[Tfug] [SPAM] OT: interesting article in Science

[Ronald Sutherland]

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 9:02 AM, Joshua Zeidner <jjzeidner at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Paul Scott <waterhorse at ultrasw.com> wrote:
>> Ronald Sutherland wrote:
>>> Nice, but so many words...
>> I agree.  I heard this on NPR Friday and wasn't impressed.
>>> What should I think about my lack of control of the price of fuel?
>> Cars were originally designed to run on alcohol.  John D. Rockefeller
>> pushed Prohibition to get us to use the much dirtier gasoline.  You can
>> build your own still and pay the alcohol tax and still come out ahead:
>>
>> http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/
>
>  very interesting... jmz

The problem with alcohol is that lots of energy is lost converting the
biomass into the stuff, which I'd rather drink anyway. I'd like to see
development of engines that can run on solid biomass fuel, like
bamboo, and the waste parts of a corn plant or even wood chips. It
seems to me that the solid fuel could be burned in something like a
Stirling engine to convert heat into power that is stored temporally
like in a Toyota Prius. Such an engine would allow individuals to grow
some or even all their fuel needs with much less land pressed into
service.

This probably sounds far out, but if you study the Stirling cycle it
does not process fuel though the engine only the resulting heat, which
is to say it's a closed loop system. In the solar case, the sun heats
one side and a fan dissipates heat from the cold side. It could just
as well be a pellet stove or an auger pushing yard scraps into a
combustion chamber. I fear that we simply can't produce enough alcohol
to replace the fuel lost to declining petroleum. In addition, from a
systems point of view the energy held in the plants woody tissues is
the highest value, converting it to a liquid and accepting the energy
loss does not make sense to me.

There is nothing more compelling to me than growing my own food and
fuel, thus removing those sources of control over my life. To me green
technologies make use of local renewable production, but to be
renewable all the parts within the system must not degrade. Which gets
us back to some of the Permaculture ideas.

Permaculture is permanent culture, I said agriculture last time but in
David Holmgren's book its clearly culture. It's not just mimicking
natural forest, or organic gardening, it's more about the
relationships within a living system. Humans can tune those
relationships (well some can) to exploit a greater production of
useful stuff, like food, fuel et cetera.

and it's spam ...