Perhaps you need to do a little more study.
Many byproducts of farming such as corn stover, wheat straw, rice straw, barnyard manure, etc. require only minor modification to present harvest procedures to be collected for alcohol production. For instance, have you ever observed a combine harvesting wheat and blowing the straw out the back on to the ground, a blower and chute, or even a collection cage and conveyor could easily load the straw to a truck or baler. Modification cost to a combine might be as low as a few to several thousand dollars. The payback could be as few as fifty acres harvested.
Modification to corn pickers might be slightly more expensive, but with from the ground up new construction of either (for replacement) probably would be little more expensive than existing models.
In the case of corn cobs, and rice straw, there is no increased collection costs as they are already collected in the harvest procedures, and have a negative cost as they presently require disposal such as burning, land fill, or composting.
The point with bio-mass is cellulose is a sugar, albeit a complex sugar that with out modification can not be fermented, with modifications that can be accomplished relatively inexpensively it can be fermented, hell it could be eaten as a food source, in any case it can be converted to alcohol at far less cost than producing and harvesting a crop just for fermentation.
In the case of rice straw, grass seed straw, sugar cane bagasse, municipal waste (both solid and liquid), manure, etc. it can be obtained at a negative cost. The waste product requiring disposal at costs that the producer has to pay for disposal.
Tonnage per acre of biomass far exceeds the tonnage of direct production of sugar per acre. The above mentioned crops can also be grown for alcohol production utilizing both the sugar/starch, and the cellulose at much higher production per acre.
As an example of what is possible with present technology using a different process from fermentation:
“We’re looking at 90 cents a gallon and this includes the profit paid to each farmer for delivering the baled stover to the production plant,” Russell said.
This biomass gasification process (pyrolysis) has great efficiencies, he said, noting that ethanol plants get about 100 gallons of ethanol from every ton of corn, while this system gets 214 gallons of ethanol from every ton of corn stover. Total corn acreage in the US is about 81,000,000 acres, multiplied by 214 is 17,334,000,000 gallons of ethanol just from corn stover.
Preliminary data show a $30 million to $35 million cost to build a biomass plant.
Production per year would be about 16,000,000 gallons of ethanol at a production cost including feed costs of $0.90 per gallon, at that rate payback on construction cost would be on the order of 3 years. Translate that to crude costs of about $1.43 per gallon @ $60 a barrel. Even at a reduced energy of about 20% less for ethanol, and add the cost of refining the crude to gasoline and the ethanol cost per gallon is far better than just competitive, and there are no balance of payment problems.
The above planned plant (September 26, 2005)
meadvilletribune.com
This plant could be duplicated in any corn growing county in the Midwest, the process could also be used for wheat straw, rice straw, hemp hurds (the biomass left after the fiber is extracted for the textile industry), etc..
Specialized crops such as miscanthus, already used as an energy crop in Europe because it has a production capability of 15 tons of biomass per acre, which converts to about $4,500 worth of ethanol per acre.
Converting food stocks to fuel is at best a temporary solution. Converting inedible biomass makes both environmental sense and economic sense. The US imports 12,000,000 barrels of oil daily, or 4,350,000,000 B/Y at a present cost of 265 billion per year, applying just a portion of that yearly cost to biomass conversion would eliminate that portion of the balance of payment deficit.
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