Tag Archives: guatemala
The Latest Clean Energy Cocktail: Bacteria And Fungus
BY JEFF SPROSS ON AUGUST 23, 2013 By throwing together a common fungus and a common bacterium, researchers are producing isobutanol — a biofuel that gallon-for-gallon delivers 82 percent of gasoline’s heat energy. The more common ethanol, by contrast, only gets 67 percent of gasoline’s energy, and does more damage to pipelines and engines. And the University of Michigan research team did it using stalks and leaves from corn plants as the raw material. The fungus in question was Trichoderma reesei , which breaks down the plant materials into sugars. The team used corn plant leftovers in this case, but many other forms of biomass like switchgrass or forestry waste could also serve. The bacterium was Escherichia coli — good old-fashioned E. coli — which then converted those sugars into isobutanol. Another team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently came up with a similar process by studying leaf cutter ants, but their work produced ethanol instead. The University of Michigan team also got the fungi and bacteria to co-exist peacefully in the same culture and bioreactor. That means fewer cost barriers to commercializing the process: “The capital investment will be much lower, and also the operating cost will be much lower,” Xiaoxia “Nina” Lin, the team’s leader, explained. “So hopefully this will make the whole process much more likely to become economically viable.” The big advantage of a cellulosic biofuel like this is twofold. One, because it can be produced from crops that don’t double as a food source, demand for it won’t drive up food prices or contribute to global food insecurity. Traditional corn-based ethanol obviously competes with one of the world’s most basic and widely-used foods, and American and European demand for it has contributed to spiraling food costs and crises in Guatemala and across the developing world. Studies looking into the 2008 food crisis determined that biofuel policies contributed to the problem, compounding the threat of global food insecurity, which in turn helps drive geopolitical upheaval and destabilization. Two, by driving up demand for food crops, traditional biofuels encourage individuals and countries to clear ever more natural land for agriculture. Grasslands and natural forest store more carbon from the atmosphere than cropland. So the growth in biofuel production, means less natural ecology to absorb carbon, leaving more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. On top of that, agriculture involves its own carbon emissions from driving tractors and such. So put it all together and traditional biofuel production is largely self-defeating in terms of the final amount of carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere. But if a process like this one produces biofuel purely from waste materials — stuff left over from crops we would’ve grown regardless, on land we would’ve cleared regardless — those biofuels will deliver a much bigger net positive when it comes to fighting climate change. “We’re really excited about this technology,” said Jeremy Minty, another member of the team. “The U.S. has the potential to sustainably produce 1 billion tons or more of biomass annually, enough to produce biofuels that could displace 30 percent or more of our current petroleum production.” And it’s not just fossil fuels that could be replaced, either. Petrochemicals are also used in making a host of other products, especially plastics. The research team hopes their work could be adapted to replace the petrochemicals used in those processes as well. HT: CleanTechnica Continue reading
Crop Crisis: Why Global Grain Demand Will Outstrip Supply
To meet global demand, grain production needs to double by 2050. It’s not going to make it. International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center Since the time of Malthus, humanity has worried whether there would be enough food to feed the growing population. Such fears were always overcome and doomsayers all proven wrong: there was always more land to grow our crops when existing croplands failed to deliver, and new ways to get more yield from old crops. Today our planet appears very finite, and the only places to expand agriculture are in our remnant natural grasslands and tropical forests. And the demand for more agricultural crops is relentless, due to not only our rising population, but more importantly, our rising prosperity. The expected 4 billion new members of the middle class who will join the rest of us by 2050 will likely demand more dairy and meat. These require an enormous amount of grains to produce. Add to these the demands biofuel places on agriculture, and we need to boost global agricultural production by 60% to 110% by 2050. To put this challenge in a time perspective, that kind of increase took our ancestors 10,000 years to achieve. So how are we doing? My research team recently published an analysis in PLOS ONE of the local to global scale performance of maize, rice, wheat and soybeans. These are the top four global crops, collectively responsible for nearly two-thirds of all agricultural calorie production. We found that current rates of productivity improvements are nowhere near the rates of productivity gains (2.4% per year) required for growing demand. Instead of the required doubling of crop production by 2050, at this rate the yield increase will be only 38% to 67%, with the problem more acute for rice and wheat. Australia, is the ninth largest global producer of wheat and a major exporter. Its wheat yields have declined at 0.7% per year. In fact, we observed negative yield trends in around 80% of Australia’s wheat cropland areas. Productivity was rising in only a few of the important wheat cropland areas: the South Eastern statistical division in New South Wales; Darling Downs in Queensland; Goulburn, Western district and Central Highlands in Victoria; south eastern region in Western Australia; and outer Adelaide, Murray Lands, and Eyre in South Australia. Even in these regions the rates of wheat productivity improvements were below the 2.4% rate required to double wheat production, except for south eastern region of New South Wales, where we estimated the rate to be 3.4% per year. Does this mean Australians won’t be able to feed themselves, much less feed others, with wheat? It seems very unlikely at only 0.7% per yearly declines. This decline however may worsen as Australian agriculture matures. Australian wheat yields are limited by lack of nutrients and of water, with the latter being a bigger factor as we reported in a paper published in Nature last year. In some areas of Australia wheat productivity was already at the maximum possible value. Looking beyond Australia, we found many countries where the gains in crop productivity are less than those required to keep pace with their population growth. In several countries – such as Guatemala and Kenya – productivity of maize, a significant source of daily dietary energy, is declining and population is growing. In Indonesia – the third largest rice-producing nation on Earth where rice provides about 49% of daily dietary energy – productivity gain is too low to keep pace with population growth. In India, China, Philippines and Nepal, productivity improvement rates in rice are just about enough to maintain per capita production at current levels. Although supply will not meet demand by 2050, all is not lost. We can close the demand–supply gap in one of many ways. We can invest more to boost crop productivity in the faltering regions that we identified. We can bring more of our remaining natural lands under production (but wheat alone would require 95 million additional hectares, more than the total area of New South Wales). We can reduce food waste, which already accounts for nearly half of global crop production (unfortunately, waste sometimes is difficult and expensive to reduce, as in developing nations where it occurs between farm and table due to lack of storage and transportation). Perhaps most controversially, we can change to more plant-based diets. Nobody really knows what members of the new middle class will choose to eat. History shows time and again that as people join the middle class, they look for more dairy and meat. But if they go against previous trends and decide to keep consumption of animal products low – if those of us already in the middle class reduce our meat consumption – we may all have enough to eat after all. 20 June 2013 Continue reading
