Kudzu a Potential Biofuel

Ever since I learned about this ridiculously quickly growing plant and its gazillion uses, I wondered why it wasn’t getting utilized as a renewable resource for a whole range of products. It seems that a lot of people also wondered about that, enough to look into using it as biofuel.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the US Department of Agriculture are taking a close look at kudzu, a native plant of Asia that can grow more than 6.5 feet a week and is nearly impossible to get rid of. The team examined the amount of carbohydrate in the plant – the part that gets turned into ethanol – at different times of year in different parts of the plant. They found the root carries over 2/3 of the carbs by weight, and they estimate kudzu could produce 2.2 to 5.3 tons of carbs per acre. This translates to 270 gallons of ethanol per acre, comparable to the ethanol yield of corn - which isn't saying much considering corn is on the low end of the energy yield spectrum.

Now the question the team is asking is whether or not it is worth the effort of digging up the roots that can grow more than six feet deep.

On the pro side, kudzu needs nothing to grow – no planting, no fertilizer, no irrigation. That’s obvious considering its pseudonym is “the plant that ate the South.” But on the con side, what amount of energy will go into getting at the tough-to-reach hillsides where much of the kudzu grows, and what will harvesting the plant’s roots do to the ecosystem, especially when folks are digging up hillsides?

Though we can use kudzu as biofuel, there seems to be little telling us we should. Nonetheless, researchers are weighing the scales and looking at its potential.

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Tons of PCBs May Come Calling at a Down-at-the-Heels Texas City

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

A petrochemical plant as seen from a housing project in Port Arthur, Tex. Activists are opposed to a company’s request to burn PCBs from Mexico at its incinerator.

By ADAM B. ELLICK

Correction Appended

PORT ARTHUR, Tex. — This downtrodden chemical town on the Gulf of Mexico has no shortage of nicknames: Cancer Alley, the Armpit of Texas, Ring of Fire.

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The New York Times

PCBs from Mexico could be incinerated near Port Arthur.

Built on a gush of oil wealth, Port Arthur eventually wooed chemical and waste plants as well. But since the 1970s, this city, which is majority African-American, has complained that it has become a dumping ground for the nation’s toxic waste.

Now, if a French-owned waste management company has its way, the Port Arthur area will be the final destination for 40 million pounds of toxins from Mexico.

“Bring it all to southeast Texas,” Hilton Kelley, a community activist, said wryly. “Who’s next? Germany? Finland? England? Aren’t our oil refineries and chemical plants enough? We have a right to a clean environment, and the nation sees us as expendable in the name of big business.”

Despite a federal ban on importing PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, the company, Veolia Environmental Services, has asked the Environmental Protection Agency for an exemption to move the chemicals by truck from Mexico and to burn them at its incinerator just outside Port Arthur. The incinerator has been disposing of the United States’ PCB waste since 1992.

In March, the E.P.A. gave tentative approval to the proposal. A final decision is expected after August.

On Thursday, the agency will conduct a public hearing featuring all of the players, from incinerator lobbyists to local leaders, who have pledged to sue if the exemption is granted.

The mayor of Port Arthur, Delores Prince, has not taken a position on the proposal, saying that the incinerator is outside the city limits and that the exemption is a federal matter.

Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and an expert on waste incineration who is not involved in the case, called the situation in Mexico an “immediate environmental risk.”

Dr. Hershkowitz defended the concept of accepting PCBs from Mexico, saying that proper incineration would be better than leaving the toxins where they were, in temporary facilities.

“This is not about Americans versus Mexicans,” he said, “but about protecting what’s most at risk for Homo sapiens and eco-regions.”

Still, Dr. Hershkowitz and other environmental experts said Port Arthur, with a population of about 58,000 people, faced a legitimate risk of exposure to PCBs, which have been linked to cancer, brain and liver damage, skin rashes and harmful effects to the reproductive system. And he questioned whether the incinerator, given its record, could do the job safely.

PCBs are used as a coolant in electric generators, although they were banned from manufacturing in 1979. No private companies have applied to import them into the United States since 1996.

