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#Post#: 1029--------------------------------------------------
Barnacle-Repellant Paint Developed To Reduce Shipping Costs
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: May 2, 2014, 1:52 pm
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Barnacle-Repellant Paint Developed To Reduce Shipping Costs
A new type of barnacle-repellant paint — based around compounds
derived from the Maytenus tree — has been devised by an
international group of researchers.
While that, at first, may not sound like something that is that
important, the reality is that the drag created by barnacles (or
many other types of hitch hikers) on ship hulls contributes
relatively significantly to the operating costs of shipping
companies. Eliminating this issue could help to improve shipping
speeds (to a degree) as well as — as previously stated —
reducing costs.
The press release explains the issue and the new work:
By increasing water resistance, they can bump a ship’s fuel use
by as much as 40%, which costs money, adds to pollution and
depletes resources. These marine hitchhikers also can cause
environmental problems by invading new parts of the globe and
competing with native animals and plants. To keep hulls clean,
some shipping companies have turned to special coatings. The
problem is these coatings can permanently harm sea life. So the
team sought an ocean-friendlier option from a sustainable
source.
They turned to Maytenus trees, which are found worldwide. The
plants’ root bark contains compounds that are similar to
defensive agents produced by bottom-dwelling ocean creatures. In
the lab, the scientists found that the compounds repel
barnacles, but generally don’t cause long-term damage. They also
added the compounds to paint, which they applied to tiles and
field-tested in the sea. The new coatings effectively stopped
algae, tube worms and other creatures from latching on.
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A. Maytenus boaria 'Green Showers' (Mayten) - full view. Full
view
Interesting work. Of course there are certainly other ways to
improve the energy efficiency of cargo ships, such as through
the use of simple, good energy-efficient design, or through the
use of rather more exotic seeming solutions, such as the those
utilized by the Vindskip.
Or you could also always largely circumvent the issue of
shipping fuel costs/pollution simply by tapping the power of the
wind, or of the sun. While it’s easy to scoff at the notion of
returning to wind-driven cargo shipping, the reality is that it
is extremely energy efficient, and not even necessarily slower.
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The new research was detailed in a paper just published in the
ACS journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
Read more at
HTML http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/02/barnacle-repellant-paint-developed-reduce-shipping-costs/#XzZKOLlPvc9qmKvv.99
#Post#: 1069--------------------------------------------------
Back to using biomaterials like hemp so that we have a future as
a species.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: May 6, 2014, 12:57 pm
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Hemp is having its moment. Meet the miracle plant’s biggest
champion
By Amber Cortes
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We’ve heard about the promise of hemp before: Its fibers are
stronger than steel. Its seeds make for antioxidant-loaded
superfood for you and your chickens. It can compete with fossil
fuel as a viable alternative energy source. But ever since the
Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the U.S. has skunked hemp’s
potential. >:(
Now, Mary Jane’s younger cousin ;D is having a moment. Included
in the recent farm bill is an amendment that allows research of
the plant at colleges and universities. And more states have
taken up the charge recently. Hawaii just passed an industrial
hemp bill for research purposes. Both New York and Illinois are
introducing similar legislation, and Missouri just passed a bill
(now heading to the governor’s desk) allowing hemp extract to be
used to treat epileptic seizures. And of the two states where
cannabis is legalized, it’s already growing in Colorado.
Enter Doug Fine, author of the new book Hemp Bound and one of
the miracle plant’s biggest cheerleaders. He’s met hemp farmers
and researchers, checked out a hemp house in Canada, and even
rode in a hemp-powered limo, all to prove that the plant is the
next big thing for a sustainable future. He sat down with Grist
to talk about why he believes hemp holds the key to “a food and
energy revolution” that will also become a vital part of climate
change mitigation.
Q. It seems like a very promising time for hemp! Now that
research is allowed, what hemp possibilities are you most
excited about?
A. It’s all coming together so rapidly. It’s such a magical
time. When I went to research Hemp Bound I had no idea that the
farm bill was going to include a hemp provision. I just knew
that hemp was really important for the future of energy. That’s
what I think is the most exciting thing about hemp – its
potential for energy, its massive biomass that can be used to
replace fossil fuels. While researching the book I found some
very forward-thinking, sustainable farmers who said the
cellulose stalks of hemp have big energy potential. So I wanted
to connect the dots and see if there really was potential for
hemp as a fossil fuel application. And it turns out there is.
