Doubled Yield For Bio-Fuel From Waste 97
hankwang writes "Dutch chemical company DSM announced a new process for production of ethanol from agricultural waste. Most bio-fuel ethanol now is produced from food crops such as corn and sugar cane. Ethanol produced from cellulose would use waste products such as wood chips, citrus peel, and straw. The new process is claimed to increase the yield by a factor of two compared to existing processes, thanks to new enzymes and special yeast strains."
With that little side benifit... (Score:2, Insightful)
of not actually decreasing the food supply and driving up the cost of staples such as grain and sugar.
Nothing like solving the energy issues for the wealthy while letting the poor starve just a little faster.
Re:With that little side benifit... (Score:5, Insightful)
From GP:
With the added benefit of not actually decreasing the food supply and driving up the cost of staples such as grain and sugar.
Funny how a single word can completely change the meaning of a phrase huh?
makes for a nice talking point (Score:5, Insightful)
You just might want to do a little more in depth research to see where the huge price rises in corn, etc come from. Hint: not from farmers, nor from ethanol production. It comes from wall street speculators, people who produce *nothing*, parasites, who take and take and take as much as they can get through controlling the government.
Assholes who live in NYC and Chicago make more money off of food products than the farmers make.
Even then, we have had mountains of surplus corn sitting around, you can go buy all you want. The "poor" suffer because those speculators drive the prices up.
If the anti ethanol people are so concerned over corn ethanol, they can put their wallets where their mouths are and actually buy shiploads of corn and distribute it..but they don't, they just run their mouths and never even do the most minimal research about that subject, or any number of other subjects where there is this far left urban centric legend about commodities.
Farmers want to grow food, they don't want subsidy to not grow food, that was forced on them when the government-at the direction of wall street-forced the ending of buying surplus crops in bumper years to maintain prices and switched to credit card based financial "food" for welfare and aid.
You want someone to blame for high food prices, blame those jerks, the sames ones and same mindset like with the oil spill, cut corners, skim off all you can, never think of the future or your global neighbors, just be a bloated tick and live off the labors of others.
Re:Duke Nukem Forever (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, it's a press release, and we have to wait until we see some hard numbers to see whether or not this single development would make it "commercially viable".
But you can't disregard the fact that - if the claim is true - doubling the output of the fermentation process makes it one step closer to "commercially viable" than it was before.
They're not claiming that "fermentation & enzymatic hydrolysis are the breakthrough," what they're claiming is that a new combination of enzymes and refinement of the process have increased the yield significantly.
Re:With that little side benifit... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Duke Nukem Forever (Score:4, Insightful)
Man I wish I could have figured out that this is just another clever lie from the cellulosic ethanol cabal.
How do you do it? It's like you're privy to data that's not available to normal people!
Skepticism is perfectly healthy. Refusing to consider anything because "it's never worked before" just makes you look sort of dumb.
Markets are symbiotic, NOT parasitic (Score:5, Insightful)
If this were true, farmers would have a very simple way to get rid of those parasites: sell directly to the consumers. AFAIK there are no militias that force farmers to deliver corn to the speculators at gun point.
Here's a farmer that grows corn, there's an industry that consumes corn. Both meet, agree on a price, the corn is delivered. Simple, isn't it?
However, both farmers and industries much prefer the system where intermediates guarantee prices and delivery. With a commodities market farmers know they will always have someone to sell their products to, industries know they will have someone to buy from. The futures market tell them what price they will get so they can plan ahead.
If markets were as bad as you say, then North Korea and Cuba would be the richest nations in the world. Albania would still be Stalinist, China would have continued with Maoism and the Soviet Union would still be a union.
Re:Markets are symbiotic, NOT parasitic (Score:3, Insightful)
But there's something much more effective that does force them: economic realities of farming. Their exposure is so great because of input costs and weather conditions and their profit margins so small that they don't really have a lot of choice in comes to selling their crops. Usually, they're just delivering on contracts and the end-user of their product is often not even known, unless they have a specific deal with a cereal company or corporate bakery. They have to play with various hedge investments to protect themselves from getting wiped out in the event of a sudden drop in prices, or bad weather or a surge in a particular input cost (fuel, for example). Independent farming (aka "family" farming) is one of the hardest ways to make money, and thank goodness there are still people willing to do it. Far from being in a position of power regarding their transactions with "speculators" farmers are pretty much at their mercy. As you correctly point out, those speculators are the futures markets that provide the farmers with some stability.
Unfortunately, the futures markets long ago ceased being tied to anything like real world conditions and have become centers of outrageous levels of speculation. Just like the stock market has long ago stopped having anything to do with companies raising capital, commodities markets have long ago stopped having anything to do with bringing stability to the producers. The same sort of wacky derivatives that have brought such a high level of danger to economic systems are now also part of commodities markets, to the detriment of everyone but a small group of high-stakes gamblers. A lot of farmers are suddenly getting knocked about by market forces that don't make a lick of sense. It's hard enough for them as it is. We don't need to see more of them giving up on careers of such strategic importance to us all.
I don't know about you, but I'm not yet willing to completely cede our food supply to the Duponts and ADMs of the world.
Farmer checking in (Score:5, Insightful)
This may not be true of every farmer out there, but I'm not obliged to sell anything to anyone I don't want to. We're not all just hapless pawns of some faceless organisations resident in a Manhattan skyscraper.
If a nice man comes to me at the beginning of the season and promises to buy however much (beet/potato/turnip/broccoli/whatever) I produce at a given price, and it's a price I like, we do business. It takes a lot of the uncertainty out of the whole business. I have insurance for crop failures (owing to various natural disasters) which takes more uncertainty out. Does it all cost me money? Sure it does. If I have a surplus over and above what a speculator will pay for, I can then sell it on the spot market, or compost it, or whatever makes the most sense.
If I'm feeling lucky and I've had a few good years I can try to second-guess the market and fight it out on the spot market unaided, but the fact is that that is not easy to get right. Farmers basically invented the futures market to guarantee some kind of return, and the commodity markets revolve around that whole issue.
So, here's a big, fat hint for you: if you don't like AmeriGloboLeechCorp crushing the hapless peasants under the heel of its italian leather pumps, find some other way to ease the wild uncertainties which dominate the farming industry. Oh, and until you find that other way? Get used to poor ignorant peasants like me doing business with people who will work with us. Call them speculators, call them what you will, they can wheel and deal the futures that they have bought (with real cash money) amongst each other until they get dizzy. I got the cash in my pocket, and I'm using it to plant whatever's on order this season.
PS: I maybe sound more combative than I feel, and people obviously realise some of this, but I get very tired of people painting farmers as illiterate hicks. A modern farmer in the west is an entrepreneur (or the US, anyway) and the stupid and lazy ones go broke by the dozen. As with any small business, it's the smart ones that survive. We have inputs, capital and running expenses, markets and regulations by the score. A modern farmer has to have a sound working knowledge of everything from livestock first aid through to economic principles, to do well. As far as the purchasers? I really don't care who or what they are as long as the currency is genuine. I will charge what the market will bear, and if someone else takes the delivery and sales stuff off my hands for a cut of the action, so be it. I have plenty of work to do out here on the land.
PPS: The single biggest cause, as far as I can tell, for the rise of agribusiness in farming concerns particulary is that this is about the best way of gathering the kind of big capital that really large scale farming demands. It's not my style, and I don't need it, but a lot of people who complain about factory farming (which is really a misnomer) would do well to, again, come up with some kind of alternative rather than just whining about where the economic realities of today have led.