion through turbulent times.

Several things wrong here. For one thing the government stats say the 25-40% of family income goes to housing. another 10% goes to gas for the car. At the very minimum that is 35% of income and does not leave 70% for food.

The math don't work.

Secondly the average farm famly in the 1800s had a total cash income of 15-30 dollars a year. Out of this they were required to purchase salt, sugar coffee and tea. 90+ % of the nation was agricultural and even the professional people in small town America grew a backyard garden.

Lastly, cooking at home does not guarentee healt, freshness or flavor. I receintly ate a couple of meals with some friends and was appaled that a "health care professional" was living on overcooked meat and potatoes all smothered in gravy, every meal.

When I cook, I guarantee flavor. Been that way for thirty years, ain't stopping now.http://forums.equipped.org/images/icons/default/wink.gif

Of course, free market capitalism and open markets will solve all the issues associated with food and food production. Or not.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis

http://developeconomies.com/development-...-goldman-sachs/

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/com...on-2016088.html

None of them are very sympathetic to the poor, struggling capitalists as they scrimp and save to keep bread on their tables. I found it interesting to compare an contrast the different articles and how they use the same basic matrix of facts.

As quietly as it's kept, we are fighting aggressively over oil right now.

Ah. Important snag there. Increased production isn't always possible. There is a limited supply of land suitable to grow wheat on. That supply of land isn't magically getting bigger when they prices are ricing. There is also a limit to how much you can produce on that piece of land.

BTW - I'm not saying anything about if it is possible to increase today's production or not. My point is that there will be a very hard and real limit to the production of any specific agricultural product - and no economic price/demand mantra will be able to raise that limit.

The classical price-demand-production-supply relationship is a wonderful mechanism when it works and a real [censored] when it doesn't.

Has anybody made the soylent green comment yet? If so, nevermind.

Speaking of wheat, why don't they invest in easy to grow plants like Quinoa? Far more nutrient dense and healthy than wheat anyway.

It's very likely we are going to see food crises, and possibly food riots, in some third world countries in the next decade. In fact, there's a good argument that some of the uprisings recently in the Arab world are partly spurred on by the fact that many people are struggling to survive. The relative cost of food in those countries (as a percentage of the typical family budget) is much higher than it is in the USA. I expect to see some marginal countries (esp. in places like Africa) become lawless states run by warlords i.e. more countries like Somalia.

It seems to me that there are a lot of creative things that can be done to boost food production. But I'm not sure the investment $$ are really there to make the major changes necessary.

We'll see.

Pete #2

Easy answer?? It doesn't sell.

Pragmatic answer? Perhaps it doesn't store or transport as well. It's all well and good if, for example, the US can produce 50% of the world's Miracle Grain #1, but it rots in a week - half the world will never see it.

My best friend's wife has a myriad of health problems (some are probably self-induced, but I digress). Anyway, they live on a variety of odd grains - corn is probably the most normal of they food staples they eat. But it's very hard for them to find non-wheat, non-rice foods. Maybe in downtown LA it wouldn't be so difficult, but up in eastern WA, it's a hassle.

Driving as I do regularly through Minnesota, WI, and IA farm country, I noticed a lot of new galvanized large grain storage bins popping up recently on farms everywhere. Some big co-ops have also added capacity. In some cases, they cut the bin in the middle, raise the top, and insert another steel section to increase its capacity. I am even seeing shiney new domes on top of old traditional masonery silos. The grain industry seems to be gearing up for something. There are so many of them, that I have to believe that the newly-increased ability to store grains will, while good for farmers, drive up the overall cost of food and ethanol at the consumer level.

I wasn't sure if my impressions were correct, so I looked up grain storage. Even though the graph does not show 2010-2011, the trnd is apparent and confirms my hunch...IA farmers have recently added millions of bushels of increased grain storage capacity.

Of course, not all farmers agree on the tactic of storing grain for market. In fact, all of this troubles farmer I.M. Slakinov, an old-country social-ist. Old Ivan has two pigs and six chickens that forage for themselves in his weed-covered farm lot.

Even though social-ism is the most thoroughly tested and soundly disproven social idea ever devised by humankind, and capitalism has produced the highest standard of living for the most participants in human history, Old Ivan still feels that if there is all this extra grain around, the gov't should take it away from the greedy farmers who produced it and put it in his empty bin. After all, he's poor.


Mods: my apologies, but why isn't 'capitalist' censored when PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. (social-ist) is?

