Senior na Me!!!: March 2009

The study entitled “Anacardium occidentale as a Good Source of Biofuel” aims to determine and prove whether the Anacardium occidentale can be a good source of biofuel.
”The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumac out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred year”, an idea which was well expressed by Henry Ford in a1925 interview with the New York Times.
We are constantly being told that the era of cheap oil is over, but the truth is that the era of oil of any kind is going to be over as well. It’s finite and every aspect of it is both dirty and expensive, right down to the wars that are being fought over it.
According to William Kovarik, 2007, fueling up with ethanol and vegetable oils was common long before the development of the internal combustion engine. Vegetable and animal oil lamps have been used since the dawn of civilization. Increasingly efficient heaters and lamps meant that higher quality fuels were developed One of Ben Franklin’s spirit lamps is on display in a Philadelphia exhibit. Naturally, early inventors turned to common portable fuels to power automobiles. In 1826, Vermont inventor Samuel Morey powered an early prototype of an internal combustion engine with distilled spirit. German engineer Nicholas Otto’s first experiments in the 1860s with engines involved ethanol as well. Around the 1850s, lamp fuels in the US and Europe were usually made from animal and vegetable oils, often combined with alcohol
The conversion of plant sugars into alcohol has been occurring for as long as history has been recorded. As far back as 10,000BC people were making beer, possibly even before bread was first produced. The process of distillation of an ethanol solution is very simple and has been and still is employed by home distillers around the world for making beverages such as fortified wines, whiskey, moonshine, vodka and so on. This is an effective process, so much so that some alcoholic beverages can act as fuels and burn once introduced to a flame. If biofuels are to be adopted in a serious manner for the long term we need to develop ways of producing them that do not compromise food production. In order to be economically viable, biofuel crops need to produce the highest possible fuel output. In the United States corn is the politically preferred crop for biofuel and it is the corn cob itself that is the source of the raw materials for making fuel. Making fuel out of the plant matter left over after a crop is harvested is another possibility. Plants are made mainly of cellulose which is simply very long chains of sugar molecules joined together. It is the intertwining and chemical bonding between strands of cellulose that make them so hard to digest.
Biofuels are the best way of reducing the emission of the greenhouse gases. They can also be looked upon as a way of energy security which stands as an alternative of fossil fuels that are limited in availability. Today, the use of biofuels has expanded globally. Some of the major producers and users of biogases are Asia, Europe and America. Theoretically, biofuel can be easily produced through any carbon source; making the photosynthetic plants the most commonly used material for production. Almost all types of materials derived from the plants are used for manufacturing biogas.
Since the study is just a continuation of the previous research, the researcher conducted the study to determine and prove if Anacardium occidentale can be a good source of biofuel. Also, to know the amount of biofuel if a kilo of Anacardium occidentale will be extracted. Through this, Anacardium occidentale will have use other than what we are used to. The researcher had then chosen Anacardium occidentale as the subject since it is uncommonly used in the said field. Also, Anacardium occidentale is a product which is abundantly available in the country every year and much of it is wasted, could be an excellent source of bio-fuel that could be effectively used for the production of ethanol.

Defined by Kevin Lambert, biofuel, which is also called agro fuel, is a fuel made from what we call biomass, which in this case is a plant, living or recently dead. Some of the best source plants are corn, sugarcane, and hemp, although biofuel can be produced from any biological carbon source. Even garbage can be used, bringing up the specter of landfill farms. Biofuels are attempting to fill a staggering need; to replace petroleum as our primary transport fuel on a permanent basis. The planetary economy and way of life depends on the transportation sector. Biofuels are considered to be a great alternative to oil, although the process of getting them to market has been called as harmful as the oil that they replace. This debate has been going on for some time and will not be resolved here. But nobody is denying that biofuels are a powerful step in the right direction. They have a quality that oil can never deliver: they grow back. Their source can be replanted and re-harvested, perhaps forever. This is their greatest advantage. Ethanol is the most common biofuel. It is easy to manufacture and process and can be made from very common materials, like corn or sugar cane. It can also come from cellulose. That particular form has been too expensive up to now, but a plant came online in Canada in 2004. Like all of the other biofuel ventures, it was heavily supported by its government, both as a financier and customer. The costs will be worth it. This technology could transform agricultural byproducts like straw sawdust and corncobs into renewable energy resources.
