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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you, David bloomback with us. David is a commercial farmer, regenerative ag tech consultant, biofuels pioneer, noted author. His book is Alcohol Can Be a Gas, and a global food waste optimization consultant as well. Early in his career, David worked on experimental energy products with NASA as well as Mother Earth News. A successful business leader and entrepreneur, he wrote the Amazon dot com critically acclaimed ag tech bestselling book,
As I mentioned, Alcohol Can Be a Gas. David, welcome back, my friend. Have you been well.
I've been doing great, George, always great to come on the show with you.
What new projects are you undertaking these days?
Oh well, there's quite a few really, But you know, methane, which we're going to talk about tonight, is kind of tangential and maybe interesting. But I'm still working, you know, on taking our road back from oil companies and maybe a little more freedom for us on the ground.
To lots of things going on these days. I want to talk with you about the push. First of all from the United Nations down the local communities where they're all looking for cleaner electricity, cleaner energy. Is that doable?
David, Oh, absolutely, we can make cleaner energy. You know. The stuff we're using now is dinosaur energy from basically corporations that have figured out how to sell something that doesn't last forever and always goes up in price, and we keep buying it. And that's like gasoline or oil products, and of course natural gas, which is also a petroleum product.
I've had natural gas in all my electric and gas ranges for years and years and years. In California, they want to reduce it, probably even do away with natural gas and propane.
Why, well, some places have already done it. You can't even get a hermit in Berkeley, California to put in a gas line into your house.
Wow.
So people need to realize the most amazing system we've created in the United States for distributing gas. It comes from some well somewhere in a pipeline and magically comes to your street up into your house and it's right there at your stove. So you know that when you think about the spider web of steel pipes underground everywhere, that's delivering all this gas, why would anyone want to
do without it? So think about natural gas is it's like if you think about underground, you know where the oil is and the rock down below, and the natural gas is under pressure with all that rock above, and it's kind of like a soda, you know, and you pop the top, you know, like you drill a well and the gas comes on up. So you know, when you first get the gas, it's full of wall kind
of horrible stuff. But they do a pretty good job cleaning up benzene and caluene and xylene and all that stuff you really don't want in the house, and so natural gas gets to you pretty clean. And when you burn it, well, heck, you know. Natural gas is the oil company term for the chemical methane. And we've all kind of heard a methane without knowing what it is. But methane is the simplest of these alkanes, which is a group of chemicals, and it has one carbon and
four hydrogens all glued together. When you go ahead and burn the methane like in your natural gas burner on your stove, what's happening is the carbon grabs on to a couple of oxygens and the hydrogen grabs onto some oxygen and you got two different things. Now, so this carbon with the oxygen, well that's carbon dioxide again. What you're breathing out the hs the hydrogens that are sitting
on it, they become water. Weaper. If you're way up north and you're cooking in the kitchen for a bunch of friends, you notice the windows always fog up when you have a natural gas stow because the moisture is being released as as it's created when you burn the gas. So it's a pretty harmless fuel, except for the fact that that extra carbon dioxide is controversial nowadays because it
comes from underground. It's millions of years old, and now we're releasing it into the air and increasing the amount of carbon dox on our air, which is a whole subject for discussion, David.
Most gas furnaces in the North and the Midwest work on natural gas as well. It's today is still the cheapest form of energy, isn't it.
Yes, But it's about to start ratcheting up because you know, there's only so much of it in the ground, but there and so that it goes up in price because it's non renewable when it comes from the ground. But methane, I make it right on my farm. I have a one hundred foot long bag I've made out a pool liner, and I put plant matter in from my alcohol plant, the waste products after I've made the alcohol, and it goes in there, and it's underwater in this bag, so
it starts rotting without air. And so when things don't have air and they're rotting, instead of giving off other things, they give off methane. So my natural my my methane that I used to power power my still comes from plant waste, you know, weeds, grass, whatever, you know. In my case, apple pulp. You know that I'm making alcohol from well the peels are left over at the end. Well, I felt the methane digester and it powers my still.
So I'm not even using the utility company's gas to make my alcol a hall for fuel.
