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- President Carter’s energy solutions 1977
Tag Archives: biomass
60 minutes promotes biomass scam
Preface. Hey 60 minutes, do some fact checking first. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, … Continue reading
Power density of biomass, wind, & solar take too much land to replace fossil fuels
Volumetric versus specific energy density for selected energy carriers. Source: Palmer, G. 2020. Energy storage & civilization: a systems approach. Springer. Preface. Vaclav Smil writes “The fact that wind, solar, and biomass have incredibly low energy density per square meter … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Biomass, Coal, Hydropower, Natural Gas, Oil
Tagged alternative energy, biodiesel, biomass, coal, ethanol, natural gas, oil, renewable energy
1 Comment
From wood to fossil fueled civilizations — the greatest tragedy mankind will ever know
Preface. These are my notes from this book about how we went from an organic sustainable economy to a temporary fossil-fueled one. It’s one of the few books I’ve found that explains what life was like before fossil fuels in … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Life Before Oil, Supply Chains
Tagged agriculture, biomass, coal, food, industrial revolution, transition, wood
5 Comments
Vaclav Smil on wood
[ I’ve extracted bits about wood from Smil’s book about materials below, read the book for the larger context. Enormous amounts of wood were used in former civilizations with much smaller populations than today, so it’s clear we can’t go … Continue reading
Why studies come up with different Energy Returned on Invest (EROI) results: can it be fixed?
[ There are many issues with biofuels beyond their trivial to negative energy return on investment (EROI). In Peak Soil I point out that current industrial farming techniques are destroying topsoil about 15 times faster than pre-fossil fuel economies — … Continue reading
Posted in Biofuels, Biomass EROI, Charles A. S. Hall
Tagged biomass, EROEI, EROI, ethanol
Comments Off on Why studies come up with different Energy Returned on Invest (EROI) results: can it be fixed?
How burning biomass made us human
[ This is a book review of Wrangham’s “Catching Fire: How cooking made us human”. Fire enabled us to have larger brains from the increased calories in cooked food, held carnivores at bay, killed bacteria, and gave us many other … Continue reading
Department of Energy algal biofuels roadmap: A summary
Preface. If you really want to get into the weeds about the details of why algal fuels have failed to produce biofuels, read this 140 page paper. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: … Continue reading