William Kovarik has a clear understanding about biofuel. According to him, fueling up with ethanol and vegetable oils was common long before the development of the internal combustion engine. Vegetable and animal oil lamps have been used since the dawn of civilization. Increasingly efficient heaters and lamps meant that higher quality fuels were developed. Because gasoline was so cheap and abundant, US automobiles were adapted to its use from the beginning. Racing cars, on the other hand, usually used ethanol because more power could be developed in a smaller, lighter engine. In 1906, Henry Ford told newspapers he was working on an alcohol fueled car and tractor. He stuck with the idea throughout his life because he believed that America’s morals were declining with the loss of rural lifestyles. He hoped to stimulate the farm economy by finding new markets for farm products and in the process contribute to the agrarian culture he cherished. Also in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt backed the farm lobby’s push to have the tax on industrial alcohol repealed, saying that the oil industry needed the competition. But the hoped–for revolution was not to be. Gasoline prices stayed relatively low. Farm belt politicians were split on ethanol as a fuel when it came to alcohol beverage Prohibition. While distillers could have a new market for their alcohol, some thought that allowing any distillery to stay open would be a “bargain with the devil”.
Meanwhile, automobiles were improving quickly in the era around WWI, but the fuel was not. At the time, gasoline had what we now call an “octane” rating in the 50s, but it was well known that blends of ethanol in gasoline could stop knocking in higher compression engines. However, ethanol had only two thirds of the energy of gasoline. In a battery of government tests at the 1907 Jamestown Exhibition, the USDA and the Bureau of Mines demonstrated that ethanol engines consumed as much fuel, at higher compression ratios, than lower compression gasoline engines under equivalent loads. At the end of WWI, gasoline quality was declining, and Detroit dropped the standard compression ratio to 3.8 to one. According to Scientific American in 1919, there were two options. One, lower the compression ratio even further, sacrificing efficiency but allowing the continued use of low-grade petroleum. Or two, use more ethanol in the fuel mix in order to conserve petroleum and allow the creation of more efficient, higher compression engines. The choice was further skewed in the direction of ethanol when the US Geological Survey announced, in 1920, that oil was running out.
This had already been anticipated by leading scientists. In 1900, Rudolph Diesel ran his engine on peanut oil at a Paris exhibition. Talking about this in 1912, Diesel said that the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum. And Alexander Graham Bell said in 1917 that alcohol makes a beautiful, clean and efficient fuel. Alcohol can be manufactured from corn stalks, and in fact from almost any vegetable matter capable of fermentation. We need never fear the exhaustion of our present fuel supplies so long as we can produce an annual crop of alcohol to any extent desired.
Most automotive inventors focused on ethanol as the solution, but a total replacement of oil with corn ethanol was seen as impractical at the time. A 1919 DuPont study showed that it would take half or more of all grain and sugar crops to replace oil. Charles Kettering at General Motors had focused on another solution – tetra ethyl lead. The idea was to find a temporary additive to allow an increase in compression ratios until ethanol could be produced from cellulose. Kettering sent two of his best researchers to study cellulose hydrolysis with Harold Hibbert at Yale University in 1920.
For complex internal reasons, GM research turned away from cellulose and towards fuel additives that might have more immediate profit potential. By 1921 they hit on leaded gasoline. Although it was extremely toxic in the lab, in production, in service stations and on the streets, Kettering justified the continued sale of leaded gasoline to fellow scientists as only a temporary bridged to the fuel of the future, which was, “unquestionably” ethanol. The fact that the leaded gasoline marketing company created as a joint venture between GM, Standard Oil and DuPont was called “Ethyl” might well have been Kettering’s inside joke about the overall direction he thought the industry would take. Publicly, Kettering and associates insisted that there were no alternatives, but even a glance at the public record of patents taken out by GM or articles by GM staff would have shown this to be untrue. As it turned out, leaded gasoline was profitable enough to take over the market, and the oil industry was powerful enough to scare away most of the competition. There were several notable exceptions, including the US farm ethanol and Henry Ford’s “chemurgy” movement of the 1930s that culminated with the “Agrol” ethanol fuel plant that ran from 1936 to 1939 at Atchison, Kansas. The plant went bankrupt, but the experience had a significant impact on ethanol plant engineering designs and systems engineering at the opening of World War II, when ethanol was desperately needed as a feedstock for synthetic rubber. While most of the investments were placed in petroleum-based systems, the agriculturally based systems proved easier to scale up and expand. By 1944, three-quarters of the tires and other rubber products were coming from ethanol.
