On Thu, 10 Sep 1998, Jim Choate wrote: (risking /dev/nullification "is that like jury nullification?")
Forwarded message:
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 11:26:47 -0600 (MDT) From: Jim Burnes <jvb@ssds.com> Subject: Renewable Energy Stuff (was citizenship silliness)
Apparently hemp hurd gassification yields a fairly sizeable, renewable amount of energy per acre. Lemme see if I have the reference....
Historically Hemp (Cannabis Sativa L.) has been a very high yielding plant (Haney 1975). Assuming that hemp produces up to 4 tons/acre seed plus 10 tons/acre stalks, Table 1 shows how many gallons of liquid fuel import could be saved by each of the following proven biomass fuel conversion routes.
Table 1. Conversion technologies for hemp stalks and hemp oil
CONVERSION CONVERSION GASOLINE EQUIV TECHNOLOGY EFF - % GAL/ACRE
1 Ethanol from fermentation of hydrolyzed cellulose 20 200 2 Digestion of whole stalks to methane 50 500 3 Producer gas from thermal gasification of stalks 85 1000 4 Methanol from syngas from gasification of stalks 65 750 5 Methanol from pyrolysis of stalks 3 30
OIL SEEDS - 4 tons/acre
6 Hemp Seed oil from Seeds, no conversion 100 300 7 Biobioesel premium diesel fuel from hemp seed 90 270 oil combined chemically with methanol
You're going to seriously claim that 1 gallon of hemp oil is equivalent to 3 gallons of gasoline? I don't think so. I've seen hemp burn and it don't burn anywhere near that efficiently.
I think you misunderstood. They are claiming "gasoline equivalent gallons/acre" -- not that 1 gallon of hemp oil = 3 gallons of gasoline. And were not talking about "burning" hemp in that sense. In this particular case were talking about hemp-based biodiesel.
I also notice it doesn't mention what it costs to raise that 4 tons/acre...
Raising a full acre of hemp in that matter is something I don't have the data on. However, hemp is widely known as a low-maintenance crop -- that translates little to no fertilizer. After that we have the price of the land/month, servicing loans on the farm equipment, labor costs, taxes, energy, water etc. Typical business overhead. And for that 1000 galgas eq/acre. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary compared to the overhead in the oil industry. Although on a cost/gallon overhead I don't know. Obviously this would take a least one growth season. ObCrypto: In the case of TEOTWAWKI from Y2K, we are going to need energy to run our computers and crypto on. This might also be important to the people wanting to run a packet radio relay net. (even though the then non-existant FCC might not like them using crypto on a packet link) I copied Tom Reed and Agua Das on this since they can address the tech matters more thoroughly than I can. Other than that we should probably take this off list. Jim