Science News Review » Biofuels

Forest Management vs. Carbon Sequestration

Aileen — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:42:53 +0000

If you or someone you know has chosen to live in or surrounded by forest – or just maintains a vacation cabin in such a setting – you are probably aware of the threat that wildfires present to property in those settings. And as the population has spread in many states out into more forested regions, many states and the federal government have undertaken forest fire prevention efforts to lessen the impact of such fires.

In the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere plans for fire prevention have included the idea of fuel reduction. This means thinning the forests and eliminating much of the understory growth. A recent study from Oregon State University sought to quantify the carbon sequestration and CO2 impacts of such a plan, and how these things affect global climate change.

Forest Fire Prevention Efforts Could Lessen Carbon Sequestration, Add to Global Warming details the issues and the report. The report’s authors came to a somewhat surprising conclusion:

“If fuel reduction treatments are effective in reducing fire severities in the western hamlock, Douglas-fir forests of the west Cascades and the western hemlock, Sitka spruce forests of the Coast Range, it will come at the cost of long-term carbon storage, even if harvested material are used as biofuels.”

The idea of using the plants and trees removed from the forest to lessen fire severity as raw material for biofuels was previously thought to offset the carbon sequestration costs of taking those trees. But it turns out that the production of biofuels isn’t very fossil fuel efficient and that the amount of energy returned doesn’t add up to the amount of energy used.

The kind of material at issue that would be harvested from the forests doesn’t produce good biodiesel fuel, which is better produced from oil-crops and such. Woody trees and shrubs are best used to make ethanol, but that process isn’t yet efficient enough to offset itself.

Another recent OSU study concluded that if the old forests of the Pacific Northwest were left alone or managed exclusively to promote carbon sequestration, they could double the amount of sequestration in many areas, even triple it in some other areas.

Bottom line then appears to be that if you build your house or vacation cabin in the old growth forests of the PNW, you shouldn’t expect to have the state or feds manage that forest so your property isn’t at risk from forest fires. Still, to many people the time spent in such abundant natural surroundings is worth the risk.

Biofuels: Something Even Better Than Corn or Switchgrass

Aileen — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:06:35 +0000

University of Illinois crop sciences researchers released results of the largest-ever field trial of its kind in the US for growing a giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus, reporting that this crop could significantly reduce the acreage necessary to meet government biofuels production goals.

Rather than re-dedicating a full 25% of US cropland to biofuels – something that would put a serious dent in food production and increase the price of everything grown – Miscanthus would require re-dedication of just 9.3% of current agricultural acreage. The findings were reported in the August issue of the journal Global Change Biology.

Researchers were judging raw amount of biomass generated each year from this perennial (meaning it regrows itself every season from roots without reseeding), and you can see from the accompanying photo that this grass takes up some vertical room. Even better, Miscanthus requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs than corn, which is a consideration for water quality and soil fertility. Moreover, in many parts of the country farmers could reap two or more ‘crops’ a year (by mowing, as with hay). Highest productivity, in fact, came from the south in the poorest of agricultural soils. Thus Miscanthus may be a very good crop for marginal land and land not even used for crop production at present, which would lower its demand on food producing cropland further.

Miscanthus also serves as a ‘carbon sink’, accumulating and binding carbon in the soil at greater efficiency than any annual crops, such as the great biomass annual industrial hemp. Which is also a good biomass crop for fuels, fiber, oil and land conservation.

Perhaps some combination of alternatives may yet allow independence from fossil fuels, and that comes with improvements in global warming, general civilizational peace and prosperity, etc. If we were to plan ways to power our homes, churches, community buildings and businesses while at the same time developing biofuels for transportation and shipping, we might find the world economy and standards of living rising quickly instead of falling fast.

It would seem that we do still have some useful scientific creativity and inventiveness to offer the world in these trying times. All we need to do now is see to it that Big Oil doesn’t shove it all under the rug, and that we get the necessary government investments in these technologies.

Links:

Giant Grass Miscanthus Can Meet US Biofuels Goal Using Less Land
Hemp: Our Original Industrial Crop
MIT Scientist Offers Solar Revolution

Fill ‘er Up!

Aileen — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:07:23 +0000

…with Bug Juice, please.