It is interesting that most of the support for farm ethanol came from grain-state Republicans and not liberals; the conservatives tended to prefer the idea of finding new markets for surplus crops to the liberal approach involving farm set-asides and crop reduction programs. As Ford knew, nearly all other industrial nations had an ethanol blending program at the time. These included Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and most of Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Following World War II, the idea of continuing to use the distilleries for chemicals and fuels was popular in the Midwest, but a commission report in 1957 concluded that ethanol could not compete with cheap petroleum. Midwestern universities and state economic development agencies continued to explore the industrial use of farm products in general, and ethanol in particular, in the 1960s and early 1970s. For instance, the Nebraska Agricultural Products Industrial Utilization Committee was formed in 1971, and by the mid-1970s became popularly known as the Nebraska Gasohol Commission. With the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, a considerable amount of public interest followed the development of oil alternatives. Biofuels were not originally at the top of the list. At one point in 1978, US Dept. of Energy officials were using the line that the US had only coal, oil and nuclear power. The oil and automotive industries were equally resistant to developing biofuels and published research that was sometimes described as “defensive.”
For political and national security reasons, the Carter administration pushed ahead with an ethanol program. Federal and state subsidies were applied towards alternative fuels, particularly ethanol. These amounted to about $11 billion between 1979 and 2000, as compared to about $150 billion in tax credits for the oil industry (from 1968 - 2000), according to the General Accounting Office. The replacement of oil with ethanol was controversial in the 1980s for several reasons, not the least of which was that the ethanol industry was dominated by one well connected company – Archer Daniels Midland of Peoria, Ill. The Reagan administration also questioned the need for government intervention, believing that most energy and environmental decisions were best left to the marketplace. The George H.W. Bush administration, on the other hand, sharply distinguished itself from Reagan era environmental policies by forcing the oil industry to clean up “air toxics” in gasoline. Ethanol was one part of that strategy, and the oil industry’s use of MTBE instead of ethanol created water pollution problems in many cities. When MTBE pollution problems were recognized in the early 2000s, ethanol use shot up to the 4 billion gallon level. A few years later, the oil price shock of 2004-2005 created an unusual market condition in which ethanol was priced lower than gasoline. Hundreds of new corn based distilleries were planned, for at least a doubling of the industry to 8 billion gallons per year by around 2008.
An understanding of the history of biofuels can help overcome some of the confusion surrounding the ethanol industry’s origins and original purpose. Modern scientists and policy makers often evaluate the US corn based ethanol industry only in terms of climate change and energy balance, when in fact, the corn based ethanol industry is a cumulative response to many decades of concern about national security, air pollution, and agricultural economics.
One of the earliest controversies about biofuels had to do with the difference in energy content (in terms of BTUs per gallon) between ethanol and gasoline. Even today, it’s not unusual to hear the opinion that gas tanks would have to be twice as large for all-ethanol autos. In 1907 and 1908, the U.S. Geological Service and the U.S. Navy performed 2000 tests on alcohol and gasoline engines in 1907 and 1908 in Norfolk, Va. and St. Louis, Mo. They found that much higher efficiencies could be achieved with engines adapted for alcohol fuel compared to gasoline engines. This would offset the disadvantage of the lower BTU ethanol as a fuel. In fact, biofuels have long been known as extremely clean fuels compared with petroleum based fuels.