True, but we're a long way from that, assuming the investment money is there. Look at situations like China and Brazil these days. Brazil's agro business is booming and expanding like crazy due to higher demand from China (a lot of business that American farmers used to get but I guess we're busy growing corn-for-ethanol instead nowadays). I have read that Brazil can still double its area under cultivation, and without clearing more rainforest. It just needs the investment money to do that, including building roads, railroads, ports, etc. to support all that additional capacity. (Actually, in fairness, most of that crop in Brazil bound for China is for animal feed because of their increasing ability to pay for meat, so the increased production there isn't really feeding more people.)

Who knows, one day we'll probably plow under Yosemite and Yellowstone if food prices got high enough. (Actually, I guess the pot growers are already ahead of the game in that department...)

I work for a contractor to the railroads, and spend a lot of time around trains and train yards. There is a steady stream of loaded trains heading for American ports all day, every day. They wait in line to be unloaded into huge ships that can take FIVE TRAINLOADS [sic] of corn and other grains to be shipped around the world.

Somewhere around 85% of the corn grown in the U.S. is feed corn. Most of the feed goes to feedlot cattle and hogs (and cheap dog/cat food). Corn isn't a natural diet for cattle and it causes digestive problems. Some bright person discovered that post-production corn ethanol waste was actually a higher-protein and more easily digestible diet for the cattle. The only part of the corn that is distilled into ethanol is the sugar and the starch, all the other nutrients are left behind as 'waste'.

One bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds. Out of that single bushel, you can produce almost three gallons of ethanol and about 17 pounds of a high-protein livestock feed (aka 'waste').

Certain parties with vested interests would have people believe that the corn from ethanol is taking food from the mouths of American children, and that is simply not the case. Corn has been America's #1 crop for many years (it's also the #1 nutrient hog, but I am digressing), so much so that they have spent a lot of money trying to find other things to make from it.

Sue

I should've been more explicit. The lost US business is primarily in soybeans, which is a huge cash crop in the US and primarily goes to animal feed. A lot of soybean farmers--and probably other kinds of farmers--have switched to growing corn-for-ethanol instead because when you include all the various subsidies and tax incentives as well as the current high price for corn, it's more lucrative than growing soybeans. Of course, I'm sure there are pretty hefty costs to switching crops, but I guess it's worth it.

The Chinese are mostly getting their soybeans for animal feed from Brazil now and have invested heavily in setting them up.

Interestingly, we now export quite a bit of corn for ethanol use overseas, but basically ban imports of foreign-made ethanol, like ethanol from--you guessed it--Brazil! Funny how all this stuff is interlinked.

I am having a hard time putting my comment into a concise point, so I apologize if this doesn't come out well.

I think something that also needs to be considered is that food shortages are also caused not by lack of food and but the lack of safe delivery of it. Many 3rd world countries that have rampant starvation do not lack for food coming into to help them but the food is taken by the government or warlords, stolen or destroyed in transportation before it gets to the regions that depend on it for survival.

On that same token, in 3rd world countries, people are more beholden to tribal/historical lands and would never leave it regardless of starvation or drought, even knowing that if they moved from their village to the city they could get the food and water they need.

It's my 2 cents.

Didn't realize until today that the corn-ethanol subsidies were voted away last week by the Senate. That's a surprise since they voted earlier in the year to extend those same subsidies.

From the Economist magazine:

Actually, that may be a good thing.

The only reason we make ethanol from corn is because we grow so much of it. Corn isn't really a good source of ethanol because it's on the low end of how much you can make from it. It's also expensive to grow, due to the heavy fertilization required. I think the round figure for corn-sourced ethanol is about 600 gallons per acre. There are other plants that don't require the high growing costs of corn, yet produce more ethanol: sugar beets, forage beets, wild cattails, mesquite pods, etc. Cattails, growing wild, produce twice the amount of ethanol that corn does with heavy fertilization/herbicides/pesticides; if liquid effluent from city sewage systems were used to feed a series of cattail marshes (in rotation), the cattails cleanse the water and the amount of ethanol produced jumps from the basic 1200 or so gallons to around 10,000 gallons per surface acre.

Using corn for ethanol is silly and expensive. Why use prime farmland for something like that? Use marginal land for ethanol and good farmland for actual food production.

Sue

So true.


Switchgrass is a robust native North American prairie grass.

Monster grain companies step aside; we are already building new switchgrass (and woodchip) ethanol plants........ I use ethanol on my long distance trips in my Chevy Impala in temperatures from +105F to -20F and I am very happy with it's power and mileage performance. In farm country it costs 90 per gallon less than gasoline and pollutes less.

