A brief comment on scale: The total carbon "waste" biomass in Canada.
Last edited Sat May 28, 2022, 11:44 AM - Edit history (2)
I'm catching up on reading in a journal for which I am way behind, Energy and Fuels.
I came across this fun paper, which I found interesting even though I'm no longer an NMR kind of guy - I'm a Mass Spec kind of guy - I had a certain fondness for NMR in my youth, and it's nice to remember being young:
Factors Affecting the Sensitivity of Hydroxyl Group Content Analysis of Biocrude Products via Phosphitylation and 31P NMR Spectroscopy Matthew Kusinski, Rafal Gieleciak, Lindsay J. Hounjet, and Jinwen Chen Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (24), 20142-20150.
I am, in general, opposed to biofuels where they impact access to food, or lead to the destruction of important ecological regions, for example the Gulf of Mexico, the SE Asian rainforests, and the South American Pantanal, the world's largest wet lands.
The diversion of agricultural land for biofuels is also a dubious enterprise, and in any case, as we are seeing in India and Pakistan, the absolute failure of the so called "renewable energy" scheme to address climate change will certainly impact the ability of crops to survive a lack of access to water as well as extreme temperatures.
But there's always the issue of "waste" biomass, wheat straw, corn stover, forest litter, etc.
Besides the esoteric technical issues in the paper cited, what caught my eye in this paper was a discussion of scale, the thing that is almost overlooked while we spin our fantasies connected with "solar breakthroughs" off shore wind farms, and - quite possibly the worst of all - batteries along other denialist/unrealistic horseshit.
Here's the comment from the paper, about all the waste biomass in Canada.
There's that good old "percent talk" that advocates of so called "renewable energy" routinely lapse into in a rhetorical effort to disguise its uselessness.
And the data about all the uselessness of all this endless talk - still going on - about how "renewable energy" will save the world is clear and unambiguous after more than half a century of such talk. As of yesterday:
May 27: 421.99 ppm
May 26: 421.37 ppm
May 25: 421.56 ppm
May 24: 421.27 ppm
May 23: 421.72 ppm
Last Updated: May 28, 2022
Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2
The world dumps roughly 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere. The carbon content of carbon dioxide is roughly 27.3%, suggesting that we dump roughly 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year.
All of the biomass in Canada, if the energy could be found to 1) collect it, 2) transport it, 3) pyrolyze it, and (to appeal to the purpose under discussion in this paper) 4) upgrade it is, thus, at 143 million tons, in "percent talk," 1.5% of the world's annual carbon dumping.
There is no accounting in this brief excerpt of text, of the energy investment required to "recover" the 5.1 EJ claimed for all of Canada's "waste" biomass, but in 2020, somewhat restrained by Covid lockdowns, the world consumed 589 EJ of energy. Thus all the "waste" biomass, were it possible to collect it, transport it, pyrolyze it without destroying essential biomineral flows, would yield 0.8% of world energy demand, again at an energy cost.
It's a little late to wake up to the ongoing tragedy of climate change, which is now full blown.
This late in the game, we still have assholes wondering if the shelling of a nuclear plant in Ukraine will be the end of the world, as if that is the only potential tragedy that mattered either in a country being destroyed by dangerous fossil fuel powered weapons financed by the sale of dangerous fossil fuels, or as if the death of food crops in India and Pakistan due to extreme heat pales in comparison to the shelling of the plant.
History will not forgive us, should it continue to exist, nor should it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