Officials at Veolia said their incinerator had a 99.99999 percent efficiency rating, reflecting the percentage of PCBs that the process destroys. Veolia employees receive annual blood tests for PCBs, and the company said no problems had been found.

“We’re in the business of destroying waste,” said Daniel Duncan, the plant’s environmental, health and safety manager. “It’s better to destroy these here than let them go unaddressed down in Mexico.”

PCBs from Mexico are now exported to Europe at three times the cost, Mr. Duncan said. He declined to estimate the value of a contract to dispose of the PCBs.

Environmental groups cite dozens of reported problems with Veolia’s incinerator and insist that incineration in general, the oldest and most widely accepted means of disposal, is imperfect.

Dr. Neil Carman, director of the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club, who is leading the fight against Veolia, said PCBs were so dangerous that even small doses of the 40 million pounds that the company wanted to transport here would significantly add to the health problems in Port Arthur. Jefferson County, where Port Arthur is located, has a cancer rate about 20 percent higher than the state average.

No one disputes that PCBs are dangerous.

In 1981, an electrical fire spread PCBs throughout a state building in Binghamton, N.Y., resulting in a 13-year, $53 million cleanup.

And since 2002, General Electric has been under a federal order to clean approximately 40 miles of the Hudson River where its factories discharged PCBs.

By 2025, all electric transformers with PCBs must be out of service in the United States, a regulation that is likely to keep the Veolia incinerator busy.

PCB disposal is a divisive issue, partly because there are no continuous monitoring devices in the United States for PCBs, an odorless and colorless compound. Veolia’s efficiency claims are based on test burns, which are conducted every five years.

Dr. Carman, who conducted emissions tests for the state for 12 years, said the tests were “a crude measure under ideal conditions.”

Ideal or not, the Veolia incinerator has an “average” compliance history, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The company, which has spent $22 million since 2002 upgrading its incinerator to comply with tougher standards of the Clean Air Act, reported 70 deviations, or faulty occurrences, from 2006 to 2008. That included 30 reports of carbon monoxide emissions, a standard indicator of poor combustion, in six months in 2006.

That same year, according to the federal Toxics Release Inventory, an E.P.A. database, the company emitted the most toxins in the United States. But Mr. Duncan attributed that finding to a bookkeeping error, and the company has submitted an amended report.

Dr. Hershkowitz, who reviewed Veolia’s violations, called the incinerator “routinely and disturbingly substandard.”

Opponents said they were baffled as to why the Mexican companies responsible for the PCBs, mainly the utility company CFE, had not pursued more eco-friendly disposal alternatives, like portable incinerators, which they say are cheaper and have been used in Canada and may soon be used in Vietnam to destroy toxins from the defoliant Agent Orange.

The E.P.A., however, said portable incineration could not handle the PCBs from Mexico.

Although the most common wind currents blow emissions from the incinerator away from Port Arthur, Mr. Kelley said that was little comfort.

“We don’t want to set a precedent in this community, where we are set up and prepared to take toxic waste from the world,” he said. “It’s not fair to children, or to me.”

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Can Changes in Sea Level Cause Periods of Mass Extinction?—A Galaxy Exclusive

For years scientists have been trying to find explanations for some of the world’s most mysterious extinction events. Since life began on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago, there have been as many as 23 mass extinction events. Over the past 540 million years, there have been five well-documented mass extinctions, primarily of marine plants and animals, with a stunning 75-95 percent loss of species. Sometimes scientists have been able to pin down the likely culprits for these dramatic events, but often, no clear answer has ever been determined…at least not until now.

Recent research suggests that the size of the ocean itself has been one of the most constant and relentless decider of fates over the last 500 million years. Shanan Peters, lead author of the study, says that sea level has been, and will continue to be, one of the most influential factors in determining Earth’s biology.