For those who worship at the altar of the man-made global warming religion, switchgrass roots bind up 94% of the carbon it produces, and "delivers 540% of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25% energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies" ...Scientific American mag


Even if subsidies dry up, I will buy ethanol, and my fuel money will stay in North America. When, in the future, I can identify cellulosic ethanol I will buy that instead of corn ethanol. Seeing mile after mile of waving perennial prairie grasses has got to be a good thing for almost everyone.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn

Approximately 95% of the ethanol being produced in the U.S. is currently being made from feed corn, on prime food-production land, heavily fertilized and treated with pesticides and herbicides. This is just plain stupid.

Make ethanol from grass on marginal prairie land, mesquite pods in the Southwest, cattails in the wet Northwest, sugar cane waste in Hawaii -- whatever grows best with the least water and fewest additional nutrients (or use local sewage), and sell it locally. Make it from hemp and kenaf. Make it from corn stover.

Southerners can make ethanol with a plant that currently makes over seven million acres of land in the south totally useless, and doesn't require any fertilization or irrigation; it grows a foot a day, 60 feet per season, and can be harvested twice a year. KUDZU!

Then, run the distilleries with the product they're producing, not petroleum. And don't say a WORD about using ethanol made on the same property not being as efficient as purchased/imported/delivered petroleum. If that's what you're thinking, you need to look up the definition of "efficient".

Use good farmland for food production and keep it that way.

Sue

As usual the chemistry, engineering, and infrastructure is a bit more difficult than someone just shouting "Make it so!". There's already an infrastructure in place for corn. We have the equipment already in place to grow it, harvest it, ship it, ferment it, and distill it. Turning switchgrass into alcohol will be great, but first someone needs to figure out a cost-effective way to break down switchgrass's cellulose into sugars that yeast can convert to ethanol. People have been trying for years to do this with little luck.

Mesquite pods? Okay, assuming someone comes up with a good, effecient way to harvest them we'd still have to turn over a whole lot of land to mesquite trees (thereby messing up the environments of those areas), followed by figuring out how to process and ferment the pods. Keep in mind the machines that could process mesquite pods would have to be designed and built from the ground up and wouldn't likely be able to be used for any other plants. Sidenote: mesquite trees suck up all the water around them, killing all the other plants and laying waste to the soil.

Kudzu? it'd be nice if the vines could be fermented, but they have the same cellulose problem as switchgrass. Kudzu tubers are high is starch and chemically can be treated just like a potato for making ethanol. However, the amount of tubers they make is much smaller than potato plants make based on a plant-mass to plant-mass comparison. In other words, to get the starch equivelent from kudzu tubers that you do from potatoes would require many, many more acres of kudzu vines than potato vines. Sidenote: harvesting kudzu tubers is a real pain in the @%%. A whole new type of harvesting equipment would need to be invented for that.

People just don't realize what a powerful, compact, easy to handle energy source oil and natural gas are. Nothing else comes close to it. A tremendous amount of worth is being done to replace it, but we still have a long, long way to go. Like I said at the begining, just saying something should be done does not magically make it possible. Perhaps a few science classes would help you better understand how things work.

-Blast

You left out the really important quote from that article:
But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

That switchgrass article itself states it's calculations are all theoretical.Yeast can't break cellulose down into alcohol. The cellulose must first be broken down into it's component sugars, which is something mankind has yet to master.
-Blast

p.s. FYI, when the trick of breaking cellulose down into yeast-friendly sugars is discovered you won't have to worry trying to find cellulose-based ethanol over corn-based ethanol. It will ALL be cellulose-based.

There you go. A Cellulose to Methane ( byproduct ) converter named Daisy.

Now turn the methane (1 carbon, 4 hydrogens) into sugar (6 carbons, 12 hydrogens, 6 oxygens).




Done yet?






How about now?





Still waiting...
-Blast

p.s. where does the tubing enter the cow?

I thought that the name of the game was to produce a fuel that can be used in an internal reciprocating combustion engine.

But the real problem is that the requirement was for a fuel that can be cut with Octane to be used as a liquid fuel for internal combustion engines. Food for mechanical contraptions, heavily subsidised by the Government to skew the economics of the biofuel madness.

Perhaps its the internal combustion engine that is the real problem, or even the over reliance on the internal combustion engine to get folks around from A to B.