Nationwide, do you see a ban of gas stoves coming up or maybe even gas furnaces, Well, you got to.
Understand what it's all about, and yes, it's coming. You know. When you see something like this, uh, you got you got to wonder what's behind it, you know, And it's easy to blame the government because they're making the rules. Like here they are talking about basing out natural gas, which is, you know, all said and done, it's a pretty clean fuel. But uh uh so, so who So if we're saying the government is doing it, well, the
government doesn't do it on its own. There's a guy up above them with you know, with strings that are making that that government puppet dance and take actions. So who benefits from banning natural gas? Well, you know, we have a limited amount of that right now and it's going to run out. But one thing we have a lot of is coal. You know, we're oil. We might only have a couple of decades left coal. We have two hundred years of coal left at least. Yeah, it
could be even more if you go further. But so a lot of our utilities in the United States are coal fired plants, and the whole world is recognized that the pollution from coal burning just is far worse than almost anything else. So what you're seeing is the oil companies hedging their bets knowing that they're not going to
be able to keep supplying natural gas. And the way they want to get around that is electrify the country and power it with their coal or nuclear Okay, so here we are talking about two really dangerous energy sources with lots of waste problems. I mean, oh my god, the ash, the toxic ash left over from burning coal is unbelievable. So what we're seeing is the government being manipulated into doing what the fossil fuel industry wants, which
is a conversion away from natural gas. Because if we start running out of natural gas from oil wells, well people will start making natural gas. Right now. If you're apartment, USDA will give you a grant to put in a methane gas generator, a thing that makes the natural gas from say you're cow maneuver in a dairy or that kind of thing. It'll digest in the in the underwater, and it gives off lots of natural gas. But that's decentralized. The oil companies don't own that, and that is a problem.
So they don't want to see us expand the non petroleum natural gas, which is renewable and it doesn't add any carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Is there anybody or any organization fighting these possible restrictions.
I think it's too early to see a big mobilized organized fight over this. You know, people are sensing that there's something wrong, like why is the government doing this? But until they know the bigger picture and the plan to you know, basically run up colon nuclear, you know, it'll get to a point where they'll say, oh, sorry, all that electricity we're having you cook with and heat your house with, well, you know, we don't have enough electricity, you know, and so you know, we're going to have
to start using nuclear power plans. So we're going to have to do you know, it's going to give an open door to technologies that really need to go away.
Is it a diversion, David.
It's it's a diversion from anything that's renewable and decentralized, in other words, something we can do ourselves. You can make. You know, I've seen people use truck tires to uh, not the tire but the inner tubes to make natural
gas to you know, to cook their food. You know, you take a big truck tire and you put a bunch of you know, plant matter in it and fill it with water, and you know you have if you have a you know, right from where the air hose used to be, that can be put a valve on that and it comes right up to your stove and there you go. You're running on your own natural gas. So methane is is a good thing if it's made from plant matter, and it's really negative if it's made underground.
So where does methane come from? Well, methane in the atmosphere comes. The two top sources are drilling for oil. When they hit the deposit, there's enormous amounts of natural gas just going up into the air. And then the ongoing operation of an oil well is the second biggest source of methane in the air. But number three is a big surprise, which is the landfills all that organic matter that.
We How do you capture it.
Though, Well, they do that right now all over the country. They sink pipes into the they cover the top with a rubber membrane, and then they sink pipes into it and it pumps out all kinds of ethics. I remember when they built in the Bay area here the shoreline amphitheater on the site of an old dump, you know, and they were at the first concerts that were you know,
playing there. It's a huge, huge, grassy, you know, mound that used to be the landfill, and people would light up a joint and all of a sudden there be a JETI flame cover you know. So, yeah, nature makes methane, but when it makes it from plants, it doesn't get into the whole argument about are we having global warming or not because of too much carbon dioxide. But methane in the air eighty times more potent in creating global warming than carbon dioxide.
So you're saying that's a bad idea.
Oh, we don't want methane in the air, not at all, you know. And so the oil companies are the biggest and they're they're not even being fined for that yet, and you know the harmous worldwide problem.
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