Q. How does hemp work as an alternative energy source? And is it
truly a feasible replacement for fossil fuels?
A. Individual farms can produce energy from their biomass waste
and sell it to their regional grid. There are basically small
power plants that use biomass, and the carbon exchange is all on
the sustainability side of the ledger. The town of Feldheim in
Germany turned one of Europe’s highest unemployment rates into
zero unemployment by building a regional utility that put people
to work collecting and using their farm waste in this kind of
process. We can do this with hemp.
Santa Fe, N.M., actually had a similar plan for their whole
utility system. It was scalable in size, affordable, carbon
friendly, and community-owned, and the only reason it didn’t
happen is that fracking kind of took the wind out of the sails
of this project. So there are plans in place about how to do
this in the U.S. But it’s not like old-school utilities are
going to be happy to just lay down and say, “Sure, hemp farmers
and communities, create your own utilities, bye, thanks, it was
nice serving you.”
Q. You claim that hemp can potentially bring in “even more
taxable revenue into the economy than its smokable relative.”
How would that work?
A. Hemp-minded communities can do three things: invest in
profitable seed oil presses, create textiles or fiber of some
kind from it, and use products like hempcrete for building – and
still have this biomass left over, this cellulose that we can
use to create regional energy grids out of hemp.
The element that’s still coming together that we couldn’t really
have predicted are these incredibly high prices that Canadian
farmers are getting for their hemp-seed oil. They are making
$300 per acre on it, 10 times what they make on GMO corn. And
that is why hemp is going to end up being planted here. The
demand curve for hemp as a super food is just happening now.
Mainstream society is realizing how beneficial this is.
Q. So now that hemp is going mainstream, what would stop the
cotton, synthetics, and paper industries from trying to oppose
it?
A. I think it’s too late to fight it. The bipartisan cooperation
on this issue almost makes you understand why the Rastafarians
call the cannabis plant the “healing of the nation.” It’s
getting unbelievably strange bedfellows together. There are
Kentucky Republicans on the horn with the DEA saying let our
farmers plant this, unbelievable stuff. The concern that some
people have is not so much opposition from Big Ag but co-option.
As long as there’s non-GMO hemp, I’m fine with there being
millions of acres of hemp cultivated by everyone.
Q. You also mention in your book that hemp has some very
practical uses for farmers. Can you talk about some of them?
A. An old-timer Nebraska rancher lady told me that her daddy
used to plant hemp along the irrigation ditches in the spring.
No matter how much flooding there was, it built this incredible
root system that culled water and was erosion control and flood
control. And then of course it’s also a high-protein snack for
the cows and the fowl.
Hemp also filters toxins; it’s been used around Chernobyl to
release radiation from the soil. The water demands are
relatively low: One of Colorado’s first commercial hemp farmers,
a very conservative farmer in Eastern Colorado struggling with
drought and monoculture-damaged soil, found that planting hemp
is using half the water than the previous wheat crop was.
Q. What about some industrial uses of hemp?
A. I saw an entire body of a tractor made out of a bio-composite
of hemp fiber. It’s stronger than petroleum-based plastic and
lighter, not to mention easily replicable – all the dangers and
the horrors of plastic potentially removed.
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I
mean, you know, thanks petroleum, it was a great century, ;)
you guys made a lot of things happen with plastics. But now
we’re going to take what we know and go back to using
biomaterials like hemp so that we have a future as a species.
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Amber Cortes is a Grist fellow, radio producer, and a digital
media grad student at the University of Washington . Follow her
on Twitter.
