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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 08 2017, @11:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the apparently-the-coca-plant-doesn't-count dept.

Scientists have confirmed that Miscanthus, long speculated to be the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass in the U.S. using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction in plant science, climate change, and ecology research.

"To understand yield trends and variation across the country for our major food crops, extensive databases are available—notably those provided by the USDA Statistical Service," said lead author Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. "But there was nowhere to go if you wanted to know about biomass crops, particularly those that have no food value such as Miscanthus, switchgrass, willow trees, etc."

To fill this gap, researchers at the Energy Biosciences Institute at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology created BETYdb, an open-source repository for physiological and yield data that facilitates bioenergy research. The goal of this database is not only to store the data but to make the data widely available and usable.

"In addition to providing an easy-to-use, web-based interface, the database supports automated data collection and big data analysis," said first author David LeBauer, a research scientist at Illinois. "Today the BETYdb database contains more than 40,000 open-access records.By making all of this data open access, we hope that researchers can identify new plants and best practices for biomass production. We've been using these data not only to summarize what has been observed in field trials, but also to identify new crops and predict productivity in new environments."

More Information can be found at Global Change Biology Bioenergy, DOI: 10.1111/gcbb.12420


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:53PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:53PM (#451030)

    I'd go a little further and actually oppose the position. There is not a food shortage, there is a food distribution problem. What's the primary raw material used in distribution? (Hint: Energy.)

    The distribution problem can also be solved by political and economic methods - politics to stop the abuse of supply/demand that concentrates wealth in the hands of those who control distribution, and straight economics to stop the dis-incentives to grow locally, reducing the need for energy for distribution.

    Politics / economics is the Ouroboros of today's world, if you can untangle and tame that: kudos. In the meantime, I would rather grow sufficient energy alongside the food to be able to distribute the food to where it is needed instead of draining the supply of non-renewable resources.

    Wind kills birds. Solar uses large amounts of land, not always non-arable. The evils of hydro are well known. All of these require extensive distribution networks. Producing bio-energy alongside food actually makes a lot of sense. As does population control.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @06:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @06:57PM (#451126)

    > ... I would rather grow sufficient energy alongside the food to be able to distribute the food to where it is needed ...

    We toured a local dairy farm a couple of years ago. ~100 cows and they also raise soybeans which make up part of the cow feed. But straight soy isn't a great diet for cows, so he and his cousin invested in a bean press. It runs off a tractor PTO and separates out the soy oil. Without even bothering to take the next steps to biodiesel, they mix the soy oil 50-50 with diesel fuel and run all their tractors on that. And the soy mash is better for the cows (so they told us).

  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:02PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:02PM (#451147) Journal

    Wind kills birds.

    More to the point, wind isn't a fuel. You can't collect it into one place, fill a ship|train|plane|truck|car with it, and do something useful with that ship|train|plane|truck|car that now has energy stored for when needed later.

    Solar uses large amounts of land, not always non-arable.

    And solar isn't a fuel. You can't collect it into one place, fill a ship|train|plane|truck|car with it, and do something useful with that ship|train|plane|truck|car that now has energy stored for when needed later.

    The evils of hydro are well known.

    Are they? I am drawing a blank here. Flooding downstream? Annoying eco-nutjobs and, to a much, much lesser degree, affecting habitats for wildlife?

    But in any event, hydro isn't a fuel. You can't collect it into one place, fill a ship|train|plane|truck|car with it, and do something useful with that ship|train|plane|truck|car that now has energy stored for when needed later.

    (And I'd submit that batteries aren't fuel. The energy from the wind/sun/water can generate immediate electricity which can impart a charge to batteries, but batteries are called "storage" only because they are the least terrible known way to hang on to at least some amount of straight electricity; they run down on their own, whether you are using them or not; that's in the helpful vein of storage, sort of, but it's not really storage. It isn't fuel.)

    But fuel (switchgrass, corn, wood) grows out of the ground. Renewable, usable.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 08 2017, @11:57PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday January 08 2017, @11:57PM (#451241)

      Wind solar and hydro "feed the grid" - not as convenient as liquid fuel when you want to run a conventional vehicle like a truck or a ship, but good enough for trains...

      Evils of hydro: it consumes dry land, usually fertile and populated dry land, but always floods an area that used to be not underwater. In areas that need a cushion in their fresh water supply, it's less evil, but often it is consuming good farmland and established towns/culture in exchange for electricity - then you can get into the ecological changes of transforming established flowing river ecologies into a stagnant lake ecologies - maybe you can stock the lake with trout, maybe not - either way it's taking biodiversity that developed over thousands to millions of years and replacing it with a radically different base ecosystem that's more or less starting from scratch with a handful of pioneer species. Oh, and eco-nutjobs hate dams too, to the point that they're getting many of them de-commissioned, so they must be pretty annoying eco-nutjobs to pull that off.

      Biofuels are basically solar power converted to chemical storage - and I'd much rather develop them than solar panels and wind turbines that are labor and resource intense to install, maintain, and connect to a grid infrastructure to charge batteries and other inefficient NIMBY nonsense.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @04:48AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @04:48AM (#451322)

        > Evils of hydro: it consumes dry land...

        A big dam and artificial lake are true in many hydro installations, but not all. For example Niagara Falls hydro just takes water from above the Falls. There is a small pond that stores water overnight (the falls almost stops when tourists are gone) and then is used to make power during the day.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @12:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @12:13AM (#451251)

    It has been mentioned here multiple times that windows and cats are orders of magnitude more significant.
    Chart 1 [wikipedia.org]
    Chart 2 [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [thinkprogress.org]

    Solar uses large amounts of land

    Next time you fly into a city, look down at all the unused roof area that could be collecting solar energy.

    All of these require extensive distribution networks

    No, they don't.
    It was common for farmers to have individual windmills over a century ago.

    Rooftop solar and batteries have been available to make households independent of the grid for years and years.
    They do this on coastal islands all the time.

    There are lots of folks who would like to break from the grid but local ordinances or state laws bought by incumbent businesses forbid it.

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