Heating oil has a reputation of antiquation. It’s one of those unique forms of energy able to conjure imagery of weather-worn New Englanders in old Victorian town homes, or the dying breed of Midwestern farmer aging alongside crumbling agrarian empires of rusty implements and dilapidated buildings. Short, gray days when life slows to a crawl atop the packed, accumulating snow; the vicious circle of snowfall and shoveling, plowing and blowing, only to do it all over again tomorrow; cold, long, dark nights spent inside looking out.
The Northeast and central Atlantic states have by far the highest concentration of heating oil usage compared with other regions—the Energy Information Administration reports 83 percent in 2005—but homes sparsely peppered across the nation are warmed by oil in the fall, winter and early spring months. Nationwide, slightly more than 8 million households out of 107 million, or 7.5 percent of U.S. homes, burn heating oil for warmth, according to the U.S. EPA. National Oilheat Research Alliance President John Huber says this represents about 10 billion gallons of diesel fuel a year.
In the fall, weather projections indicating colder than normal winter temperatures typically induce supply and pricing fears in the heating oil markets sending prices upward. This winter, record-high heating oil prices were expected even though the National Oceanic and Atmosphereic Administrations outlook covering the first three months of 2008 predicted above-average temperatures for most of the continental United States. However, temperatures in the Northeast, from New York to Maine, were given a big question mark—an equal chance of above-average, normal or below-average temperatures for those same three winter months. Despite the unknown in the Northeast and warmer winter weather throughout the rest of the country, heating oil prices are expected to hit record highs this winter. “We’re close to an all-time high for heating oil, in inflation-adjusted dollars,” Huber told Biodiesel Magazine in November. “1980 is still a touch higher, but we’re getting up into that range now. I’ve heard people pricing up in the $3.30 to $3.50 a gallon range for delivered heat.” The EIA’s short-term energy outlook formulated in November 2007 forecasts heating oil prices to hit season highs in first quarter 2008 at $3.07 a gallon in the Northeast and $3.08 a gallon out west for delivered heat, including state taxes.
بیوتکنولوژی صنعتی Industrial Biotechnology
این وبلاگ محلی برای به اشتراک گذاردن یافته ها و دانسته های علوم بیوتکنولوژیستبیوتکنولوژی صنعتی Industrial Biotechnology
این وبلاگ محلی برای به اشتراک گذاردن یافته ها و دانسته های علوم بیوتکنولوژیستنانو لوله های کربنی، ابزار ارزشمند داروسازی
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ایران یکی از ۳۶کشور مرجع بیوتکنولوژی در جهان
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ثبت جهانی دانش «ژئوبیوتکنولوژی» به نام ایران
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فرآورده نوترکیب یعنی تولید محصولات بیوتکنولوژیک
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Biotechnology vs. sustainability: What do students think
Biotechnology vs. sustainability: What do students think
EUREKALERT
Contact: Sara Uttech
suttech@agronomy.org
608-268-4948
American Society of Agronomy
Agricultural producers, industry, and the research community, as well as the general public, have shown much interest in both biotechnology and sustainability in recent years
College students in a Sustainable Agriculture course were surveyed before and after taking the class. Students' exposure to the ideas of sustainability, as well as biotechnology-related topics, provided them with a chance to state their views as they completed homework and exams and participated in discussions.
William A. Anderson, Professor of Agronomy, University of Wisconsin-River Falls, conducted the survey and shares the results, which are published in the 2008 Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education.
Students were asked to agree or disagree with 17 statements related to sustainable agriculture and biotechnology during the first class session and again during the last session. This helped the instructor to learn their understanding of the topics, to reveal their opinions toward topic-related statements (many of which were controversial), and to stimulate their interest in the course.
At the start of the class, some students believed that biotechnology products and practices were beneficial to agricultures sustainability efforts. They supported the use of genetically modified crops, and they did not believe that biotechnology contributed much to food allergy problems or toxins in the environment.
Other students were less comfortable with biotechnology. They noted problems with the decline in biodiversity, safety and reliability, patents, consumer acceptance issues, as well as other environmental, societal, and economic concerns.
"At first, students were neutral about organic farms as fully sustainable businesses, but they rejected that idea later," Anderson says. "They discovered that organic farmers, like conventional farmers, are continually striving to make their operations more sustainable."
The theory that students would likely soften their stances and adopt a more middle, uncertain, or neutral ground related to the more controversial survey statements turned out to be incorrect. Instead, students tended to agree or disagree more strongly in many cases.
