Comments
KiwasiGames t1_j1otprq wrote
I think we should tread carefully on this.
One of the huge advantages of oil extraction is that it has a low land use foot print. Using oil for chemical feedstocks generally doesn’t pump out much carbon (beyond energy use). So at this stage it still seems to be sensible.
On the other hand plant based feedstocks suck up a lot of land. This is land that can no longer be used for food production. Farmers switching land to biofuel was implicated as one of the causes of the 2008/09 food price crisis (although not the major one).
From a technical point it’s generally straight forward to dial up these processes on the factory side. But the land use side is hard to get around.
pattydickens t1_j1owex0 wrote
Pests become a factor as well. A lot of automobile manufacturers switched to plant based wiring insulation, and now mice and other rodents are known to destroy the wiring because of the materials being food essentially. I'm not pro petroleum by any means, but stuff like this seems to get overlooked until it's a big problem.
zz502chevyII t1_j1ox6tp wrote
As an automotive repair shop owner, I hate this new wiring. Mice climb into spaces that we can't reach and chew up wires.
Likesdirt t1_j1p0ei8 wrote
These plant based solvents are already available as byproducts from paper mills and orange juice factories. Furfural comes from oats and was used as rocket fuel for a moment in the 1950's.
But none of these compounds is present as more than a trace in their sources. There won't be any orange trees planted as a peel oil crop with hopes for a vigorous juice market, or orange peel recycling bins.
-businessskeleton- t1_j1owz8t wrote
Would this be where we would need to create factory farming inside large facilities? Or is the scale so big, even this isn't viable?
Likesdirt t1_j1oy2ak wrote
Factory greenhouses are huge energy consumers, and really only viable to make luxury products. Strawberries and greens, not oats and trees.
IceFinancialaJake t1_j1pjddr wrote
Mate. There is so much land going fallow because the big corporations haven't got them locked up or isn't funny. Miles and miles of farmland locked away behind dubious deals and crap luck. Farmers being paid to dump their produce because it's cheaper/better for the supermarkets budget.
Land use isn't a non-problem. It's just not a show stopper. It's a matter of getting it going and showing theirs money to be made and bam your head will spin at how fast the mega corps get it off the ground
polymernerd t1_j1qlpg6 wrote
Polymer Chemist here with an interest in greener chemistry. I can kinda talk on this. I did contract R&D for a company looking to develop a plant based feedstock for polyurethanes, and I can share some insights.
You are absolutely correct: turning arable land from food to chemical production can cause issues. But then there are so many inefficiencies in our food chain. The USDA estimates that 30-40% of all food produced gets wasted. There have been plans/talks of using more vertical farming and hydroponics to reduce the physical footprint, and some vertical farms are in development.
There has also been a big push in my field to use more microorganisms to produce chemicals and polymers. These bio reactors take up significantly less space than traditional farming, and there has been success in modifying bacterial to make small molecules we produce from petroleum refining.
Someone else mentioned that there are issues with these various terpenes have low volatility, which is also true. I would mention that they may not be the best solvents for everything, they can absolutely replace petroleum based chemicals in other applications. Think as to how many cleaners have some variation of “Citrus Powered” in their marketing, and they work better than traditional solvents.
I feel that as a public, we assume that a new technology will replace all of the old. That is not necessarily the case. We now have more options for solving a problem, and some of these solutions may involve lower energy consumption.
Pascalwb t1_j1plq3y wrote
yea, this biofuel stuff etc. wastes so much land and resources. We already have problem with growing food.
Glasnerven t1_j1poxtj wrote
Not so much with growing it, as with distributing it. We have a lot of food waste, and a noticeable amount of farmland going to growing foods that can be sold to the rich for higher profits instead of fed to the poor to keep them fed.
TheIncarnated t1_j1q0enr wrote
But we also have better ways of growing food. Vertical farming is a thing. With grow lights and everything. You can seal the grow rooms off from pests and more but no one is talking about that.
