World Water Week to focus on climate change, biofuels.

[NNadir]

I predict that the future of many forms of renewable energy will involve sounding great until someone tries to scale them up.

STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Climate change and a potential water shortage in some regions, also due to the diversion of water to crops for biofuels, will be at the centre of the 2007 World Water Week which opens here Monday, with 2,500 international experts expected to attend...

..."Where will the water to grow the food needed to feed a growing population come from if more and more water is diverted to crops for biofuels production?" asked Trouba.

The European Union wants biofuels to account for 10 percent of the total of motor fuels in 2020, against an estimated 1.6 percent last year.

There are two main kinds of biofuels: ethanols, sometimes called "biopetrol" and which are reserved for petrol-fueled engines; and biodiesels, used in diesel motors.

At the moment biodiesel is much more widely used than ethanol in Europe, in a proportion of 80 percent to 20 percent.

Ethanol is made from sugar beet, wheat, corn and sugar cane.

Biodiesels, known also by the scientific name EMHV (methylic ester of vegetable oil), or diester, are extracted from colza, sunflower, soya and palm oils, and mixed with diesel fuel.

Medical aspects of polluted water will also be tackled during World Water Week and widely lacking sanitary facilities in developing countries have prompted organisers to state, "Hurry up! 2.6 billion are queuing to use the toilet..."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070811/sc_afp/environmentwater_070811204357

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Interesting bit of trivia I only recently learned ...

supposedly, Rudolf Diesel developed his engine with the goal of using peanut or vegetable oil as fuel.

"Diesel demonstrated his engine at the Exhibition Fair in Paris, France in 1898. This engine stood as an example of Diesel's vision because it was fueled by peanut oil - the "original" biodiesel. He thought that the utilization of a biomass fuel was the real future of his engine. He hoped that it would provide a way for the smaller industries, farmers, and "commonfolk" a means of competing with the monopolizing industries, which controlled all energy production at that time, as well as serve as an alternative for the inefficient fuel consumption of the steam engine. As a result of Diesel's vision, compression ignited engines were powered by a biomass fuel, vegetable oil, until the 1920's and are being powered again, today, by biodiesel."
***
more: http://www.ybiofuels.org/bio_fuels/history_diesel.html


Rudolf Diesel said, "The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time."
***
more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Diesel


"Diesel expected that his engine would be powered by vegetable oils (including hemp) and seed oils. At the 1900 World's Fair, Diesel ran his engines on peanut oil. Later, George Schlichten invented a hemp 'decorticating' machine that stood poised to revolutionize paper making. Henry Ford demonstrated that cars can be made of, and run on, hemp. Evidence suggests a special-interest group that included the DuPont petrochemical company, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon (Dupont's major financial backer), and the newspaper man William Randolph Hearst mounted a yellow journalism campaign against hemp. Hearst deliberately confused psychoactive marijuana with industrial hemp, one of humankind's oldest and most useful resources. DuPont and Hearst were heavily invested in timber and petroleum resources, and saw hemp as a threat to their empires. Petroleum companies also knew that petroleum emits noxious, toxic byproducts when incompletely burned, as in an auto engine. Pollution was important to Diesel and he saw his engine as a solution to the inefficient, highly polluting engines of his time. In 1937 DuPont, Mellen and Hearst were able to push a "marijuana" prohibition bill through Congress in less than three months, which destroyed the domestic hemp industry."
***
more: http://www.hempcar.org/diesel.shtml


Unfortunately, further Web search shows that it was not Diesel's engine which burned peanut oil at the Paris demonstration. Some of the other claims are deficient in sources, but followup might be interesting.

[NNadir]

2. No biofuel will ever run all the world's diesel engines.

Not peanuts, not soy beans, not palm oil, not hemp.

It seems like the last plant - another one of those hand waving bits from biofuels types - is the subject of some mysticism. I couldn't care less if they legalize hemp. It's not going to do a damn thing for climate change, but I get tired of hearing the same rehash decade after decade.

I happen to think that biodiesel is pretty good stuff, so long as Indonesian rain forests aren't trashed for palm oil plantations, but the only way it could help cover total demand is as an additive. In particular it is great stuff when recovered from used cooking oils. In this capacity it might help in some circumstances to minimize lubricity problems with DME. Lubricity is the only drawback to using DME in diesel engines, but DME is superior by far to biodiesel, FT-diesel, petro diesel and gasoline engines.

DME can be made from a plethora or sources but regrettably the world's commercial plants use either natural gas or coal as a starting source.

The DME commercialization scale up is now underway.

The first papers on the use of DME in diesel engines were published in 1995. Twelve years latter there is a major committment in Asia and elsewhere, notably Iran, to this fuel.

http://www.japantransport.com/conferences/2006/03/pr_boehman.pdf

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Meant more as historical interest than relevant to policy ... horse has left the barn.

It's interesting to speculate how things might have been different if there had been a big push for biofuels when the Diesel was introduced ... would the tight supply of biofuel have restricted the 'motorization' of society, especially commerce? Or (more likely -- *sigh*) would this just have delayed the development of petroleum as fuel? Would that have been delayed until after the Greenhouse Effect was so well-established that the prospect of explosive growth in petrofuel use met more opposition? Maybe not.

But there might have been a lost opportunity there, if the right people had listened to Diesel.

[phantom power]

4. The problem was that oil had already been discovered.

So many things were different then. Agriculture was a much more manually intense practice. Oil literally shot out of the ground. So different than the space-age heroics we now go thru to get our oil, as a matter of course. The concept of human-induced climate change was far in the future. I bet it had not occurred to anybody that mass transit would someday be systematically dismantled in favor of boosting the automobile industry.