Hemp Is Not
An Alternative Fuel.
The hemp-istas start from their desire to
legalize cannabis, and proceed to rather convoluted
arguments. I don't object to cannabis legalization,
on purely practical grounds, though I have
some difficulty in seeing cannabis as a great
freedom, rather than a small vice. I would certainly agree
that cannabis is less destructive than distilled spirits.
However, I doubt that hemp would make a very good
fuel-stock.
If you leave land to its own devices for a few years,
it does not revert to hemp. In most parts of
the United States, it reverts to trees (depending on
region, varying proportions of Oak, Maple, Beech, Pine,
Aspen, Spruce, etc. ). On the great plains,
the land reverts to tallgrass. Unlike a cultivated
cropfield, the wildland is not a monoculture-- it has a
little of this and a little of that. If you walk through a
pasture-type-field and look closely, you can easily
pick out a dozen different species, and the same applies for
a woodlot. The natural seeding process carries
seeds for miles, and a process of natural selection
operates, favoring all kinds of synergistic relations. The
one-species monoculture crop is a kind of market distortion,
reflecting the need to produce a standard grain that a
trader on the Corn Exchange, who has never got the soil
of the land on his boots, can buy and sell.
Methanol is sometimes called wood alcohol, because it
was first discovered as a byproduct of the making of charcoal
from wood. People traditionally burn wood
for fuel, and the charcoal kiln is simply a modification of
this. The charcoal-burner took the customary fuel of his time and
place, whatever that was, and used it to make pure
carbon for metal-smelting. When coal became the
dominant fuel, the kiln was re-designed to
burn off the impurities of coal, and became a coking
oven. Both methanol and pure carbon (charcoal, coke) are
simply the result of quenching the combustion process
in midstream. Methanol and carbon can be made
from anything which will burn. They are not primary
fuels in their own right, but intermediate energy carriers,
equivalent to electricity. Nowadays, I might add, the
ascendant form of steelmaking is the electric-arc furnace.
The latest development involves microwaving iron ore.
Major coal deposits were formed about four hundred million
years ago, at a time when the world was comparatively
swampy, and dead small plants tended to accumulate to a
considerable depth in the form of organic muck, or
peat. Over geological time, peat got compressed, first into
lignite, and then into coal. In swampy areas,
people traditionally don't cut wood for fuel--
they cut peat instead. On a larger scale, the
Irish electric authority runs some of its power plants on peat.
What people do not generally do is to cut small plants of a
particular species for fuel, because that is
extremely labor-intensive.
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Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute and Alberta Farm
Machinery Research Centre, "Using Straw as a Farm
Heating Fuel" (Research Update 719, 1995). This
article describes using straw-- a byproduct of grain
production-- for fuel. Straw has a fuel value, per pound,
roughly comparable to wood or lignite, and about half
of that of coal. This system works economically
because the combine-harvester has to cut the entire
grain stalk to feed it into the thresher unit, and the
spent straw is deposited in a compact windrow,
where it can be easily gathered up. It would not
work if the fuel use of straw had to bear the
full costs of production.
http://www.pami.ca/pdfs/reports_reasearch_updates/using_straw_as_a_farm_heating_fuel_719.pdf
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Presumably hay, the most nearly comparable crop to hemp
which is grown in its own right, would have a roughly
comparable heat value, and the going rate for hay is
about a hundred dollars a ton (to the farmer), or, in terms of
fuel value, about five to ten times the price of coal. The
probable sources of fuel for methanol will be substantially
the same kinds of fuels which are used to make electricity,
especially, for the time being, coal, which is at present
the single largest source of electricity.
More fundamentally, electricity is in the ascendant.
Interesting new transportation systems will naturally run on
electricity. Let me give you an example. This new
volcano in Iceland will presumably be erupting, off and on,
for a year or more. The practical effect
is to put European aviation back thirty
years or so, to the days when airplanes were at the mercy of
the weather. When the weather was bad, the
flights simply had to wait until it improved. Railroads, on
the other hand, keep getting better, with ever-faster
electric bullet-trains. Gaps in the high-speed railroad
network will be bridged. As the railroads improve, they tend
to become more and more like subways, becoming more and more
detached from the environment. Madrid seems to be free of
the volcanic ash for the most part, and transatlantic
flights will presumably be re-routed there, the travelers
getting between Spain and the rest of Europe by train.
Here is a link to a review essay of material, mostly about
electric cars, and about the intelligent use of electricity in
transportation.
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/adtodd1a/blog_01.htm
I developed a kind of dialectic to show how the
transportation energy problem practically reduces to coming
up with a good electric subway. That said, hemp is not a serious
candidate for fueling electric power plants. Such plants run
on fuels which are, generally speaking, both
inexpensive and locally available. Consequently, electricity
generation does not involve a significant global commerce in
fuels.
Abundant at the level
that you can go botanizing for it is one thing.
Abundant at the level to enable mechanical harvesting is
another. The dominant plant biomass in a state of nature is
pine, or spruce, or oak, or maple, as the case may be, or
some mixture of them. Annual shrubs such as Cannabis occur only in
clearings in the forest. Almost anything which involves annual
harvesting is likely to be uneconomic as a source of fuel. The
kind of harvesting mechanisms which work for foodstuffs don't work
for fuel, because fuel has to be so much
cheaper. The whole point of a woodlot is that you
leave it for twenty years, and come back and harvest
the accumulated growth, stored in the form of tree
trunks.
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The so-called Hearst conspiracy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#War_on_marijuana
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/77339/
This conspiracy theory was put forward by
a bong salesman, and has been thoroughly debunked, not that it
needed much debunking. You can make paper from just
about any kind of fiber. In fact, good paper is
traditionally made from cloth rags. The economics of jute
paper or sisal paper would probably have been very much the
same as those of hemp paper. As for the claimed merits of hemp
paper, every inventor claims that his invention is the greatest
thing since Polar Bear ice cream. It's the nature of
the beast.