Hydroponics is a solution here and can be upscaled for manufacturing.
Also, we don't have a food problem. We have a distribution problem. The world makes 3x over the food the entire world needs. But there are some bad crop yields here and there as well.
Chef_Chantier t1_j1poz3l wrote
We can always use waste ressources, like eucalyptus oil that would be left as waste from the paper pulp industry (eucalyptus is a widely used plant for paper pulp, especially in southern europe where it has completely taken over portuguese tree plantations), or limonene from the citrus juice industry. Not saying it would be enough to replace all use of petroleum-based solvents, but it's a start.
berationalhereplz t1_j1roqnq wrote
The percentage of these compounds by mass of the plant is usually very very small, as it is, they are extremely expensive (maybe ~100-1000 times more expensive) to purchase. So to make it economical you would need tons and tons of land and tons and tons of water.
Chef_Chantier t1_j1s5t1l wrote
they're not that expensive. limonene is sold by the quart online, and it's more expensive than white spirits, but totally reasonable price for hobbyists or domestic uses.
theregoesanother t1_j1pt6xx wrote
Until we can find huge underground caverns to build it...
danielravennest t1_j1qi2zb wrote
> On the other hand plant based feedstocks suck up a lot of land.
Seaweed. Already grown on a 35 million ton per year basis.
[deleted] t1_j1ploix wrote
[removed]
[deleted] t1_j1pnzqo wrote
[removed]
Staerebu t1_j1pt3st wrote
It's already possible to synthesise crude oil with CO2, hydrogen from an electrolyser and power from a solar plant 1,000 miles away.
It's just not as cheap as oil from wells and shale.
Neophoys t1_j1pj8bb wrote
To those concerned about the issue of land usage: Monoterpenoids like limonene are great candidates for heterologous expression in bacteria, yeasts and even microalgae. As such the land usage issue is not as big a concern. If one uses microalgae you can even retain the many upsides of photosynthetic organism instead of the costly feeding of other microbes. It's still not at the level of commercial viability afaik, but the research in that area is promising.
azdood85 t1_j1p0vsn wrote
Sounds great until you find a koala trying to eat your computer.
wackywavingarmgumby t1_j1pgvve wrote
Koalas don't even eat leaves that aren't on branches, they're not smart enough to eat anything else.
nhavar t1_j1pbmhb wrote
Does anyone ever think "oh so we'll use new plant based petroleum to replace old plant based petroleum..."
Let's also talk about soil erosion and the loss of topsoil and the toxic chemicals we're putting into the waterways as we're farming all of these new miracle crops. What will fundamentally change about our lifestyles that will fix this dumb cycle.
For instance we're sending perfectly good waste material to the dump that could be grade A fertilizer because it's cheaper to throw it away and use natural gas to make fertilizer. We're putting millions of bodies in caskets or incinerating them and keeping the remains in urns as mementos instead of them going back into the earth as nutrients. Same for animals and animal byproducts. Just use a bunch of petroleum energy to burn off the remains instead of figuring out how to turn it back to the soil. It's expedient and cheaper but slowly robs the earth of it's nutrients to just create heat waste.
rlf16 t1_j1ptha3 wrote
> we’ll use new plant based petroleum to replace old plant based petroleum
Well yea, the whole point is the difference in the length of the carbon cycle and the fact that a lot of fossil fuels were created by processes that can’t exist anymore because microorganisms are much better at breaking down dead wood now, so by burning that old stuff we’re essentially releasing CO2 from permanent carbon sinks.
