[Enthalpy]

Hello nice people!

The 2021 harvest was bad in Europe and some other locations due to drought. Natural gas has gotten badly expensive, but it provides the hydrogen for ammonia and then fertilizers. The war in Ukraine made everything worse. And now, strong drought in Europe will reduce the 2022 harvest. Even as Ukraine's crop exports resumed, were heading into a food crisis.

I had suggested that seaweed should be considered
  chemicalforums
Several companies develop it in Europe, which presently lags far behind Asia. Nice report by the Beeb
  BBC
Seaweed is considered as human food, animal feed, fertilizer, biofuel and more.

[Enthalpy]

Many rich countries put far too much sucrose in the food. In Germany, even the supermarket's pizza diavola adds sugar to the chilli, porca miseria! 80M Germans ingest 32kg/year sucrose while WHO recommends less than 9kg/year.

I already suggested to reduce these sugars to live healthier and feed more people
  chemicalforums
or we could just burn the noxious sugar to replace fuels. Sucrose provides 16.5MJ/kg
  srd.nist.gov p24/58
so if 80M Germans swallow 10kg/year less each, the country has 420MW more fuels. Or if really reducing to 9kg/year, it's 1GW heat, the electricity output of a power plant.

[Reddart]

Many rich countries put far too much sucrose in the food. In Germany, even the supermarket's pizza diavola adds sugar to the chilli, porca miseria! 80M Germans ingest 32kg/year sucrose while WHO recommends less than 9kg/year.

I already suggested to reduce these sugars to live healthier and feed more people
  chemicalforumsor we could just burn the noxious sugar to replace fuels. Sucrose provides 16.5MJ/kg
  srd.nist.gov p24/58
so if 80M Germans swallow 10kg/year less each, the country has 420MW more fuels. Or if really reducing to 9kg/year, it's 1GW heat, the electricity output of a power plant.

That is maybe a couple of days of heat during cold weather? Better than nothing I suppose.

My decision to install a geothermal system in my house 2 years ago was fortuitous, considering the cost of fuel now. What was a considerable payback time then is now a cash positive decision. I "break even" at ~$3.50/gallon fuel oil.

[Enthalpy]

Your question puzzled me. Germany consumed 130TWh of natural gas in January 2022, mostly for heating
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/Companies/SecurityOfSupply/GasSupply/grafik_consumption.html
so 1GW over 1 year saves 9TWh or 2 January days worth of natural gas.

Natural gas costs 15€/TJ (0.05€/kWh) at the border
https://www.eek-energy.com/en/news/natural-gas/detail/news/gas-import-price-rushes-from-record-to-record.html
so 1GW over 1 year lets save 0.5G€/year, which is indeed better than nothing.

Or you can compare with a present lengthy and passionate debate in Germany about closing TWO nuclear power plants right now, or in January, or keeping them in operation longer. The unhealthily wasted sucrose is ONE power plant worth.

Though in my view, it's better to sell or give the food to hungry people than burning it.

==========

What's your geothermal system? Do you have a hot source, or do you use the ground's inertia for heating and cooling, combined with a heat pump maybe?

[Reddart]

Yes it indeed it is a ground source heatpump. It uses the ground as a heat sink to run the heatpump for heating and cooling. Also uses the waste heat of the pump to preheat the water going into the water heater. It is sized for heating in my climate (upstate New York), so the airconditioning in the summer is uber overkill. I could make my whole house into a meat locker in less than an hour if I so desired.

I'll turn my temperature setting down a degree for a day this winter to show my solidarity with the Germans.

[Enthalpy]

Nice of you! I wash my hands and the dishes with cold water in solidarity with the Ukrainians. And to keep some fuel for this winter. But the situation here isn't so critical: the federal gov just announced the gas storage is 91% full.

[Enthalpy]

EU countries seek gas suppliers to replace Russia in the future
  aljazeera

I should like to remind that European straw can produce biomethane, able to replace around 1/6^th of the natural gas we used to buy from Russia
  chemicalforums - chemicalforums and following oops
Worth 30G€/year, and the fermentation leftovers are still good fertilizer. This biomethane emits no net CO₂ and might even avoid emitting CH₄ when unprocessed straw ferments in the soil as a fertilizer. The idea is already known, ask the researchers.

The leftovers of palm oil production in Asia exceed the straw amount in the EU. I suppose they could feed the same methanisers and increase also their output of fertilizer
  chemicalforums
Worth transporting from the antipodes? They can be chopped before.

The EU has more time than last year to build methanisers. Institutional action can save time. Like: select the best design, buy its intellectual property, make it freely available to many manufacturers, let know the process, provide optionally guarantees to the farmers.