New Biofuel Resource Overlooks Second Law Of Thermodynamics — but what’s new?

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, October 9, 2007 (ENS) – American cars and
trucks may soon be fueled with sorghum. Not used widely as a food grain
in the United States, sorghum is one of the five top cereal crops in
the world, along with wheat, oats, corn, and barley. It was cultivated
in Egypt in ancient times, and Africa still is the largest producer of
sorghum today.

Now, energy crop company Ceres, Inc. and the Texas Agricultural
Experiment Station of the Texas A&M University system have entered
into a joint research and commercial agreement for high biomass sorghum.

These plants are not designed to produce grain, although they do
produce it. The real value is that sorghum can be bred to produce vast
amounts of biomass, the raw material for cellulosic biofuels made from
stems, stalks and leaves.

Scientists Develop Fast-Growing Sorghum for Biofuel

The trouble here is, biofuels are not renewable resources!
They all require water (non-renewable in its fresh state), soil (which
becomes depleted) and fertilizer (from where? Petroleum!), and their production requires immense quantities of energy from…where?  And at what cost in pollution?

What we refer to as “energy sources” are not, in fact, sources.  They are convenient ways of transferring energy from one point to another.

The only truly renewable sources of energy are solar — in the
form of sunlight, wind and tides, nuclear (some other sun, billions of
years ago, but still solar), and geothermal (see preceding). Even
petroleum is stored solar energy in the form of transformed plant
material.

Hydropower requires the transport of water (via solar energy) to
the right places at the right times, and it must then be allowed to
flow. There is no guarantee that either requirement is going to be met
in the immediate future. There is, on the other hand, every reason to
believe that rain- and snowfall patterns will be disrupted (if not
seriously or completely curtailed). The glaciers are all melting, and
there is some question if there will even be water for most of the
Earth’s great rivers in the centuries to come.

The only truly free source of energy is solar.  The problem, from the point of view of the big energy corporations, is that efficient use of solar would involve local production, since electrical transmission over long distances can result in up to 25% energy loss.  This would obviously result in dissolution of the monopoly that they hold on electrical power, and their profit margins.

Until this is realized, and the necessary steps taken, we will continue with energy “solutions” that fatten the pockets of corporate bigwigs, while making matters worse.

If we don’t get our act together soon, it will prove we don’t deserve the planet.