When I started college in the late 1960s in Oklahoma, I could buy gas for my Volkswagon Bug for 19.9¢ a gallon. That’s 5 gallons for a dollar, enough to drive home to visit the folks, drive around town to see friends, and get back to college without having to stop at a gas station. This past weekend I drove our little pickup to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to see an old Navy buddy, a round trip equivalent to that past Oklahoma weekend trek. Gas for the journey cost us right around $50. A dollar’s worth won’t get me to the grocery store and back any more, and it doesn’t look like the price is ever going to come down.

The going price per barrel of petroleum is pushing $150 hard and will probably go over $200 before the end of the year. Diesel fuel is a dollar more expensive than gasoline, and the price of everything grown on a farm and transported by ship, train or truck must go up accordingly.

The good news – or, at least the hopeful news is that progress is being made in deciding what replacement fuels we should be developing. Most people are skeptical of corn-based ethanol and the diversion of food crops as well as crop land to biofuels. And while new techniques can make biofuels from native vegetation like switchgrass or even algae, the fact is that plants aren’t very efficient at converting solar energy into the biomass required.

Biotech researchers are now turning to engineered microorganisms as both helpers in turning biomass into fuels and as fuel themselves – photosynthetic bacteria that can capture sunlight energy 100 times more efficiently than plants – that can be grown in massive amounts without competing for cropland.

It does appear that the time has finally come when human civilization must change its ways, the only questions being how much it’s going to hurt regular people and which nations and/or multinational corporations will corner the markets. Perhaps biotechnology can be put to good use creating new fuel sources instead of turning staple foods into pesticides. That would be a positive change of focus, help get the tarnish of public resistance off the biotech bus, and maybe even save the planet.

But you and I will probably be paying at least $5 a gallon to fill our tanks, no matter what kind of fuels are developed. Just something we’ll have to get used to.

Links:

New Source for Biofuels Discovered
Harnessing Microbes to Meet Future Energy Needs
Are microbes the answer to the energy crisis?

The ‘08 Farm Bill and Improving America’s Diet

Aileen — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:06:33 +0000

The 2007 Farm Bill – now the 2008 Farm Bill, was passed by both chambers of Congress, vetoed by President Bush, then the veto was overridden by both houses and is now the ‘Law of the Land’. Politically, the bill isn’t perfect, there is still too much pork and payments to rich agribusiness concerns for their poor farming practices, and not enough clarifying guidelines for biofuels production and organic farming.

But it’s a lot better than no bill at all, which would have kept the last support bill in place for the foreseeable future. The new bill has incentives to clean up residue discharges in important watersheds, and supports for best practices in crop rotations, cover crops and low-chemical input farming. It’s still strong on commodity production (corn, wheat, rice), but does put some real support into farmer’s market promotions and expansion of organic markets. It does somewhat limit subsidies to near-millionaire commodity farmers, requires more fresh fruit and vegetables to be available in schools, increases food stamp benefits as tied to the price of food, allots priority funding to research into the bee die-off situation, and supports rural enterprise and microenterprise investments.

Research into the “typical American diet” and its relationship to serious health issues and obesity informs us that Americans eat way too much junk and not nearly enough healthy food. Which, in a country that rations health care by income level and allows insurance companies to exclude people who actually need health care, would seem to be an important issue to address with education and real food availability in public institutions such as schools.

In 2005 the University of Michigan’s Integrative Medicine Clinical Services published a new food pyramid based on “healing” foods. Which emphasized fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables over grains, legumes (beans) and the more fatty foods at the top. The Agricultural Research Service published this past weekend a study that showed alkaline-producing fresh fruits and vegetables help preserve muscle mass in older men and women.

And researchers from USDA’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory have released findings that demonstrate organic farming methods including crop rotation complexity can offer a 30% greater yield than simple corn-soybean rotations.

As demand for organic meat, milk and basic commodities rises about 20% per year in this country, improvements in the technology of organic production will serve to increase availability. It has long been known that reduced use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers (most with highly questionable ‘inert ingredients’ such as toxic waste from industry) will also improve water quality and the general fertility of our ‘breadbasket’ agricultural base land. It is hoped that the new farm bill, by emphasizing changes that need to be made in these directions, will speed America’s switch to sustainable practices and improve citizen’s health significantly.

