Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The efficient, low-water process could also help produce ethanol for hand sanitiser, which is in high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an article published this week in the Journal of Cleaner Production, University of Sydney agronomist Associate Professor Daniel Tan with international and Australian colleagues have analysed the potential to produce bioethanol (biofuel) from the agave plant, a high-sugar succulent widely grown in Mexico to make the alcoholic drink tequila.
The agave plant is now being grown as a biofuel source on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland by MSF Sugar, and it promises some significant advantages over existing sources of bioethanol such as sugarcane and corn, Associate Professor Tan said.
"Agave is an environmentally friendly crop that we can grow to produce ethanol-based fuels and healthcare products," said Associate Professor Tan from the Sydney Institute of Agriculture.
"It can grow in semi-arid areas without irrigation; and it does not compete with food crops or put demands on limited water and fertiliser supplies. Agave is heat and drought tolerant and can survive Australia's hot summers."
-- submitted from IRC
Xiaoyu Yan, Kendall R. Corbin, Rachel A. Burton, Daniel K.Y. Tan. Agave: A promising feedstock for biofuels in the water-energy-food-environment (WEFE) nexus. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2020; 261: 121283 DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121283
(Score: 3, Touché) by MostCynical on Thursday April 02 2020, @11:04AM (1 child)
Original [youtube.com]
Live [youtube.com]
Potential agave farmers will just want to know if there are subsidies available [taxpayer.net]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @01:53PM
eh, needs more cowbell...
But seriously, thanks for those links!
(Score: 4, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday April 02 2020, @12:26PM (10 children)
There is a substantial problem with this strategy; scale. Agave is harvested by hand and it is an astoundingly difficult job. If someone builds a tractor attachment to harvest them you could enable the technology.
If you're interested in Ethanol production, there is a readable hippy book on the topic Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century [amzn.to](Amazon Affiliate link). A big portion of the book is available as "Look inside".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @02:09PM (4 children)
Interesting. If you harvest agave like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJQlQkumrvU [youtube.com] it will take a pretty sophisticated "tractor attachment", perhaps all the initial slashing is to remove thorns before accessing the center of the plant? This one shows taking down the whole plant to get to the "heart", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfNxo2vkdUU [youtube.com] so it is slightly simpler.
Looks more like a job for an AI + robot arm attachment with cameras, if this was going to be industrialized in some other desert for ethanol production.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @04:53PM (3 children)
Now imagine this in Australia. Where every insect, spider and snake will kill you. The Agave harvesters are not going to be lining up for work.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday April 02 2020, @07:08PM (2 children)
Those may only be slightly more toxic than the rattlesnakes, gila monsters scorpions, and spiders of Mexico. Australia does not have a monopoly on deadly critters and bugs.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @10:00PM (1 child)
And in Australia you won't stumble into any drug running cartels out in the middle of the dessert ...
(Score: 4, Funny) by gawdonblue on Thursday April 02 2020, @10:23PM
Yeah, but you might run into Max, and he's mad!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday April 02 2020, @02:58PM (4 children)
A secondary problem is that mass monocropping a landscape is anything but environmentally friendly.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:21PM (1 child)
But TFA says
Isn't there plenty of land in the middle parts of Australia?
Would not tequila be an important enough health care product to warrant some tolerable amount of monocropping?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by Jay on Friday April 03 2020, @01:08PM
In my experience, tequila is what necessitates healthcare, not something that cures ills.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:27PM
A Tertiary problem: Aren't the Aussies more than a wee bit 'funny' about non-native species...I do seem to recall rabid 'wadjela' antipodean environmentalists, without a hint of irony, talking about ridding Australia of all non-native species..
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday April 03 2020, @01:02AM
Agreed. Figuring out how to sustainably multicrop is another market opportunity.
Sustainably in this case also includes economic sustainability.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Thursday April 02 2020, @02:24PM
Everybody gets, wait for it, ethanol fueled. Greta is happy.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:15PM (7 children)
You'll get a lot more sugar and thus ethanol from traditional crops.
If Australia can't grow these, it should just import the ethanol from places that can do it efficiently. Australia is not blessed with tons of farmland.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dwilson on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:46PM (6 children)
Having skimmed an article (from another website, possibly not the same one linked in the summery here) about this, agave yields roughly 30% less ethanol-per-hectare than sugarcane. On the face of it, that blows the 'more efficient' claim right out of the water.
On the subject of water, and as you noted, Australia doesn't have a lot of it, or the decent farmland it enables. Pissing away what little they do have on irrigating a fuel crop would be pretty dumb, so if agave can grow there without irrigation, it does make a sort of sense to develop harvesting technology and make a go of it.
Becoming self-sufficient in fuel production and getting away from a requirement to import it will do wonders for their foreign policy options, along with the knock-on benefits for the rest of us once the technology is mature and starts being exported.
- D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @05:15PM (1 child)
I took a vacation to Brazil in the 1980s. The streets had a slightly sweet odor rather than the usual exhaust odor. That is because the automobiles, in the name of energy independence, ran on domestically produce ethanol rather than gasoline. Brazil has a large tropical region that is suited to growing sugar cane, the only crop that even barely makes sense as a source of ethanol fuel. I believe this initiative was started after the 1970s OPEC led fuel shocks. Well, not many years after I witnessed their transportation miracle, gasoline got cheaper and Brazil started its transition back to gasoline.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @05:23PM
I will add that Brazil is a major oil producer, and its production went sharply upward in the 1980s and is much higher today. So the ethanol as a fuel source didn't make sense anymore.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday April 03 2020, @01:07AM (3 children)
The water requirements for the arid-adapted agave are significantly smaller than tropical sugar cane; 10 inches of water per year vs. 50 inches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @02:32AM
It's not just the amount, it's also when. As a desert plant agave would be a lot more tolerant of nothing for most of the year then 10 inches of rain in a week.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday April 04 2020, @01:39AM (1 child)
better than trying to grow cotton [timalderman.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:19PM
If ever a plant needed to be re-engineered from the ground up, it's cotton. From a sustainability perspective it's an absolute shitshow.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday April 03 2020, @03:58AM
I've been known to get highly energetic when fueled by tequila.
But, oh god, the morning after.