As folks get bigger (over consumption of carbohydrate sugars) so do their vehicles. When the reciprocating internal engines go hungry will it be before or after half the folks on planet goes hungry?

More precisely, the internal reciprocating combustion engines already owned by millions of people, without modification of those engines.

-Blast, trying to imagine what a methane-powered jet plane would look like.

p.s. I'm also imagining huge "factory" complexes with thousands of cows caged up in rows, a tube feeding them switchgrass at one end and a methane collection unit attached to the other end. *shudder*

The 1976 GM Firebird 2, just in time for the middle east fuel crisis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3d3nQX4L0

Henry Ford did that around the turn of the previous century. Most of his vehicles were dual-fuel: alcohol and gasoline. In the city, where petroleum was available, people used gasoline. When they were in the country, where most farmers made their own alcohol, they would use home brew.

My work Suburban is dual fuel as it sits in the driveway.

The current method of making ethanol from sugar- and starch-rich plants like cattails and sugar/fodder beets is still the simplest and cheapest way to go. They may find ways eventually to use cellulose, but not right now.



Ummm... like that's never happened before?



Powerful, compact, easy, cheap... Of course! We've been indoctrinated to believe that everything must be easy and cheap. The be-all and end-all of our existence.



I guess you shouldn't look now, but they're almost there. Just replace the switchgrass with the corn they're already using:



I guess they're just looking for a cheap source of tubing from China. And some No Smoking signs...

Sue

Henry Ford envisioned that ethanol made from plant matter would be the best way to power vast new fleets of automobiles. Besides Henry Ford, didn't Rudolf Diesel originally design his engines to run on vegetable or seed oils, not petroleum? Funny how ideas that we think are new are actually quite old. They even had electric cars way back then.

You left out the really important quote from that article:
But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

That switchgrass article itself states it's calculations are all theoretical.Yeast can't break cellulose down into alcohol. The cellulose must first be broken down into it's component sugars, which is something mankind has yet to master.
-Blast

p.s. FYI, when the trick of breaking cellulose down into yeast-friendly sugars is discovered you won't have to worry trying to find cellulose-based ethanol over corn-based ethanol. It will ALL be cellulose-based. [/quote]

I defer to your chemistry expertise of which I have none, but there are already a lot of cellulosic ethanol plants up and running, but most don't use switchgrass yet:

Commercial Cellulosic Ethanol Plants in the U.S.[73][74]
(Operational or under construction)

Company..... Location..... Feedstock

Abengoa Bioenergy Hugoton, KS Wheat straw
BlueFire Ethanol Irvine, CA Multiple sources
Colusa Biomass Energy Corporation Sacramento, CA Waste rice straw
Coskata Warrenville, IL Biomass, Agricultural and Municipal wastes
DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol (DDCE) Vonore, TN Corn cobs, switchgrass
Fulcrum BioEnergy Reno, NV Municipal solid waste
Gulf Coast Energy Mossy Head, FL Wood waste
KL Energy Corp. Upton, WY Wood
Mascoma Lansing, MI Wood
POET LLC Emmetsburg, IA Corn cobs
Range Fuels[75] Treutlen County, GA Wood waste
SunOpta Little Falls, MN Wood chips
SweetWater Energy Rochester, NY Multiple Sources
US Envirofuels Highlands County, FL Sweet sorghum
Xethanol Auburndale, FL Citrus peels

Byrd_Huntr, that's excellent information, thanks for the list! I checked the different plants out and currently they are all "pilot plant" scale designed more to test the technology rather than full-scale production plants. Still, it's a start.
They all seem to be using variations of acid hydrolysis to break down the cellulose down into yeast-friendly sugars. BlueFire Ethanol, Inc.'s technology page has a good description of the process. In the past this has been tricky to do on a large scale as it needs constant, minute tweaks to the batch as it is broken down otherwise you get a run-away reaction which can be very damaging. Advances in computer-controlled "tweaking" seems to be the key to these different plants. It'll be interesting to watch what improvements these companies make on the actual chemistry of the process.

-Blast

The Department of Energy just announced that they will be providing loan guarantees for POET (already listed in Byrd_Hunter's list) so they can build the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant, which will be completed sometime in 2013. Output should be up to 25 million gallons a year.

I have been interested in cellulose-based ethanol for a long time. Plenty of experiments are also in play on this side of the 49th.