Global Warming, Biodiversity and Biofuels

Aileen — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:27:55 +0000

The dramatic breakup of the northern ice sheet has tended to confirm global warming, and there are other indications that things are worse than we thought. Turns out that North America’s Northernmost Lake is showing signs of climate change too.

An international research team reports that a core sample of lake bed sediment indicates a drastic change in algae and diatom concentrations in the lake over the last 200 years, but not in the 8,000 years prior – when the lake was permanently frozen. This tends to support the hypothesis that human industrialization has contributed to the warming.

Even if we stopped releasing greenhouse gases today we’d still have to deal with the effects of climate change, and this has been a concern for important ecosystems’ stability. Good news is that researchers have discovered Forests of Endangered Tropical Kelp surviving just fine in the deep waters off the Galapagos Islands.

According to the researchers, the discovery demonstrates a surprising resilience for tropical marine systems in response to climate change. Using a computer model designed to predict where kelp forests might survive despite warming waters, student divers explored the tropical reefs where the computer had predicted likely kelp habitat. They found the forests growing at depths from 40 to 200 feet below the surface, in the cool water layer. Their find may get this species of kelp removed from the World Conservation Union’s database of threatened species.

Meanwhile, in our struggle to develop alternatives to fossil fuels that contribute to greenhouse gases, the National Research Council has reported a serious effect of increased ethanol production from corn that may lead to changing policies on what biofuels we as a nation decide to develop.

Increase in Ethanol Production from Corn Could Harm Water Quality outlines how, if projected increases in corn production for conversion to ethanol occur, water quality could be significantly harmed. This has to do with agricultural practices and expansion of farmland for growing fuel crops, particularly into arid and semi-arid regions of the country.

Irrigation could divert water resources for drinking, industry and hydropower, fish habitat and recreation. In dry regions corn typically requires more water than soybeans or cotton. Native grasses and switchgrass are possible alternative choices for ethanol production that do not require massive irrigation or intense chemical additives, or new crops could be bioengineered that are more water efficient.

It’s good to see the NRC evaluating the relative wisdom of any dramatic change in agriculture to accommodate biofuels production, as factory farming practices already pose a significant threat to public health by pollution of land and water, and agriculture accounts for a hefty chunk of our fossil fuels use all by itself. But ethanol may not be the best choice anyway, if future cars used a different kind of engine. It turns out that just such engines are under development.

Focusing on biodiesel instead of ethanol may be a better policy. Trucks, trains, agricultural machinery and ships already run on petro-diesel, and could switch to 20-80 biodiesel blends immediately without altering the existing engines. New engines can be run on 80-20 biodiesel mixtures, thereby cutting the petroleum content by an additional 60%. GM could deploy its new passenger diesel engine for at least half its new cars and light trucks as soon as nationwide biodiesel distribution allows and the factories can be re-tooled. People would surely buy them, if the popularity of hybrids is any indication.

Production of biodiesel is more energy efficient and less polluting all the way down the line than production of ethanol, though new technologies are being developed to make ethanol production more efficient (and from more easily grown crops). Bioengineered oil crops that will grow in semi-arid climates could be deployed on land not suitable for growing food crops without intensive additions and irrigation, and the machinery that plants and harvests them can run on biodiesel. Researchers are also looking at algae as a source of oil for biodiesel.

As we plan for the future and attempt to wean ourselves from our addiction to fossil fuels, it helps to remember that Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable oil in the first place, though petroleum magnates in the early years of the 20th century ensured that only petroleum-based fuel would be used. 100 years later there is hope that his dream may finally come to fruition.

Little Hoods, Little Goods, Little Doo-Dads from the Woods…

Aileen — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:51:59 +0000

(With apologies to Zappa/Beefheart and Poofter’s Froth Wyoming)

In the science news this week reports run the gambit of science and technology, including biofuels, nanotechnology, genes and genomes, evolution, and bizarre animal behavior.

Nanotechnology

Single-Atom Data Storage, Single-Molecule Switching
In the quest for ever smaller, ever more useful computers and other devices, IBM reported this week that its researchers have made significant progress in understanding the magnetic properties of atoms, which opens the door to computational and data storage devices that will have practical applications even beyond current AI dreams of quantum computers.

