Tacoma Tour 2016

wat? that's unpossible says physicians

 

Wut?

I'm in Agriculture. Trust me. There is more than enough energy in a plant to make biofuels viable. The problem is getting all of that energy into a form which we can use like Ethanol without excessive costs or time.

BTW People have been trying to turn Cellulose into Ethanol efficiently for decades with no luck. I doubt it will ever be viable.

 

i think he means more energy can be obtained than what man power went into it, obviously your only gonna yield at best 10% of the energy absorbed by the plant from the sun.

 

The figure is higher than 10%. Basically right now for Ethanol there are two problems:

A) We only use the sugar in the seed of the plant for the Ethanol. Basically the easy way to make Ethanol, and the way it's done right now, is to ferment the seeds to produce Ethanol. When you do that though all you get is the energy of the seed sugar, which isn't nearly as high as the energy of the entire biomass of the plant.

B) The Ethanol is being used in cars designed for gasoline. If you designed the car to run just on E85, things could be much much more efficient.

If you could use ALL of the above ground dry matter, including the stem, leaves, seed sugar aka endosperm, seed coat, embryo, etc etc you could gain vast amounts of energy over what you put in. Basically cellulose makes up most of the cellular walls in plants. All plant cells have cellular walls so there is a shit ton of cellulose in the dry matter left when a plant is harvested. Cellulose has a ton of energy in it because it is a complex carbohydrate. It is possible to convert cellulose to ethanol, but no one has been able to do it efficiently. If someone could develop a way to do it efficiently, you could gain far more than 110% conversion of the energy put in to growing the plant.

The big problem is people have been trying to turn cellulose in ethanol for a very long time in an efficient manner and no one has had much luck, which means it may be impossible to achieve.