Peters' research, which recently appeared in the journal Nature, provides an intriguing perspective on one of nature’s most pervasive mysteries. Most of us correlate Earth's periodic mass extinctions with dramatic and sudden events like a blazing asteroid or a sky-blackening super volcano—the kind of things that have been linked to the demise of the dinosaurs. While dramatic events like these do appear to have played major roles in some extinction periods, they certainly haven’t accounted for all of them. Peters says that is where sea level comes into play. His research provides evidence that convincingly fills in the gaps.

“The oceans might seem to be rather static, but sea levels, in fact, change quite dramatically over geological time. In fact, the rocks right here in Madison, Wisconsin—pretty much in the center of our continent—were in fact deposited in one of these shallow seas that covered much of the present day land area almost 500 million years ago…My results show that the expansion and contraction of these sea waves had a big impact on controlling which animals lived and which animals died…When these seas expand and contract, many of the animals that lived in them were forced to deal with all sorts of environmental changes, and many of those changes caused some animals to go extinct.”

As part of his research, Peters measured two principal types of marine shelf environments found in the rock record. Specifically he looked at the sediments derived from erosion of land and sediments composed primarily of calcium carbonate, which is produced in-place by shelled organisms and by chemical processes. Peters noted the differences in sediment stability, temperature and the availability of nutrients and sunlight and found that dramatic sea level changes appear to correlate with extinction patterns.

But does any of this apply to us today, and if so, how? National Science Foundation (NSF) Program Manager Rich Lane believes it does. "This breakthrough speaks loudly to the future impending modern shelf extinction due to climate change on Earth," says Lane.

Lane is referring to the fact that many climate experts fear a warming climate will cause sea levels to rise with devastating consequences. The Daily Galaxy asked Peters how climate affects sea levels.

“Climate change is linked to sea level for two reasons. Most important, changes in the amount of water stored as ice on land affects the amount of water in the oceans. If all of the ice currently on land melted, average sea level would rise by about 70 m,” Peters explained to Rebecca Sato of The Daily Galaxy. “The second link between sea level and climate is global temperature. As the earth warms, water expands, and this expansion makes sea level rise. The magnitude of this effect is small, on the order of a few meters.”

Peters agrees that rising sea levels will have a biological impact in the relatively near future, but how this change will affect us depends on several different factors.

“Climate change WILL result in a change in sea level. My study, and many others that have focused in great detail on individual events, really do help to understand the biological effects of the environmental changes that go along with sea level change. The overall lesson from the past is that the effect of a given change in sea level depends on the rate of that change and on the state of environments at the time the change occurs,” Peters tells The Daily Galaxy.

However, there’s more too it than that. He also explains that the relatively modest change in sea level expected to accompany global warming isn’t necessarily going to harm marine life, at least not to the extent that some of the more dramatic sea level changes may have caused in the past.

“If sea level rise is fast enough, shallow carbonate environments that need to be in the photic zone (things like coral reefs), can be drowned, and this can result in a temporary or long-term decline in the abundance and diversity of animals like corals. However, sea level rises also expand the areas of shallow seas and can have an overall positive impact on marine biodiversity.” Peters told The Daily Galaxy. “In fact, most of the major mass extinctions in the past have been associated with the draining of large shallow seas that once covered much of the present-day land surface. Only a few cases of abrupt sea level rise, often in conjunction with the spread of anoxic marine bottom waters, appear to have been important drivers of extinction.”

So, it’s really not marine life that Peters is predominantly worried about in regards to any future rise in sea level. He explained to The Daily Galaxy that overall the biosphere could handle the sea level rise that is predicted to occur with global warning. He isn’t so sure, however, that humans will be so lucky.

“In my opinion, a much bigger concern with respect to global warming-induced sea level rise is the human impact. A very large fraction of the world's population and infrastructure is within a few meters of sea level. Thus, even a small rise is going to wreak almost unimaginable havoc,” Peters told The Daily Galaxy. “In fact, I think the impending sea level rise is the most serious threat posed by global warming. The biosphere is well-conditioned to deal with the magnitude of sea level rise that we are likely to induce. We, as a society, are not.”

Posted by Rebecca Sato.

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