The Sustainable Agriculture course, after development and approval by the university, attracted more students than expected, not just the handful who had requested it. Most course participants came from conventional farming backgrounds, rather than organic, and most likely this influenced their acceptance of biotechnology as they strived to find a place for it in sustainable systems.
"I feel that it is critically important for faculty to expose today's students to both sustainable agricultural systems and agricultural biotechnology without introducing personal biases. Students should interject their own educated voices into the evolving debate," concludes Anderson.
New biofuel sources may not be food
New biofuel sources may not be food, but they could prove invasive
Food crops such as wheat being used for biofuel in Egypt. Fears over diverting food crops have led to "second-generation" biofuels made from nonfood crops like reeds and wild grasses. Toru Hanai/Reuters
In the past year, the world has witnessed the unintended effects of diverting food crops like corn and palm to make biofuel: In part because of competition from the hot biofuels market, food prices are skyrocketing and food stocks vanishing. Rain forest is being cut down to grow more "green" fuel.
As such problems have emerged, it has become almost a mantra among investors and politicians that newer "second-generation" biofuels - made from nonfood crops like reeds and wild grasses - would provide green energy, without taking food off the table.
Second-generation biofuel plantations growing jatropha, a genus of succulents, have sprung up all over Africa. In the United States and Europe, plans abound to grow crops like switch grass and giant reed for energy and fuels.
Now, biologists and botanists are warning that these second-generation biofuels may have serious unintended consequences as well: Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species - weeds - which they say have high potential to escape plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc.
At a United Nations meeting in Bonn on Tuesday, scientists from the Global Invasive Species Program, the Nature Conservancy and the International Union for Conservation of Nature as well as other groups issued a warning worthy of Cassandra.
"Some of the most commonly recommended species for biofuels production are also major invasive alien species," their paper says, adding that these crops should be studied more before being cultivated for biofuel production in new areas.
Controlling the spread of such plants could prove difficult, the experts said, producing "greater financial losses than gains." As the International Union put it: "Don't let invasive biofuel crops attack your country."
To reach their conclusions, the scientists matched the list of the most popular second-generation biofuels with a list of invasive species and found an alarming degree of overlapping. They said little evaluation of risk had occurred before planting.
"With biofuels, there's always a hurry,' said Geoffrey Howard, an expert on invasive species with the International Union. "Plantations are started by investors - often from the U.S. or Europe - so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don't want a negative assessment."
The biofuels industry says the risk that biofuel crops will become weed problems is overstated, noting that proposed crops, while they have some "weedy" potential, are not inevitably invasive.
"There are very few plants that are 'weeds' - full stop," said Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of the EuropaBio, an industry group. "You have to look at the biology of the plant and the environment where you're introducing it and ask, are there worry points here?"
He said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully, because they would not want growth they could not control.
The EU and the United States have both instituted biofuel targets as a method of reducing carbon emissions; the EU target of 10 per cent biofuel use in transport by 2020 is binding. As a result, politicians are eagerly awaiting the commercial perfection of second-generation biofuels.
The EU is funding a project to introduce the "giant reed, a high-yielding, nonfood plant into EU agriculture." The reed is an "environmentally friendly" and cost-effective crop, poised to become the "champion of biomass crops," the project proposal says.
A proposed Florida biofuel plantation and plant, also using giant reed, has been greeted with enthusiasm by investors, its energy sold even before the facility is built.
But the project has been opposed by the Florida Native Plants Society and a number of scientists, who say giant reed growth could endanger the nearby Everglades. The giant reed - previously used mostly as a decorative plant and to make musical instruments - is a fast-growing thirsty species that has drained wetlands and clogged drainage systems in other places where it has been planted. Highly flammable, it increases the risk of fires.
From a business perspective, the good thing about second-generation biofuel crops is that they are easy to grow and need little attention. But that is also what creates their invasive potential.
"These are tough survivors, which means they're good producers for biofuel because they grow well on marginal land that you wouldn't use for food," Howard said. "But we've had 100 years of experience with introductions of these crops that turned out to be disastrous for environment, people, health."
Stas Burgiel, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said the cost of controlling invasive species was "immense," and generally not paid by those who created the problem.
But he and other experts emphasized that some of the second-generation biofuel crops could still be safe, if introduced into the right places and under the right conditions
"With biofuels we need to do proper assessments and take appropriate measures, so they don't get out of the gate, so to speak," Burgiel said. He added that assessment must take a broad geographical perspective, since invasive species don't respect borders. "If Florida says no and the investors go next door, you've got the problem anyway," he said.