HTML http://grist.org/business-technology/hemp-wonderplant/
#Post#: 1087--------------------------------------------------
Re: Plant Based Products for a Sustainable civilization
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: May 9, 2014, 11:37 pm
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Hempcrete startup kickstarts a revolution in sustainable green
building in US
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Hempcrete Could Change The Way We Build Everything
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#Post#: 1404--------------------------------------------------
Re: Plant Based Products for a Sustainable civilization
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: June 17, 2014, 12:54 pm
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The US South’s New Clean Energy Hub
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Sam Boykin, June 17, 2014
While Charlotte, N.C., is perhaps best known as a financial
center, with big institutions like Bank of America and Wells
Fargo dominating the skyline, the area is also a major energy
hub. The region is home to more than 260 companies and nearly
28,000 workers that are tied directly to the energy sector,
including Charlotte-based Duke Energy. Moreover, the region is
developing a growing number of clean energy initiatives, and the
state has implemented legislature that requires investor-owned
utilities to generate 12.5 percent of their retail sales from
renewable energy by 2021.
That’s the message that the Charlotte Regional Partnership
(CRP), a nonprofit economic development organization, brings
with it on mission trips, including one earlier this year to
Tokyo. In its efforts to tap into Japan’s growing clean energy
industry, the CRP highlighted several local programs during a
presentation at the U.S. Embassy.
One such program is the Catawba County Regional EcoComplex and
Resource Recovery Facility. The 805-acre site has multiple
components that are designed to convert byproducts and waste
materials into renewable sources of energy, which are then fed
to the power grid.
About 500 tons of county waste is trucked daily into the
facility’s landfill. The garbage is burned inside internal
combustible engines, which turn three 1-MW generators. This
electricity is then sold to the power company, and the profits
are used to fund other EcoComplex projects.
This includes the Biodiesel Research Facility, which harnesses
heat emitted from the landfill generators. The heat breaks down
seeds from locally grown feedstock crops like sunflowers and
canola, converting them to biodiesel. The facility produces
about 100,000 gallons of biodiesel a year, which is used in
county vehicles such as dump trucks, bulldozers and excavators.
Barry Edwards, director of Catawba County’s Utilities and
Engineering, says the ultimate goal is to recover all useable
products and by-products from local private and public partners
and use these waste products either as a source of energy or as
a raw material for the production of products such as pallets or
lumber. “The EcoComplex makes one industry’s output stream
another industry’s input stream,” Edwards says. “It brings to
life the old saying that ‘one man’s trash is another man’s
treasure.’"
While the EcoComplex strives to convert waste materials into
renewable energy sources, the nonprofit Envision Charlotte has
implemented a program designed to reduce energy usage in the
city’s urban core.
Amy Aussieker, Envision Charlotte’s executive director, explains
that Smart Energy Now is a first-of-its-kind public-private
initiative that uses technology to change the way people think
about and use energy. The project, which is a collaborative
effort between Charlotte Center City Partners, the city, county,
Duke Energy, and some of the largest companies in uptown
Charlotte, was announced during the Clinton initiative in Oct.
2010. About a year later special interactive kiosks and monitors
were installed in 61 participating uptown buildings — totaling
about 21 million square feet — that provide real-time data and
graphic displays about each building’s energy consumption. “You
can’t manage what you can’t measure,” says Aussieker.
The kiosks, which are sort of like giant iPads, also provide
simple changes people can make to conserve energy, such as using
more natural daylight in the office, setting back the thermostat
when a building is unoccupied, and regularly maintaining a
building’s equipment to ensure it is functioning efficiently.
Envision Charlotte announced in May its project reduced the use
of electricity by 8.4 percent over its first three years. The
hope is that the program will spur sustainable behaviors in
order to reduce energy consumption by 20 percent over five years
at an estimated savings of $16 million.
E4 Carolinas is another clean energy initiative. A consortium of
energy and engineering firms, government agencies, economic
development groups and educators created E4 in response to the
region’s growing energy consumption. The nonprofit’s mission is
to nurture workforce development and technology innovations in
order to foster efficient and environmentally sensitive energy
clusters.
The collaborative effort includes a variety of companies,
including Charlotte-based Calor Energy Consulting, which helps
everyone from property developers to nonprofits select the best
renewable energy options. Through a technical analysis, Calor
determines if it’s economically feasible for a company to
install a system, such as solar and wind. If so, it also assists
clients with issues like seeking tax and equity investors as
well as selecting the best EPC (Engineering, Procurement,
Construction) for the project.
