Wow.........had to laugh, even with Chris's forum name, I didn't see that one coming lol:-)
Definitely changed the game on the producers list for sure! Guess I am surely not the big kid on the block anymore:-(
All good though, GREAT for the coin and the community.......am sure this will have positive reflect on the price.
IMJIM: so Jess' second system is a biofuel production system. Transportation fuels are massively carbon intensive so obviously it'll be an imperative for GreenCoin to include this commodity production sector in the GreenCoin ecosystem. As far as the size of the system a 55 gallon home reactor is actually about as small as it gets oddly enough. This particular size system in the Pacific NW is sometimes known as the "Appleseed Reactor."
The reason why Jess' 55 gallons crammed everyone down so far for that one day is simply just math. Home solar PV does not offset nearly as much carbon as a home biofuel production system. Since Jess was first I had to come up with a calculation for the offset but I feel I erred considerably on the side of caution (i.e., underestimating CO2) and I told him as much in an email. As the Foundation beefs up it's members these are the types of calculations people can sit around and fight about and re-calibrate in the future, but here is my calculation:
- The EPA estimates about 22.38 pounds of CO2 are produced by burning a gallon of diesel fuel. [10.15 kg CO2/gallon]
- based on EPA and other literature I estimated biodiesel lifecycle CO2 emission at 1.97 kg CO2/gal.
- I need to know what the global emissions for diesel fuel are, which include the current biofuel makeup of diesel emissions and I chose 12.41% bio (this is a hard number to find), but several sources indicated this is about right.
So for the global average = 10.15 * 0.8759 + 2.19 * 0.1241 = 9.14 kg CO2/gal
The biodiesel producer then gets 9.14 - 1.97 = 7.17 kg CO2 per gallon
For 55 gallons this is 394 kg CO2. The entire production of the other 6-8 solar producers that get GRE in any given day averages about 71 kg. So for this one day, there was quite a cram for the PV solar guys. Kinda makes you want to be a biofuel producer, no?
One of the principal reasons I think this calculation errs on the side if caution is that the literature indicates significant energy resources are utilized when crushing soybeans to prepare the vegetable oil for prep as a fuel source. However, with the case in Jess' system, he uses waste vegetable oil so this calculation is not relevant (this crushing step would be considered part of the food production CO2 intensiveness of the oil since it was not specifically grown to be a fuel). There are negative considerations such as home systems having less total efficiency than large-scale systems and processing WVO to be used as a reactant, however, these are smaller than the energy consideration for crushing, IMO.
Certainly many will agree it is much harder to come up with a single carbon "number" for complex input systems such as biofuel production versus, say, PV solar or onshore wind, which are more homogeneous and have less inputs. I just try to ensure my calculations are well researched, defensible, and err on the side of caution. They can be changed in the future to fit better data models through the Foundation.
As it relates to the total number of coins per day your award will decrease in absolute GRE count in the future obviously, but the hope is as more carbon comes rolling in and the ecosystem "catches on" more, the GRE individual price of GRE will rise.
