A Biological World: Sustainable Materials and Fuels

GCC
Global industry is looking for alternatives to fossil fuels, as feedstocks for the production of fuels, plastics, high value chemicals, lubricants, and other materials. The planet Earth is highly prolific in its biological output -- and it could be far more biologically prolific, given just a little help.

The image above depicts the scheme of Montana startup Blue Marble Biomaterials, which aims to ride a $multimillion grant from the US Advanced Manufacturing Program to successful bio-manufacturing.

The company is implementing novel recycling systems to eliminate waste and reduce cost: a photo-bioreactor containing algae purifies wastewater and waste gas from the fermentation system and their solid waste is dried and pelletized for use in wood-burning furnaces and stoves. The company has future plans to power its facilities using its own waste gas and pelletized solid waste in already on-site gasifiers.

Blue Marble Energy’s proprietary AGATE (Acid, Gas and Ammonia Targeted Extraction) system uses different bacterial consortia (“cassettes”) in an anaerobic fermentation process to produce carboxylic acids, esters, mercaptains / thiols, and terpenes. The system is feedstock flexible; for the Missoula plant, Blue Marble is using waste coffee grounds and spent grain from a major brewer, said Kelly Ogilvie, Blue Marble’s CEO.

(Blue Marble uses a supercritical fluid extraction process to remove the remaining lipids from the coffee grounds.)

The feedstock flexibility can manifest as price stability for Blue Marble’s chemical customers, Ogilvie noted. For example, the company has a stable price on the spent grain from the brewer; a waste product which otherwise would end up in landfills (i.e., the amounts above that which could economically be used for cattle feed, the other major disposal pathway for spent grain).

If we have fixed feedstock [such as the waste spent grain], we have price stability. We can hedge off the future price volatility of petroleum. Price protection is a huge issue right now.

—Kelly Ogilvie

_GCC

Blue Marble had better have its act together, because government grants run out very quickly -- no matter how well connected company founders may be to government administrators. Bio-manufacture of this range of materials, using these new technologies, is risky and cutting edge.

As long as petroleum prices remain relatively high, crafty uses of biomass and bio-products as substitutes for petroleum can make a profit. But to build a large-scale infrastructure of bio-manufacture and bio-refining, investors and participants will want to be sure the bio-approach can withstand temporary nose-dives of oil prices, such as occurred in 2008-2009 and multiple times throughout the 1900s.

Bombing the Planet with Tree Seedlings: Terraforming Earth?

macleansIn most modern forestry operations in the developed world, at least 5 new seedlings are planted for each tree that is cut down. But in the third world, the emerging world, and in the non-forestry world, there is plenty of room for planting new trees.

MIT researcher Moshe Alamaro wants to pull fleets of old military transports and bombers out of mothballs, and use them to bombard the planet with special tree seedling bomblets.

Alamaro collaborated with U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin in the late ’90s to replace the tedious and back-breaking work of manually planting trees by dropping saplings from the sky. The idea, which could see nearly one million trees planted per day, was based on research done at the University of British Columbia in the 1970s. The concept involved using a small fertilizing plane to drop saplings in plastic pods one at a time from a hopper. But it wasn’t very fruitful—most pods hit debris during pilot tests and failed to actually take root.

“It was pretty crude,” says Dennis Bendickson, a forestry professor at UBC, who was a student when the first tests were conducted. He says the upgraded idea, which is meant to create new forests on empty landscapes instead of debris-strewn cuts, “could get success rates of probably 90 per cent.”

The process Alamaro advocates places trees in metal pods that rot on contact with the ground, instead of the low-tech and less sturdy plastic version. He says the process can be adapted to plant shrubs, and would work best in places with clear, loose soil, such as sub-desert parts of the Middle East, or newly habitable Arctic tundra opened up by global warming. “What is needed is government policy to use old military aircraft,” he says, adding that thousands are in hangars across the globe. _Macleans

Observant persons will recognise the undercurrent of climate hysteria which runs beneath most proposals such as this. Unfortunately, large scale geoengineering projects are as likely to plunge the planet into a new ice age as they are to improve living conditions for the planet's lifeforms.