The consultant has spearheaded many projects, such as helping
Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South obtain a key grant
from Duke Energy—using key metrics like energy use, recycling
programs and employee commuting—to upgrade its lighting and HVAC
to meet sustainability goals. The changes have reduced the
history museum’s consumption of power and gas by as much as 30
percent annually. The consultant also helped create an
innovative financing plan to attract private investment in order
to install a 10 KW PV solar system on the roof of Friendship
Trays. The project helped the “meals-on-wheels” program save on
utility bills and establish cash flow though renewable energy
credit sales and tax credits.
Another E4 Carolina partner, 02energies, develops large-scale,
ground-mounted solar power plants in the Southeast, creating
work and educational opportunities while enhancing
sustainability. Some notable projects include Avery Solar, in
which a 1 megawatt, six-acre solar farm was built at Henderson
Farms, a Christmas tree farm in North Carolina. Each year, the
solar farm generates 1,161 MWh of electricity during times of
peak demand. The company also installed a 1.2-MW solar power
plant at Mount Airy, the childhood home of actor Andy Griffith
and a popular tourist attraction. The six-acre site generates
electricity into the Duke Energy grid and provides power to
hundreds of homes and small businesses.
The Charlotte region is one of the fastest-growing metro areas
in the country. Its population increased 1.8 percent, climbing
to 2.3 million, between July 2012 and July 2013. Moreover, the
region is expected to see an influx of more than 1.8 million
people over the next 40 years — increasing the current
population by more than half. This makes CRP’s economic
development efforts and initiatives like EcoComplex, Envision
Charlotte and E4 Carolinas all the more important as a way to
both safeguard the environment and strengthen the region’s
position in the global marketplace.
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#Post#: 1427--------------------------------------------------
Does Recycling Paper Save Energy?
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: June 20, 2014, 10:54 pm
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Does Recycling Paper Save Energy?
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Recycling paper saves energy because it uses about 65% less
energy
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/>than it would take to process virgin wood pulp and produce new
paper, even after accounting for the energy used to sort and
process recycled paper. When paper is recycled, its fibers
become weakened, and virgin wood pulp must be added to
strengthen it. Recycled paper can be used as many as six times,
so it saves on the amount of virgin wood pulp that must be
processed. Recycled paper production also saves 80% on water and
generates about 95% less air pollution.
More about recycling:
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•Recycling cardboard saves about 25% of the energy it would
require to create new cardboard. ;D
•The amount of energy saved from recycling one aluminum can
could power a television for three hours ::), because
processing recycled aluminum takes just 5% of the energy that it
takes to produce new aluminum.
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•Producing recycled glass decreases pollution by 50% and uses
50% less energy than producing new glass.
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#Post#: 1449--------------------------------------------------
Re: Plant Based Products for a Sustainable civilization
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: June 24, 2014, 1:52 pm
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The Ugly Duckling: Can Duckweed Find Its Way to Bioenergy
Commercialization?
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Bruce Dorminey, Correspondent
June 23, 2014
Greater Duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) — one of the smallest and
simplest freshwater plants known — generally gets a bad rap.
That’s because the millimeter-sized floating plant thrives on
the worst sort of livestock and human wastewater, basically
garden-variety sewage. In fact, in the South Pacific, New
Zealand and Australia, it’s frequently used to clean such
wastewater.
For years, researchers have been trying to commercialize
duckweed as a viable source of bioenergy for the production of
ethanol, biodiesel, natural gas and steam-generated electricity.
But even now, there’s little agreement on whether duckweed is
best suited as a natural option for turning so-called municipal
graywater into something clean enough to drink from the tap, or
as a renewable biomass. In pelletized form, it can also be used
to feed tilapia, shrimp or poultry, and is even co-fired with
coal.
Duckweed to bioenergy conversion may ultimately work best when
done in tandem with some sort of ongoing wastewater cleanup.
The plant itself is composed of only a single kidney-shaped
leaf, connected to the water on, which it floats by only a few
thin underwater roots. However, duckweed advocates point to the
fact that, in warm climates, it can basically grow anywhere and
at all altitudes.
A shallow big pond full of effluent from secondary treatment is
just like liquid duckweed fertilizer, says Anne Marie Stomp, a
retired North Carolina State University plant molecular
biologist.