In the 1970s, as ethanol programs began taking off worldwide, concerns were raised by agricultural experts, notably Lester Brown, about competition from the energy sector for food resources. It is not a simple concern. Brown and others are aware that corn is not entirely used up in ethanol production, (only the starch is used, leaving the original protein value of the grain). But the competition may also come in the form of pressures on the agricultural infrastructure and economic competition for food resources, Brown notes. Debate continues to involve questions about the complexity of small farm economies in developing nations and the impact of dependency on US grain aid. The first generation of biofuels, notably ethanol from corn in the US and from sugarcane in Brazil, has been available for well over a century. The motivation for using these fuels, despite slightly higher prices, involved national security, farm support, environmental and public health considerations. The idea of moving to a second generation of biofuels, from cellulose and sawdust and other non-food feedstock, has also been in development since at least the 1920s. This also shows that many of the problems we face in terms of developing a viable renewable energy system have been anticipated in history
Biofuels have received a lot of industrial, political and media attention recently. The idea of using ethanol from naturally grown plant matter as an alternative to crude oil for fuel is an appealing one. Of equal interest is the idea of producing biodiesel and its energy rich by-product glycerin from both used and new vegetable oils. This process is in turn dependent on supplies of methanol and sodium hydroxide, also called lye. It is possible to make lye at home but is is much easier and cheaper to purchase it pre made. Biofuels carry with them an image of sustainability and environmentally friendliness and the promise of allowing us to continue our use of automobiles without damaging the planet. Some of these ideas have been realized at least in part, whereas other problems have come to light that are casting biofuels in a less than green lime light. In order to become a genuinely environmentally friendly addition to our energy supplies, biofuels need to be generated using land that is not presently being used for food production or that is covered with natural vegetation such as rainforests. Making fuel out of the plant matter left over after a crop is harvested is another possibility.
Described by Chelsie Vandaveer, the cashew tree, Anacardium occidentale L., is called marañon in most Spanish-speaking countries, but merey in Venezuela; and caju or cajueiro in Portuguese. The fruit is a so called pseudo fruit (or "false fruit") since the true fruit is the cashew nut: that is first developed.
The receptacle becomes fleshy and plump. It has a waxy yellow, red or orange skin. It is juicy, acid to sub acid. The cashew apple is the receptacle, the portion of the pedicel (flower stem) where the nut is now attached. When the true fruit is fully grown, the receptacle swells becoming fleshy. The cashew apple and the nut ripen at the same time and fall from the tree. It is generally bushy, low-branched and spreading; may reach 35 ft (10.6 m) in height and width. Its leaves, mainly in terminal clusters, are oblong-oval, 4 to 8 in (10-20 cm) long and 2 to 4 in (5-10 cm) wide, and leathery. Yellowish-pink, 5-petalled flowers are bear in 6 to 10-in (15-25 cm) terminal panicles of mixed male, female and bisexual. The true fruit of the tree is the cashew nut resembling a miniature boxing-glove; consisting of a double shell containing a caustic phenolic resin in honeycomb-like cells, enclosing the edible kidney-shaped kernel. An interesting feature of the cashew is that the nut develops first and when it is full-grown but not yet ripe, its peduncle or, more technically, receptacle, fills out, becomes plump, fleshy, pear-shaped or rhomboid-to-ovate, 2 to 4 1/2 in (5-11.25 cm) in length, with waxy, yellow, red, or red-and-yellow skin and spongy, fibrous, very juicy, astringent, acid to subacid, yellow pulp. Thus is formed the conspicuous, so-called cashew apple. The cashew is native to northeast Brazil and, in the 16th Century, Portuguese traders introduced it to Mozambique and coastal India, but only as a soil retainer to stop erosion on the coasts. It flourished and ran wild and formed extensive forests in these locations and on nearby islands, and eventually it also became dispersed in East Africa and throughout the tropical lowlands of northern South America, Central America and the West Indies. It has been more or less casually planted in all warm regions and a few fruiting specimens are found in experimental stations and private gardens in southern Florida.
In the field, the fruits are picked up and chewed for refreshment, the juice swallowed, and the fibrous residue discarded. In the home and, in a limited way for commercial purposes, the cashew apples are preserved in syrup in glass jars. Fresh apples are highly perishable. Various species of yeast and fungi cause spoilage after the first day at room temperature. Food technologists in India have found that good condition can be maintained for 5 weeks at 32º to 35º F (0º-1.67º C) and relative humidity of 85% to 90%. Inasmuch as the juice is astringent and somewhat acrid due to 35% tannin content (in the red: less in the yellow) and 3% of an oily substance, the fruit is pressure-steamed for 5 to 15 minutes before candying or making into jam or chutney or extracting the juice for carbonated beverages, syrup or wine. Efforts are made to retain as much as possible of the ascorbic acid. Food technologists in Costa Rica recently worked out an improved process for producing the locally popular candied, sun-dried cashew apples. Failure to remove the tannin from the juice may account for the nutritional deficiency in heavy imbibers of cashew apple wine in Mozambique, for tannin prevents the body's full assimilation of protein.

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