Not saying there aren’t major issues with biofuels, but there are good reasons why “young peutroleum” can be much better than fossil fuels.
nhavar t1_j1qvk9y wrote
I'm not necessarily knocking new biofuels as much as the moniker "plant based". They're both "plant based" just on a different cycle time. The more accurate name would be "farmed biofuel" or "short cycle biofuel". I think people also mistakenly associate "plant based" with healthier for you and that's not exactly the case either. Hence why I pointed out a missing ingredient in the lifecycle of plant based things; Getting nutrients back into the soil we keep robbing. By no means should we let perfect become the enemy of good, but it is something we need to start focusing on quickly otherwise the demand on the earth for food AND fuel AND medicine AND everything else is going to leave it baren and unusable.
rlf16 t1_j1r0lc8 wrote
Oh totally agree about land management, it’s a mess. But if you compare the long term environmental damage of practices like tar sand extraction, fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction, farming practices has a lot of room for improvement, unlike the former. And increasing atmospheric CO2 will accelerate top soil loss by droughts and other extreme weather, so keeping more of it in the ground is still a positive for that issue.
I’m aware that growing conventional plants for biofuel isn’t scalable, but low-land area forms such as algae tanks could be promising for some uses.
Ultimately hydrocarbon use needs to be heavily reduced. But if we can use short-cycle hydrocarbons as a temporary replacement so that we can leave more coal, oil and gas in the ground, that’d be great. Especially coal is never, ever going to be created again in quantities that’ll have a significant impact on reducing atmospheric CO2 ppm. once it is out of the ground and released into the atmosphere, the carbon will have to be sequestered again by other means. And it’s dirty af.
“Plant based” might be a bit of a PR spin, but if it helps people that aren’t very knowledgeable about the issues to see it more positively than “fossil based”, I don’t mind it. It’s not just a different cycle period, it’s about keeping as much CO2 as possible sequestered underground before it’s too late. But yeah biofuels are not some kind of panacea by any means
Chef_Chantier t1_j1poqer wrote
Still waiting for limonene to finally replace white spirits in every hardware store. We have tons and tons of citrus peels from the juicing industry, i'd bet there's enough to produce a decent amount of more eco-friendly alternative solvents to white spirits, even if they're sold at a premium. A lot of people would be fine paying a bit more, if it means it's non-carcinogenic and smells like freaking lemons and not poison.
mandingoBBC t1_j1oy7z5 wrote
Coconut oil for sex lube
acatnamedrupert t1_j1provu wrote
The funny thing about all of this is that pre WW1 much of the chemical industry worked with tree sap or tree resin as it was easier to fraction and process in the older chemistry plants than crude oil was.
There was a whole industry [in Europe at least] where people collected resin from their forests, lightly scoring their trees similar to how it is still done in Asia with rubber trees.
AutoModerator t1_j1ori2q wrote
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
heard_enough_crap t1_j1pc74k wrote
We fought a war against the Emu's and lost. Now you want to take on the Koala's and DropBears? Insane.
Ignorant_Slut t1_j1pq6fa wrote
Koalas are too stupid to function, we got this.
I'm worried about what news like this will do to our logging industry though. Our LULUCF numbers are the only thing we can fall back on for emissions improvements, we'd be well and truly emitting out our asses if we borked that.
joelex8472 t1_j1rzhh6 wrote
Just how much can a Koala bear!!!
SOwED t1_j1tfd04 wrote
Worked for several years on a process to produce ethyl acetate from corn ethanol. Only renewable sourced paint thinner in existence.
BurntVomit t1_j1p802l wrote
Everyone want to use plants but we have destroyed our topsoil. Bad. Extra. Gonna need soil free plants that thrive on fake water.
gdogg121 t1_j1pjh2f wrote
And we'll never hear about it again.
realDonaldTrummp t1_j1pndpn wrote
No they can’t. The energy math literally doesn’t add up, because of thermodynamics. What a shockingly bad article.
FogletGilet t1_j1owfmn wrote
There are two aspects that electronics maker will probably be worried about: energy use (these are much harder to evaporate than most currently used solvent), purity (it is easy to extract limonene at 99% for degreasing in mechanics that's much more difficult at the ppb levels that electronic manufacturing will require). But yes a lot of home solvents used for cleaning or hobbies could also be replaced by those and that would also help.