“You dump duckweed on top and every three days you take half of
it away and the rest keeps growing,” says Stomp.
Multi-use Resource
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Duckweed also has an advantage over algae biomass;/[b] it is
large enough that it can be easily separated from water, it is
very easy to air dry and, like hay, is also easy to store.
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It may soon become more prevalent in the U.S. if the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) places more stringent
requirements on wastewater discharge permits, and small towns
could be forced to comply with tertiary wastewater treatment
options.
“Small towns could be forced to put in $100 million chemical
tertiary treatment plants which they can’t afford,” said Stomp.
[b]“However, duckweed is fantastically good at tertiary
wastewater treatment.”
Duckweed bio-engineering could also make it even more attractive
as a bioenenergy feedstock.
A paper published earlier this year in the journal Nature
Communications provides new and comprehensive details of the
duckweed’s genome.
“If used for ethanol or electricity, any improvement in its BTU
[output] would require that you improve the carbon allocation of
the organism,” said Joachim Messing, Director of the Waksman
Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Messing, the paper’s senior author, says that, it requires
knowing the duckweed’s gene content.
“We can bio-engineer the organism so that it has a better carbon
output — in some form of carbon, either sugar, protein or oil —
to potentially make kerosene, gasoline or diesel,” said Messing.
Commercial Applications
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Duckweed, however, is already capable of doubling its population
in as little as 48 hours, a fact that hasn’t eluded police
officer Sam Licciardello, CEO of Biomass Alternative Power in
Mantua Township, New Jersey. [size=12pt]He is heading up a
group that is investing $40 to $60 million to use duckweed to
generate both electricity and natural gas by late 2015[/size]
“I will be growing duckweed in a 15-acre, gutter-connected
greenhouse site,” said Licciardello. “It will accumulate steam
from the gasifiers that will run two turbines which will create
electricity and supply the grid with 12 MW. While making steam,
it will also create natural gas from the duckweed which will be
stored, then tested processed and released in a metered [grid]
system.”
But Stomp remains skeptical.
“No one wants to fund research to figure out a high-value
product from duckweed because there is no mass source or
cropping system for the plant,” said Stomp. “So, nothing but
futile attempts at commercialization get started, usually by
people who are passionate but have limited business sense.”
Yet Licciardello couldn’t disagree more. ;D
Biogas Potential
For his own operation, Licciardello explains that the duckweed
will be automatically harvested from six separate greenhouse
sections before being screened and dried in a process that
removes 75 percent of its water. From there, it will move into
a patented convection system that will use a furnace-like closed
loop process to heat and burn the duckweed to create both
natural gas and steam.
Duckweed is dried down to 25 percent moisture before being put
into three rows of 11 gasifiers that are fired up to 1,600
degrees Fahrenheit. The gasifiers will be automatically fed
with duckweed. The steam created from the process will travel
back to the turbines.
Licciardello says a component inside the gasifiers actually
separates the natural gas from the steam. The natural gas
component is then pumped into a holding tank before being fed
into the natural gas grid.
Steam from the process will be fed into one of the two
Siemens-built turbines at 12 MW of capacity. Biomass
Alternative Power plans on selling its electricity to Florida’s
NextEra Energy. The New Jersey start-up’s natural gas is to be
purchased by British Petroleum (BP) for possible transport to
California via cross-country pipeline.
When up and running, Licciardello says Biomass Alternative Power
will become the only commercial duckweed-to-bioenergy conversion
operator in North America.
“The production of ethanol and biogas from duckweed still cannot
compete against petroleum products (gasoline and natural gas)
economically,” said Jay Cheng, an agricultural and biological
engineer at North Carolina State University.
It’s a view again not shared by Licciardello, however, who
claims that his own start-up’s natural gas production from
duckweed can already easily compete with natural gas garnered
via fracking.
Once up to speed, Biomass Alternative Power will process about a
million sq. ft. of duckweed per day says Licciardello. But he
remains undecided about whether his greenhouse lagoons will be
filled with wastewater or whether the company will fertilize
their ponds with phosphorous, nitrogen and potash.
