Interesting viewpoint. One thing though is that as always, biofuels will never be the energy of the future, that reputation lies with something as abundant as water, more in the line of fuel cells n all that. However, these liquid biofuels will always be the gap that will bridge infrastructural shift from fossil fuel based energy to more renewable sources.
From my viewpoint, the food vs fuel debate is more often a lot of B. Many people that argue on this rarely appreciate the true value of land. The truth of the matter is that to meet the food needs of this country, we would probably just need land half the size of central province. I use the land size viz a viz agricultural productivity of israel as a light benchmark. Drips, shade nets, etc etc. For the rest of kenya, careful planning would probably give enough land to offset a big portion of our fuel needs. Remember, each year we spend more than 110b shillings to buy fuel, even if at break even point, the government would be doing much to re circulate that kind of money back into the economy.
Onto the thermodynamic perspective. This again is not necessarily a straightforward issue. Even if the process of making biofuel is energy inefficient, and the energy inputs come from non fossil oil sources, the net effect is a transformation of energy into a form more usable. Eg, you get one btu from firewood for heat used to dry coconut and end up with a 0.5 btu equivalent in the biodiesel. What you have basically done is enabled cars to run off firewood, and as long the downstream is not affected (de forestation et al), then you have saved the country one btu equivalent of energy. On 10/28/09, ashok+skunkworks@parliaments.info <ashok+skunkworks@parliaments.info> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 1:01 PM, [ Brainiac ] <arebacollins@gmail.com> wrote:
@ashok i would say wrong. Some maybe, but not all. Here is my simple rationale, if mumias were producing ethanol , they would do it at less than ten bob a liter. Petrol engines can run the stuff straight, but it has less energy, by a factor of 0.7, which would leave it costing just over 10, say even 20 per equivalent energy liter. This would automatically make billions for the company, farmers would earn more and net energy is positive.
I seriously doubt whether the numbers add up.
1) land use - if you want to use sugar-cane ethanol on a large scale -- you need to grow a lot of sugarcane on a lot of land.
2) food security - in a country which is not self-sufficient for food production - it means more arable land for food turned over to fuel production.(i.e. it will result in higher food prices ... increase in general costs... food riots .... but you can use the fuel to drive an suv)
3) energy use - general infrastructure (roads , bureaucracy, transport, etc.) is very poor. which means growing, transporting and processing sugarcane to produce ethanol will probably require the same amount (or more) of (petroleum based: fuel, fertilizer) energy that will be output by the end product ethanol.
instead, you have an equatorial country where you have sunshine all year round. Ethanol from sugarcane is 'cellulosic' ethanol -- sunshine photosynthesised by the plant -- which you are then again converting back to fuel. Notice the inefficiencies of doing that when you could be harnessing the power at the source (the sun) whose energy production is always constant. _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------ Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke Other lists ------------- Announce: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks-announce Science: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/science kazi: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/kazi/general