Biomass and energy

With oil prices so high everyone is looking for a new fuel source, and biomass seems to be top of the heap. I have seen everything from corn to grass tossed around, but all those crops require nitrogen fertilizer which is made with natural gas, and require that good farmland be used. My suggestion is mesquite. Why? The mesquite tree is a legume, so it doesn’t require nitrogen fertilization, it also produces beans which can be substituted for soy beans in animal feed or hydrolyzed into a lysine rich food grade protein. Mesquite is a desert weed tree, so it doesn’t require good farm land be converted or heavy irrigation and it is fast growing, so the turn around from planting to harvest is only a couple years.

Some my say that is well and good for the Southwest but what about the rest of the nation? Well wood can be thermally decomposed and the methanol (and heavy oils) recovered. Methanol is racing fuel so it can be burned in a gasoline blend too, and is one of alcohols that is safe for reformers in fuel cells. The remaining charcoal since mesquite is a hard wood can be burned in place of coal.

Other ideas include large scale biomass aquaculture, which uses heavy feeding water plants to deplete nutrients from eutrophied rivers and lakes. This kills three birds with one stone, since the water is purified, carbon is fixed and we get biomass. Either we use woody water plants and build pond/swamp type farms, or we use algae and run it like a chemostat, either way small amounts of water are constantly changed. I wonder is there a water plant that either has oily seeds or stores its extra energy as a starch or oil? (Lotus won’t work, too sensitive.) If there is then we get a saleable crop on top of the biomass, and if it is still not economically viable then perhaps we put some fish farming (or chickens) up stream to make some extra money and really enrich the water with nutrients.