However, revenue streams from processing wastewater treatment
for counties and municipalities could arguably aid fledgling
duckweed bioenergy start-ups’ bottom lines.
Duckweed in Argentina
There may even be room for more socially-conscious entities,
such as Argentina’s Mamagrande, a Buenos Aires-based biotech
concern that has a stated goal of “regenerating ecosystems” by
using duckweed to cleanup wastewater. It may also eventually
ferment the duckweed’s starch into lactic acid to manufacture
biodegradable plastic and/or bioethanol.
Funded with only several hundred thousand dollars, Mamagrande
currently is working with a 4 hectare (9.88 acre) pilot plant in
the small Argentinean town of Totoras.
Eduardo Mercovich, one of Mamagrande’s co-founders, says the
initial cost of the duckweed needed to get such projects going
is almost negligible. That’s in part because, as he notes,
usually within a month’s time, the plant can grow to cover a
hectare (2.47 acres) of a lagoon’s surface area.
“In our pilot plant,” said Mercovich, “we should have ten fresh
wet tons of duckweed per day; or about a quarter ton of starch
per day; half of which would produce 100 liters of ethanol
daily.”
Mercovich says that once Mamagrande’s duckweed process is proven
in Argentina, its technology will be made publicly available.
He notes that in both Brazil and Argentina, ethanol is currently
made from either corn or sugar cane. But unlike cane or corn,
as Mercovich points out, duckweed needs less energy to process.
Bioengineering Starch for Ethanol
If future duckweed bioenergy entrepreneurs can find some sort of
revenue-generating synchronicity with global municipalities
interested in cleaning up wastewater — either to be reused as
graywater for agricultural irrigation or for drinking water —
then duckweed may find a viable bioenergy conversion niche. And
as Stomp points out, it also compares favorably with corn, as it
is likely easier to isolate starch from duckweed.
After over 15 years of duckweed research in the laboratory,
Stomp explains that she and Cheng proved that once loaded into a
fermentation vessel, more than 95 percent of its starch could be
converted into ethanol.
“By growing duckweed on wastewater from hog production,” said
Stomp, “we harvested duckweed biomass at the rate of 20 grams of
dry weight per sq. meter a day, which is equivalent to 54,000 kg
of dry weight on 2.5 acres a year.”
Stomp notes that if this 54,000 kg of dry weight duckweed were
only 50 percent starch then it would yield something like 27,000
kg of starch for every 2.5 acres, or roughly four times the
starch that could be expected from 2.5 acres of corn.
Stomp, however, says that by using enzymatic degradation of corn
stover, the traditionally unused portion of a corn plant for
ethanol conversion itself, then that “drastically” increases dry
weight biomass that can harvested from an acre of corn.
But with bioengineering, duckweed would likely still have an
edge on corn.
“You could probably trick this plant into accumulating starch to
as much as 75 percent; [roughly] the same starch percentage as
corn,” said Stomp. [b]*
[/b]
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* Agelbert NOTE: Not mentioned is the fact that it takes MUCH
longer to get that "high percentage of starch" in corn than the
40% or so in Duckweed. Also, ALL of the duckweed has that starch
content whereas corn only has it in the seed with LOTS of wasted
energy (from a starch production standpoint) used to make the
rest of the plant with a huge stalk and root system. Duckweed is
ALL usable product. Duckweed has much less lignin content that
corn. Lignin is the THE biggest chemical bugaboo obstacle
because it is expensive to rid the feed stock of it in
preparation for making biofuel. So yeah, duckweed beats the
living daylights out of corn and even switchgrass, never mind
that corn and switchgrass have short growing seasons and
Duckweed can be grown ALL YEAR.
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-141113185047.png<br
/>
HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i_2h2CoQII&feature=player_embedded<br
/>
My comment posted on the article web site:
A. G. Gelbert
June 24, 2014
Great Article! I just want to add the tiniest flowering plant
known to science (Lemna minor - Duckweed), also has great
promise as a source of nutrition and bioremediation of the
environment at the same time.