Nevertheless, there are large areas of the third world that have been stripped bare by human and other animal plant-abusers. Large areas of borderline desert could be transformed into more diverse habitats by wise re-vegetation policies. Perhaps even profitable food or biomass farms can be seeded and re-seeded economically using this approach.

Certainly the experiment is worth performing.

At War in the Forest: A Ballad of Bark Beetles

Bark beetles have killed nearly 80 million ponderosa, piñon and lodgepole pines in Arizona and New Mexico and tens of millions more across the West over the past decade. Years of punishing drought left the trees unable to protect themselves against the attacks, which carve ugly scars into forests, weaken the surrounding ecosystem and heighten wildfire danger.

Forest managers can apply insecticide to individual trees or small stands, but forestwide treatments are impractical and would be wildly expensive and potentially risky to other plants and wildlife.

Enter Reagan McGuire, a research assistant who wondered what would happen if the beetles were blasted with noise, creating an acoustic stress that might change their behavior. He sold Hofstetter on the idea, and the experiment was hatched at NAU's School of Forestry lab.

They collected tree trunks infested with bark beetles and sandwiched slices of the trees between clear plastic plates, creating what looked like the old ant farms once sold in the back pages of magazines.

Working in the lab, McGuire piped in the music through tiny speakers, the sort you might find in a singing greeting card. He watched the reaction of the beetles using a microscope. The rock music didn't seem to annoy the bugs, nor did Rush [Limbaugh] in reverse.

McGuire and Hofstetter decided to try something different. They recorded the sounds of the beetles and played them back, manipulating them to test the response.

Suddenly, every little thing they did seemed to provoke the beetles.

"We could use a particular aggression call that would make the beetles move away from the sound as if they were avoiding another beetle," Hofstetter said.

When they made the beetle sounds louder and stronger than a typical male mating call, he said, the female beetle rejected the male and moved toward the electronic sound.


Even more surprising was what the beetles did to each other. The researchers manipulated the sounds and, at a certain point, the male stopped mating and tore the female apart, McGuire said.

"This is not normal behavior in the natural world," he said. _AzCentral

Al Fin botanists and entomologists respond to McGuire: No shite Shirlock! If it were normal behaviour in the natural world, there would be no bark beetles at all by now. It is your job to make it common behaviour in the pine forest. Otherwise, give back all those grants!

Biomass companies had better grab up as many dead pines as they can, while they last. If the bark beetles are driven to distraction by the manipulation of their own sounds, pine forests may have a few years to recover -- until the next deadly pest comes along.

Clever Hemp-Based Wood Replacement

Hemp is a fast-growing source of plant fiber that may help preserve the majestic forests of the world. Stanford University researchers are busy at work creating a very intriguing faux wood from hemp, combining a bioplastic called PHB with sheets of hemp fiber. The resulting wood substitute may also prove to be a plastic substitute!

The hemp-PHB biocomposite material has several characteristics similar to wood from trees, according to Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, who collaborated on the project. “It’s quite attractive looking and very strong,” he said. “You can mold it, nail it, hammer it and drill it a lot like wood. But, bioplastic PHB can be produced faster than wood, and hemp can be grown faster than trees.” _Biomass

The age of advanced biomaterials is arriving at the same time as the age of advanced bio-fuels and bio-chemicals. Many technologies for turning biomass into plastics and structural fiber, can be used to turn biomass into fuels and high value chemicals.

Laws against the growth and use of hemp are just one example of the government's counterproductive meddling in the markets -- eventually resulting in depressed economies. The current Obama reich's meddling in energy markets is another fine example of government stupidity. Here's a novel idea: why doesn't the government concentrate on protecting its citizens from violence, fraud, and greedy, corrupt bureaucrats? The mainspring of human progress is the human spirit and human imagination. Big greedy government is the antithesis of an open and vibrant future.