The researchers unveiled the first single-molecule switch, which operates flawlessly and does not disrupt the molecule’s outer frame. They used IBM’s scanning tunneling microscope [STM] to manipulate single iron atoms, arranging them with precision on a prepared copper surface. Two papers on the subject have been published in the Sept. 5 issue of the journal Science.

Nanotech Biology

Blending DNA and Nanotechnology
DNA – it’s not just a template for life anymore. It was reported this week that researchers at a John Wiley & Sons, Inc., a corporate nanotech laboratory, have developed a method of using DNA molecules as pattern templates for high-aspect ratio trenches for nanochannels and nanowire deposition for nanocircuitry and other nanofabrications.

They call it “DNA shadow nanolithography” and takes us yet another step farther into the brave new nanoworld.

Genetics, DNA

Genetic Trigger for the Cambrian Explosion?
A Croatian research team reported that a novel methodology they developed for approaching evolutionary studies has allowed them to shed light on issues that have puzzled biologists since Darwin’s time.

Their approach doesn’t rely on fossilized remains, which display significant gaps in the evolutionary record. Instead, they suggest that the current genome of every species carries within it a “snapshot” of each evolutionary epoch that species went through in the deep past. The paper fully presenting their theory of genomic phylostratigraphy will be published in the November issue of the journal Trends in Genetics.

One might wonder about that theory, given the asserted mechanisms and predictions of the standard theory of evolution, the Neodarwinian Synthesis. Yet strangely enough, there is intriguing evidence that large, very ancient portions of genomes are perfectly conserved through eons of evolution (with zero mutations), even though these ultraconserved sequences apparently serve no purpose for the organism. Hmmm…

Mice Thrive Missing Ancient DNA Sequences
Scientists reporting in the September issue of the online open access journal PLoS Biology are trying to explain why ‘knockout’ mice missing 4 of the 481 “ultraconserved” genetic sequences that are shared exactly with humans have showed no signs of abnormalities. As team leader Nadav Ahituv explained,

The discovery that deletion of ultraconserved elements does not render mice inviable or infertile is a major challenge to our understanding of how highly conserved elements of the genome persist and what their functions are, [team leader Nadav Ahituv said]. He and his colleagues are pursuing research aimed at answering these compelling new questions.

First Diploid Human Genome Sequence Shows Surprising Difference
Human genome sequencing superstar Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute [JCVI] has once again sequenced his own genome, this time accounting for both chromosome pairs instead of just one – a full diploid genome.

With help from collaborators in Toronto and UCSD, the new diploid genome was dubbed “HuRef” and the research is to be available to the public and other researchers via the open access online journal, PLoS Biology. Venter’s HuRef genome demonstrates how greatly previous human genome sequences underestimated the genetic diversity among humans at least sevenfold.

Biofuels

‘Sweet’ Biofuels Research Goes Down on the Farm
Oklahoma State University’s sorghum biofuels researchers are working on methods for producing ethanol from easily grown, environmentally friendly sorghum right on the farm where its grown.

With the help of a sorghum field harvester invented by entreppreneur Lee McClune of Sorganol Production Co., Inc., the OSU Ag Sciences workers are hoping to develop a means to ferment the harvested sorghum juice (300-600 gallons per acre depending on efficiency) right on the farm, during harvest season when environmental temperatures make it feasible.

Will A Biofuel Economy Be Sustainable?
Farmers in the midwestern U.S. “Corn Belt” grow a lot of corn. And they are increasingly growing it for biomass and biofuels production rather than for human and animal food. Researchers in agriculture and biosystems engineering have been trying to answer some questions about how the U.S. agricultural economy will be changing as our demand for biofuels increases.

The article reports a paper published in Crop Science online, Potential for Enhanced Nutrient Cycling through Coupling of Agricultural and Bioenergy Systems.

Biology News of the Bizarre

Got Arachnophobia? Here’s Your Worst Nightmare
That picture doesn’t do it justice. This communal web covers 5 acres of the Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas, and it hosts millions of spiders. They’re taking over an entire lakeside penninsula.

Biologists say this behavior is usually not seen outside the tropics, where a few species of ’social’ spiders are known to build communal webs. Some are saying it could be the unusual amount of rain this part of Texas enjoyed this year, others suggest it might be a symptom of global warming, and still others think it’s just a fluke. Any way you slice it, the town of Wills Point, Texas is going to have a heck of a haunted hayride opportunity this Halloween!