This wonder plant grows almost everywhere on earth, can be
fertilized with pig feces, thereby avoiding chemical fertilizers
and nitrogen waste farm runoff, grows in shallow ponds with no
need of continual water resupply once the initial pond is set
up, does not replace crop land because ponds can be placed over
non arable land all over the world to help sequester carbon, can
be used as feed for animal and nutrient supplements for humans
to prevent malnutrition, have even been used as environmental
markers to detect heavy metal pollutants in water and, last but
not least, is a known natural water purifier (lower the fecal
coliform count to acceptable levels).
The Chinese have actually proposed Duckweed refineries because,
as long as crude oil costs more that $80 a barrel, biofuel
hydrocarbons form the Duckweed carbohydrates are profitable.
Duckweed, unlike many cellulose biofuel plant sources is
extremely low in lignin . This makes the extraction process far
simpler, cheaper and more environmentally friendly that making
biofuel out corn (a horrible choice only a fossil fuel lover
could like) or even sugar can, which is eight times more
efficient as a biofuel source than corn. Even switchgrass
varieties have more lignin than Duckweed.
I am firmly convinced this humble plant is part of a human
future in a viable biosphere. I have video and research data as
well as links below.
Duckweed, The Little Green Plant that Could.
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/renewables/plant-based-products-for-transprtation-and-building-materials/msg1012/#msg1012<br
/>
We need to transition to 100% renewable Energy sources. Duckweed
is part of the answer to how we can accomplish this herculean
task quickly.
If you agree, please sign this petition to President Obama:
Demand Liberty From Fossil Fuels Through 100% Renewable Energy
WWII Style Effort
Here's a link to the petition:
HTML http://www.care2.com/go/z/e/Ai3Tb<br
/>
We did it with the Liberty Ship massive building effort in WWII;
we can do it again with Renewable energy technology and
infrastructure.
Thank you
Anthony G. Gelbert
Green Leaf Star American in the Service of Future Generations
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/index.php
#Post#: 1472--------------------------------------------------
Re: Plant Based Products for a Sustainable civilization
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: June 30, 2014, 5:33 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML http://s3.amazonaws.com/floridatrend/10398/carinata-seeds.jpg
Ethiopian mustard, Abyssinian mustard.
Latin Name: Brassica carinata.
Plant Family: Brassicaceae
HTML http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/CropOp/images/crop_images/industrial/oil_crops/car/carf3_zoom.jpg
Pass the Mustard:
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-141113185850.gif<br
/>Why Carinata is Taking Root as Biofuel
HTML http://www.rdmag.com/sites/rdmag.com/files/Agrisoma-Nurseryx250.jpg
HTML http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/obj/images/irap-pari/success-reussite/2013-2013/agrisoma3.jpg
HTML http://energy.techno-science.ca/img/content/lte/biofuel.bmp
HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/reading.gif
HTML http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/06/pass-the-mustard-why-carinata-is-taking-root-as-biofuel#comment-133006
#Post#: 1687--------------------------------------------------
Green Crude
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: August 12, 2014, 1:31 am
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVua2qls5P8&feature=player_embedded
Green Crude from Sapphire Energy
#Post#: 1940--------------------------------------------------
Re: Plant Based Products for a Sustainable civilization
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: September 28, 2014, 2:58 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-280914153931.jpeg
This is the Urbee 2 (Google it :emthup: :icon_mrgreen:), a car
made out of parts created by a 3D printer. The developers hope
to have it on the road by 2015, and will attempt to drive it
across the country using just 10 gallons of gas.
HTML http://www.freesmileys.org/emoticons/tuzki-bunnys/tuzki-bunny-emoticon-022.gif
Agelbert NOTE: As long as the resin is a plant based plastic
(hello HEMP! :icon_mrgreen:), this process will save a lot of
energy in manufacturing, transport to point of sale AND use of
the vehicle due it's extremely low weight. And just as a whale
is every bit as efficient as a dolphin, this shape can be put to
use in large vehicles too! It's not just about some tiny
runabout!
#Post#: 4714--------------------------------------------------
Re: Plant Based Products for a Sustainable civilization
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 17, 2016, 7:29 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[center]United Airlines launches first regularly scheduled
sustainable biofuel flights ;D[/center]
HTML http://www.treehugger.com/aviation/united-airlines-launches-first-regularly-scheduled-sustainable-biofuel-flights.html
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