======================================================
Coal costs something
like twenty to forty dollars per ton. As a ton of coal is the
energy equivalent of two hundred gallons of gasoline, that is
comparable to gasoline costing ten to twenty cents a
gallon. Wholesale electricity (baseline load) generated from
coal costs about three cents per Kilowatt-hour, half of that
going for the coal. Nuclear electricity costs seven cents per
Kilowatt-hour, and I understand that wind electricity is
rapidly closing in on nuclear. The value of gasoline derives not
from its inherent value as fuel, but from "lock-in,"
the fact that automobiles and roads are designed to use
gasoline, that the roads are not fitted with electric
trolley wires, etc. Historically, oil only only cost fifty cents a
gallon, on a wholesale basis, before we began playing silly games
in the Middle East, and the retail price of gasoline was
only about a dollar. Five or ten dollars a gallon for gasoline,
exclusive of tax, is not sustainable on a long-term basis, simply
because that is enough to trigger the adoption of electric
transportation, and the end of "lock-in."
For most annual plants, there is a fairly narrow time-window
when the plants are fully mature, and have comparatively low
moisture content, before they die and release seeds. Often,
once the plants have been cut, they generally
have to be stacked in the open fields to dry out
further. This means that during harvest season, the
farmer is always worrying about the weather, and about the
availability of a short-term labor supply. That gets
expensive. Over the long term, if you try to sell fuel at farm
crop prices, you will be undercut by electricity, possibly
nuclear, possibly wind-based.
Now, the two conventional crop-based biofuels, that is
corn-based ethanol and legume-based biodiesel, are based
around the premise that extracting them improves the value
of the residues. Specifically the residues are
high-protein foods. One commentator describe the process as
"taking the candy bar out of the corn." The idea is that if
you feed cattle a high-protein, athletic-training-table sort of
diet, their meat will command higher prices. From the
agricultural standpoint, the sugars and lipids (fats, oils) which
go to make biofuels are waste products.
The hemp advocates, I find, are taking the opposite tack. They are
expecting to have large quantities of hemp fiber available
as a waste product of the production of hemp oil, considered as a
foodstuff. According to David Malmo-Levine, whom you cite,
an acre is supposed to yield something like six tons of hemp
fiber, suitable for fuel uses, and a hundred gallons of
hemp oil at something like fifteen dollars a gallon.
However, fuel consumption is measured in tons per capita.
When one scales Malmo-Levine's figures up to the level
required to make a significant dent in national energy
requirements, it works out to something like a sixth of the United
States' land area under hemp cultivation, and every man, woman,
and child consuming a quart of hemp oil per day. That is
totally unrealistic. Recipes call for the inclusion of a
tablespoon or two of vegetable oil in a dish which serves four or
six people. Obviously, the edible-oil market would
be saturated long before enough was produced to
subsidize a significant quantity of biofuel.
http://hemp-ethanol.blogspot.com/2008/01/economics-history-and-politics-of-hemp.html
That puts you back into the situation of producing a crop roughly
comparable to hay. Again, you would be trying to sell
fuel at food prices. Fuel is required in such large quantities
that you cannot really produce it as a byproduct of anything
else. The fuel-producing process has to be economic in its own
terms.
For something low-value like fuel, the scarce resource is the
labor of the people who harvest it. A forestry
operation divides up its land into, say, twenty parcels, and
visits each parcel once every twenty years. They start by
cutting down existing trees, and planting seedlings, and
move on to a different parcel, and after twenty years, they
can come back to the first parcel. They
cut wood at a steady pace over the year, adverse
weather permitting. In fact, the way forestry was actually
practiced in the American West in W. R. Hearst's time, they
tended to cut old-growth timber, trees hundreds
of years old, and several feet in diameter. Eventually,
shortages of really big trees developed, and regulations in
National Forests became more stringent. The 1980's were the decade
of the Spotted Owl. I am reminded on the
legend I saw, in the late 1980's, on the billboard
sign of a rough mill-workers' tavern in an Oregon
saw-mill town, reading: "You can hoot and howl/ We don't
give a ----- for the Spotted Owl." At that time, large
trucks were still hauling logs a couple of feet in diameter
down out of the mountains, bound to the local
Weyerhauser plant. There was another plant, on the outskirts
of town, which made sawdust into charcoal briquettes.
As for the Hearst conspiracy, as per Steven Wishnia, cited above,
the indisputable fact is that W. R. Hearst was a
newspaper owner on a very large scale, and that, as such, he
had a massive interest in cheap paper, from whatever source. At a
minimum, you would have to show that he was producing
substantially more paper than his newspapers consumed.
Furthermore, Hearst added substantial added value to raw
paper in the course of turning it into newspapers. Again, it seems
undisputed that Hearst was having difficulties paying for
the raw paper he purchased, and got into debt to the paper
mills. Unless you can challenge that, in a well-documented way, I
don't see that you have the beginnings of a
case.
Paper-making consists of two parts. First you cook unspecified
stuff in large kettles, until you get pulp, and then
you spread the pulp out in thin sheets and
squeeze the water out of it. The second part is
inherently more laborious, requires more elaborate machines,
etc., That said, it seems probable that a paper-mill
could have adapted to a different raw material
by adjusting the cookery necessary to get pulp,
and then proceeding normally. Beyond paper-making per
se, there are additional processes to give the paper the
desired kind of surface, etc. Magazine paper has to be
coated with a thin layer of clay, for example. The raw
material is the least part of paper-making.