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(2020 article) How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again — Low Tech Magazine
(solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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@[email protected] you're presumably joking about the feasibility of getting some of the energy wasted on food & plastic back out again.
But this is a good article on how renewable hydrocarbons can be used for energy. Of course, modern energy use would probably exceed the forage capacity or new growth wood.
Biomass was our main fuel for 95% of the history of civilization. These days we have engines that can produce both energy and charcoal, which you can sequester and enrich the land just by tilling it into the soil.
The way capitalism currently does it is by clear-cutting forests, pelleting the wood, and shipping it halfway round the world as a low-quality substitute in coal plants. If we were to localize it and decrease our energy demand by 90% (mostly by living closer to each other, riding bikes and trains, and not being disgustingly wasteful), we would be able to use solar/wind/hydro for much of our power and biomass from pollards to fill in the gaps for base load.
There would be a lot more biomass to collect if we didn't just completely lay waste to forests yeah holy shit. The ecological civilization/sponge city stuff where fauna and flora is returned to urban spaces along with creating better more navigable people oriented spaces... 🤩 it's dreamy
By energy wasted on food and trash I mean the hydrogen & energy (both generally from fossil fuels) that go into a lot of the fertilizer which is used in industrial agriculture. All of the energy which goes into plastic manufacturing: fossil fuel feedstocks, cellulose and other stuff going into it, to the transport of supplies & the energy use of everything.
Yeah effective composting is a good way of doing that. I have a compost bin.
Re: My comments on hydrogen gas specifically, I don't know how any of this shit works in terms of chemistry or equipment or anything. :3 I just think renewable production of fuels is very cool because it can just be stored in a big vessel (although hydrogen needs to be compressed or stored in some kind of solution like with some zinc batteries i posted about before)
when talking to people about the renewable energy transition, one of the points has been frequently raised as a negative is the overuse of lithium ion batteries (we're using gigantic lithium batteries for data centers & for power stations, which could be replaced by flow batteries and other stuff (actually may have still neglected to post about flow batteries) but renewable fuel production is one of those things that skirts around the issue (can cause pollution tho ofc), so I find it very interesting.
Hydrogen is so used for lots of industrial processes other than being a clean energy source, like fertilizer
You're right on the money as far as going out and harvesting biomass rather than waste disposal that doubles as energy production being dumb. This magazine's editors and writers have a completely different worldview than me. I wasn't sure if you were joking/I was misunderstanding you about there not being energy to burn in plastic and food waste.
I don't know what people's hang up about nuclear is.
And all the naysayers about renewables are getting swept by the Chinese yeah.
They are hung up on storage and disposal and the scope of the risk.
I am hung up on how it's not downscalable and requires lots of central control.
We are not the same!
Biodiesel or ethanol is what you're looking for. With our current methods, we spend so much energy making ethanol for E85 gasoline that it's nearly a 1-for-1 trade, but it doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to use huge gas-powered farming equipment; we didn't always use it in the past yet we've been farming corn productively for 5000 years.
Don't worry I know we make a shit ton of corn ethanol
I just think it would be cool to be able to send off my apartment compost to a facility that creates futuristic and trendy
H Y D R O G E N
G A S
Also hydrogen gas is used to make gasoline. If fossil fuel production was heavily reduced I'm guessing it would be trivial to replace part of naptha production with hydrogen from renewable sources?
Maybe it would be redundant.