The Global Invasive Species Program estimates that the damage from invasive species already costs the world more than $1.4 trillion annually - 5 percent of the global economy.
History is filled with well-meaning introductions gone bad, as plants transported from one part of the world to another thrive uncontrollably in a new country that lacks their natural predators.
Decades ago, mesquite was introduced into Australia and Africa for charcoal production, as well as to provide shade and reduce erosion. Decades later, "it has turned into a monster,' Howard said, invading millions of hectares of pastureland in places like Australia and Ethiopia and rendering them unusable.
"It all covered by awful spiny bushes so that people and their animals can't find anything to eat," said Howard, an Australian. "We want to make sure that doesn't happen again through biofuels."
Jatropha, the darling of the second-generation biofuel community is being cultivated widely in East Africa and promoted by entrepreneurs and organizations like the Clinton Foundation. But jatropha was recently banned by two Australian states as an invasive species. If jatropha, which is poisonous, overgrows farmland or pasture the result could be a disaster for local food supply in Africa, experts say.
But De Greef, of EuropaBio, said jatropha had little weed potential in most areas. He added: "Just because a species has caused a problem in one place, doesn't make it a weed everywhere."
Biodiesel’s True Calling
Biodiesel’s True Calling
From :American Fuels website
As biodiesel struggles for widespread acceptance as a transportation fuel, it has found a warm, cozy home in the residential heating oil market.
Armed with a list of advantages fuel oil has over its competition, this energy with an aging reputation is being repackaged for a new generation of consumers. Despite information from EIA, which states most older U.S. homes outside New England have replaced oil burners with propane or natural gas, and that oil no longer has an appreciable share of the new construction market, heating oil advocacy groups and fuel distributors bill heating oil, especially when blended with biodiesel, as clean, safe and affordable. Moreover, new systems technologies with greater utility are emerging, and may help heating oil and biodiesel gain footing as an attractive source for residential heating, air conditioning and electricity.
Comparisons
EIA Administrator Guy Caruso recently testified before a legislative subcommittee in Washington D.C., where he told Congress that depending on temperatures this winter, residents using electricity for heat could expect a 3 percent price increase, natural gas an 11 percent increase, propane a 20 percent increase and heating oil an increase of 26 percent compared with the previous year. Andrew Schuyler, director for the Northeast Biofuels Collaboration, tells Biodiesel Magazine the oil industry has systematically scaled down petroleum bulk storage capacity over the past two decades. If bulk storage capacity is lean, then increasing heating oil production to meet expected increases in demand would do no good because there would be no place to store the excess supply. But that’s only part of the story. “While some of this can be attributed to changes in crude oil availability, the consolidation of the oil industry and its preference for tight supplies is well documented,” Schuyler says. “There’s been a lot of talk about the industry’s use of ‘just-in-time’ inventory management, which is designed to ensure that product only arrives at retail points when it’s needed. While this clearly increases profits, it also leaves regions like the northeast vulnerable to any type of supply disruptions, such as weather or geopolitical events.” Despite this news, fuel distributors and proponents of heating oil say when adjusted for inflation and on a per million British thermal units basis, heating oil is still an economical choice. “Natural gas prices have not moved up as steadily as petroleum prices have risen,” Huber says. “This has a lot to do with the fundamentals of petroleum, and of biodiesel. It’s an international market for those products, so as the dollar declines in value, they’ve got to make it up, so the price has gone up. Natural gas is still very much a domestic market. America has had a bit of a manufacturing recession after Katrina and Rita, so a lot of demand for natural gas has still been depressed but the supply has been there.” So while natural gas prices appear more attractive than heating oil this winter, propane, which consists of 50 percent petroleum and 50 percent natural gas, is less so. “Propane is still probably more expensive than heating oil,” Huber continues. “In general, propane has been more expensive and according to the DOE will continue to be higher priced in the market.” Even at record petroleum highs, biodiesel is still priced higher than diesel fuel at the retail level. “The two products, biodiesel and fuel oil, track each other,” Huber says. “If biodiesel is a little more or a little less than petroleum, you’re going to have a market. You can’t go much higher or you’ll lose market, and if you go much lower, then you’ll sell out instantly, so it’s got to be in range.”