I do have some concerns about the assumption that "agricultural waste" is a massive resource, freely available to be tapped, and of no other value. It is not waste that's trucked to a landfill and buried. Most "waste" is the stalks and leaves of the producing plant, chopped up and spread during harvest. Or, as straw, used as bedding for animals and then tilled back into the land. The point is, soil is a cyclical system: if you feed it, it will feed you. And if you take away a disproportionate amount of the biomass it produces, you have to supplement with fertilizer -- which currently comes from fossil fuels. A similar principle applies to "forestry waste." There is no free lunch in nature; the only free lunch we've found so far is in fossil fuels.

But back to the point: the whole concept of cellulose-derived ethanol is fascinating in a number of ways. Including, if we can make it work, the possible end of world hunger? Pure speculation; but the stuff yeast can eat is the stuff people can eat. (Just wondering.)

Has anyone worked out the math regarding cellulose-derived ethanol? That is, at projected best production, how much bio-based fuel can be produced in N.America, and how much of our arable land mass would that require. (Yeah, I know, there are big fat politics entwined in this, meaning that the numbers from any one source need to be taken with a large grain of ... ethanol.)

Enough of my rambling. What do you think?

Big Business and government can't even get corn-based ethanol processed in a common-sense way, and they're already doing that!



That attitude is certifiably insane. I don't know anything about cellulose-derived alcohol, but the waste from crop-type plants is just as valuable as the sugar/starch-based alcohol that comes from it.

In a common-sense society, a crop like fodder beets could be grown on decent soil. The crop could be taken to a nearby distillery and the sugars and starch removed to make alcohol. The sugars and starches in the plants come from sunlight/photosynthesis, which is free. The 'waste product' left behind is all the protein, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, silica, sulfur, sodium, micro-nutrients and trace minerals that were absorbed from the soil during growth.

This 'waste' can either be fed to pastured livestock and returned to the soil as manure, or returned directly to the soil and spread as fertilizer. Sending it to the landfill is just plain stupid and wasteful.

Sue

[rant ON]

My concerns are specific to the cellulostic ethanol gambit.

Most specifically, to the casual labelling (marketing?) of agricultural biomass as "waste." Waste, to the urban ear equals garbage, trash, the smelly and gross stuff that magically disappears when you put it in the bins. Gracious heavens, if you can turn "waste" into fuel for your car, to maintain your existing lifestyle, that's obviously wise; why would you hesitate?

Well, it doesn't work that way. The "waste" produced on farmers' fields needs to be incorporated back into the soil to maintain any semblance of a sustainable soil ecosystem. And even then, it's hardly enough. There is no free lunch: outputs require inputs. Otherwise, you are mining the soil.

Though I confess I haven't looked at it closely, I find it extremely hard to believe that the miracle biomass plants such as switchgrass can be harvested en masse without consequences -- or external chemical inputs. The laws of physics, and the laws of soil, altogether inconvenient, continue to apply.

-Doug, who grew up on a mixed farm and knows a little about the maintenance of soil fertility

[rant OFF]

Of course! They always have and they always will. Only within the last 60-70 years have farmers fallen for the bill of goods sold to them of being able to take without suitable return.

The soil web is life, literally. Those who think they can get around that fact are doomed to find out the hard way, and will take a lot of other people with them. TANSTAAFL applies here, as to all else.

From what I understand from the people who know this, using things like switchgrass is a way to use less desirable land for fuel so the prime land can be used for food production. You still have to feed the land and return sufficient nutrients, or even that isn't going to work.

But there seem to be a lot of people who have to learn the hard way, and the learning of it is slow in coming.

Sue

True, but you can say that about almost any resource. We exist in the billions because of fossil fuels, and those are running out. When they are rare, we will switch whole scale to 'renewable' and without petro-based fertilizers, we will deplete the soils quickly. Biomass energy only slows the process.

The root cause is simple: too many people. The solution is a bit more complex, and likely draconian.

And in a related news flash, biofuels have just been officially approved for use in civillian commercial aircraft. I'm no expert, but aviation biofuel uses different organic inputs from the various ethanol technologies, so it is a different technology track from ethanol. The inputs are also not typically food for people, unlike the current main inputs for ethanol, like corn or sugar cane.

I know that the Dept of Defense has been looking into biofuel for its military planes, but I don't know if that is still just in the experimental phase. One day, we may be sending our aircraft carriers and soldiers to novel new destinations to protect our supply of plants or algae that go into making aviation biofuel. Who knows.

However, as Byrd_Hunter points out, this promising news still doesn't get around the issue of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer to keep crops growing, but as natural gas gets permanently expensive someday, we may find a viable alternative as we are just beginning to do for transportation fuels.