Currently browsing from alexandrite.app an alternative lemmy frontend.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • I wanted to post this as reply on slashdot but I can’t be bothered to email for an account.

    If someone can produce a carbon neutral synthesized fuel at a price even close to that of petroleum fuels then they will have all the money. A lot of people are looking to do just that.

    Comstock fuels / Bioleum is a company planning to build a plant to convert biomass into fuel products. Their first plant is supposed to have an annual capacity of 400k barrels of gas gallon equivalents at an initial capital cost of ~300m. Supposedly they could produce ~3500gge(gas gallon equivalents) per acre of land with the right crops grown. I hope if/when they get it going that they don’t just sell it to the oil companies for greenwashing efforts, but instead actually try sell it to the end-user. The executives of it seem keen on integrating with the oil industry which seems kinda questionable from a business standpoint since they will both be fuel suppliers and therefore competitors.

    The pricing will be key but that is unknown at this point. But I did see that their planned operating income was about $2 per gge which might be competitive with fossil fuels depending on the expenses for feed crop, labor, and maintenance.



  • Tbf I still wouldn’t call it “violent,” violent and peaceful are not a binary choice, things can be not peaceful but also not violent. I’ll accept that wasting tea isn’t peaceful, but you’ll never convince me it’s violent.

    Yep, That’s like the point I made in another comment. I only originally implied that the tea party wasn’t peaceful(using sarcasm), that doesn’t mean I thought it was violent.

    At this point I’m suspecting you’re just criminally British and see assault against tea as the highest form of treason, or should I say teason.

    Is what I get for not putting the /s with the obvious sarcasm? smh

    If it makes you happy to imagine me as an ye old British tea enjoyer outraged about tea parties 300 years ago go for it lol.









  • Harvesting, transportation, fermentation are high co2 emitters

    They don’t have to be. They are currently because equipment and vehicles mostly run on gasoline. If the farm equipment and fuel transporters were modified to run on the ethanol it would be co2 neutral or somewhat co2 negative as the co2 harvested by the plants would be stored for later release when burning the fuel or fermenting before burning.

    Heating for fermentation and distilling could also be powered by co2 neutral biomass such as crop byproducts or well managed wood forests. Usually fertilizer is less necessary with organic and permaculture growing practices since the natural diversity of plants’ keeps the soil healthy and well nourished.

    Land owners making ethanol precursors would want high yield crops.

    Corn is actually one of the lower yield corps per acre when grown for ethanol. It averages around 350 gallons per acre. Crops such as sugar cane, sugar beets, sorghum, cassava, cattails and even natural prairie grasses all produce more than that per acre.

    Corn is used so widely for ethanol in the US because of all the government subsidies keeping its price artificially low.

    Well managed plant fuel is definitely better for the environment than fossil fuels. Brazil has been running most of its cars on ethanol grown from the byproducts of sugar cane production since they forced the carmakers there to adopt their engines to run it in response to the 1970s oil price shock.







  • That could be but I feel like good propaganda does use other stories and narratives to boost its persuasive power. IF it was due to risk assessments then they should put that in the article. I feel like if they had solid proof, they would be willing to actually share that proof with the public rather than just hearsay that these stories have been.

    If there was evidence of it being China, I would think they would be a lot less subtle about it then running articles about sus components without mentioning the connection Iberian incident. Something more direct like ‘Iberian outage caused by kill switches in Chinese solar equipment’ rather than running separate stories and leaving it to the reader to connect the stories on their own.

    That’s what makes it suspicious too me, too much fearmongering and too little substance and facts in the articles.