In December, just as ASTM was expected to pass a B5 measure in D975, the on-road diesel fuel spec, advocates for biodiesel use in home heating applications expect D396, the heating oil spec, to do the same. NORA and the National Biodiesel Board have trademarked the name “Bioheat” to market home heating oil blended with quality biodiesel up to and including 20 percent. “We’re still completing our research so we have not settled on what that exact blend should be,” Huber says. “But when the ASTM ballot for B5 in D396 is passed, we’ll move the Bioheat trademark to say it means a 5 percent blend. … I would rather move the industry up 5 [percent], 7 [percent] or 9 percent as opposed to moving it up 50 percent, or using off-spec product, and then having disasters and getting the idea into the general community that this product doesn’t work as heating oil.”
Heating oil blends higher than B30 are not recommended, and results from a comprehensive study undertaken over several years at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., in conjunction with New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, explain why. While heating oil blends up to and including B30 displayed as good or even better combustion and operational characteristics than pure petroleum heating oil, “it was observed that, with blends of over 30 percent biodiesel concentration, the cadmium sulfide flame sensor would sometimes not see the flame sufficiently and, hence, the control system would shut down the burner as a safety precaution,” C.R. Krishna, BNL, and R.J. Albrecht, NYSERDA, wrote in a paper detailing BNL’s findings. “This occurrence was a function of the system, the airflow settings, the control system parameters, the [B]ioheat blend ratios, etc., and was not seen in all the systems tested. Caution is therefore suggested in the use of [B]ioheat blends with high biodiesel concentrations.” Huber explains those findings. “With some of the higher blends, the fuel is burning so cleanly that the cadmium cell that’s traditionally been used in the industry will not register the light waves,” he says. “It’s almost a pure-white flame [with biodiesel] whereas oil tends to burn yellow. Realistically, a lot of next-generation sensors on furnaces are using ultra violet where this will not be an issue. But we have 8 million to 10 million homes using the existing equipment, so we can’t get ahead of what customers’ equipment can do.”
Not only do higher blend levels increase the possibility of operational issues, but BNL also states one of its primary findings in its lengthy study was that somewhere between B30 and B40, the upper limit on viscosity as defined in D396, was reached. BNL also determined, not surprisingly, that the pour and cold filter plugging points of heating oil increased proportionately to the blend, “but proper cold weather additives can more than offset any such increase.” In addition, the flash point increases as the biodiesel percentage increases, and can be used by fuel distributors and advocacy groups as an additional selling point for the safety of biodiesel-blended heating oil. The BNL study also replicated what other open-flame combustion tests of biodiesel have displayed over the years, the reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions. Particulate matter emissions (2.5 micron size), directly and primarily dependent on the fuel’s sulfur content, were shown by BNL to decrease proportionally as biodiesel percentages increase.
New Markets
Cleaner, safer and economically competitive on a per-Btu basis, biodiesel-blended heating oil is an attractive energy choice. “In a world concerned with global warming and as a nation trying to move away from relying on the Middle East, our industry has been very receptive to Bioheat,” Huber says. According to Schuyler, “If there was ever a time to convince elected officials that we need to seriously alter our relationship with fossil fuels, it’s now. We may have reached the so-called ‘perfect energy storm’—we have high energy prices, a war that Alan Greenspan recently noted is largely about oil, and the words ‘climate change’ rolling off the lips of every serious candidate for president.”
If only 5 percent of the 10 billion gallons of heating oil consumed annually in the United States was replaced with biodiesel, this would represent a 500 million gallon market—more than the U.S. biodiesel industry produced last year. Some states already have legislation on the books requiring use of biodiesel-blended heating oil in municipal buildings. Other state legislatures such as Massachusetts deliberated bills requiring low-blend mandates. All of these efforts would help get biodiesel usage in home heating oil to the B5 market saturation level. “But this doesn’t mean a top limit, so if you’re in that market, there can be some room for long-term growth in some of the offshoots we’re looking at,” Huber says.
