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Forum Index : Windmills : Sclerosis anyone?
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| AllanS Regular Member  Joined: 05/06/2006 Location: Posts: 67 |
A little something here to help warm the shed. Wonder how she'd go with a bit of orange juice. Hey, it's relevant. Alternate energy and all that. |
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Gizmo Admin Group  Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
Very clever, and makes a lot of sense if your a farmer and handy with metal working. With the price of fuel these days. Speaking of ethanol, I started running my 92 Commodore on the E10 blend about 1 year ago, and I swear by the stuff. The old V6 has done about 200,000km, and with the E10 its a lot crisper to drive, more get up and go. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| AllanS Regular Member Joined: 05/06/2006 Location: Posts: 67 |
I was thinking about this the other day. A hectare of cane gives you about 10 tonnes of dry sugar, or if sugar-beet in cooler climates, 7 tonnes. Ferment that and distill it. You'd get a fair bit of fuel, maybe 5 tonnes per Ha. It sounds good, but that's only $5000 worth. I reckon the opportunity costs and labour costs to the farmer would make it cheaper to fill up at the servo. A bit of a bummer. |
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Pt w/field Matt Senior Member  Joined: 24/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 105 |
johney and co wouldnt like that!!! matt down south |
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| RossW Guru  Joined: 25/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 495 |
I agree that if you had a saleable crop you wouldn't do it. But in those times where your crop has been damaged by weather, or there is a glut and it costs you more to get it to market than they pay you, or it's been a fallow crop, then anything that can make a mash just might be worth it. Unlike a "ripe" crop, ethanol will keep indeterminately in sealed containers, without refrigeration. And if the farmer has damaged or unsaleable crop, it just might be better to make mash and ferment it, than dig a hole and bury it. |
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| AllanS Regular Member Joined: 05/06/2006 Location: Posts: 67 |
The trick is to convert cellolose into ethanol. Enzymes or acid treatments hydrolyse the cellulose into glucose, and this is fermented. Advances have reduced enzyme costs from $1/litre to a couple of cents, and now they're engineering bugs that will do the cellulose-ethanol conversion in one step. This will be brilliant for farmers disposing crop wastes of all sorts. Municipal garbage could also go thru a digester, turning paper and green wastes into ethanol. The thing we need now is a bit of water to grow these crops. We've got stacks of land, it's just not bloody raining. Desalination is pushing $1/m3 potable water to produce, and that cost's falling. At that price, could you grow a fuel crop (or any crop) profitably, using hydroponics or whatever? |
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