These “offshoots” include combinatory heating, air conditioning and power generation systems for single-family homes. Hot water systems utilizing heat generated from combustion of heating oil, which essentially heat water for free when the heat is on, already exist and are gaining in popularity. NORA and equipment manufacturers are looking to go one or several steps further than this. “In the heating oil industry, we essentially have a tank of fuel at someone’s home,” Huber explains. “That presents some great opportunities, one of which is trying to develop electricity to supply backup for people using heating oil. Or if electricity rates go up high enough, they can produce their own power at home. Electricity rates are going up all around the country pretty radically.” In states like Alabama, Kentucky or Tennessee, where lower-priced
New Markets
Cleaner, safer and economically competitive on a per-Btu basis, biodiesel-blended heating oil is an attractive energy choice. “In a world concerned with global warming and as a nation trying to move away from relying on the Middle East, our industry has been very receptive to Bioheat,” Huber says. According to Schuyler, “If there was ever a time to convince elected officials that we need to seriously alter our relationship with fossil fuels, it’s now. We may have reached the so-called ‘perfect energy storm’—we have high energy prices, a war that Alan Greenspan recently noted is largely about oil, and the words ‘climate change’ rolling off the lips of every serious candidate for president.”
If only 5 percent of the 10 billion gallons of heating oil consumed annually in the United States was replaced with biodiesel, this would represent a 500 million gallon market—more than the U.S. biodiesel industry produced last year. Some states already have legislation on the books requiring use of biodiesel-blended heating oil in municipal buildings. Other state legislatures such as Massachusetts deliberated bills requiring low-blend mandates. All of these efforts would help get biodiesel usage in home heating oil to the B5 market saturation level. “But this doesn’t mean a top limit, so if you’re in that market, there can be some room for long-term growth in some of the offshoots we’re looking at,” Huber says.
These “offshoots” include combinatory heating, air conditioning and power generation systems for single-family homes. Hot water systems utilizing heat generated from combustion of heating oil, which essentially heat water for free when the heat is on, already exist and are gaining in popularity. NORA and equipment manufacturers are looking to go one or several steps further than this. “In the heating oil industry, we essentially have a tank of fuel at someone’s home,” Huber explains. “That presents some great opportunities, one of which is trying to develop electricity to supply backup for people using heating oil. Or if electricity rates go up high enough, they can produce their own power at home. Electricity rates are going up all around the country pretty radically.” In states like Alabama, Kentucky or Tennessee, where lower-priced
Tennessee Valley Authority power is accessible, this might not be as attractive an option as it would be in other states. “In New England, they’re using power from either high-priced nuclear plants or high-priced oil or gas plants,” Huber says. The closer energy is made to its end user, the less that’s lost. “That is something that could make this very attractive at some point,” Huber says. NORA has an ongoing project investigating the possibility of powering air conditioning, the heat pump for which is typically run by electricity, with heating oil too, so one unit could supply both the heat and the air conditioning for the home. Biodiesel Magazine will follow these developments as they progress.
Higher-priced biodiesel, even without government usage requirements, would still command a presence in the marketplace. “Probably not as much,” Schuyler says. “But there is definitely a segment of the population, particularly in the Northeast, who are willing to purchase slightly more expensive, value-added products. On the other hand, people who are struggling financially may not be able to afford any price increase. Therefore I think one of our biggest challenges is to diversify our fuel markets, which will lead to lower costs for both traditional and alternative fuels. In other words, a healthy biodiesel market will compete directly with petroleum for market share, and that competition will be good for consumers, the economy and the environment.”
Huber says a lot of dealers market bio because they think it’s an attractive ecological product and it sets them apart as a better industry. “There’s demand for it—current demand—and even if the price for Bioheat is a bit higher, those who are running fuel distribution companies are saying, ‘I want to be a quality company that sells this type of product.’”
Ron Kotrba is a Biodiesel Magazine senior writer. Reach him at rkotrba@bbibiofuels.com or (701) 738-4962
Higher-priced biodiesel, even without government usage requirements, would still command a presence in the marketplace. “Probably not as much,” Schuyler says. “But there is definitely a segment of the population, particularly in the Northeast, who are willing to purchase slightly more expensive, value-added products. On the other hand, people who are struggling financially may not be able to afford any price increase. Therefore I think one of our biggest challenges is to diversify our fuel markets, which will lead to lower costs for both traditional and alternative fuels. In other words, a healthy biodiesel market will compete directly with petroleum for market share, and that competition will be good for consumers, the economy and the environment.”
Huber says a lot of dealers market bio because they think it’s an attractive ecological product and it sets them apart as a better industry. “There’s demand for it—current demand—and even if the price for Bioheat is a bit higher, those who are running fuel distribution companies are saying, ‘I want to be a quality company that sells this type of product.’”
Ron Kotrba is a Biodiesel Magazine senior writer. Reach him at rkotrba@bbibiofuels.com or (701) 738-4962