Biofuels are not the end all solution

Biofuels not the total solution - REDUCE your driving and consumption of fossil fuels. I agree with other posters on here that buying unsustainable shipped from China contributes to a HUGE carbon footprint. BUY LOCAL!

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The truth about Biofuel ( source http://www.instructables.com/id/Biotour.org-Waste-Vegetable-Oil-Conversion-Diesel-/ )

Biodiesel is a fuel that is made from the long-chain esters (fatty acids) from plants. These are usually concentrated in a few parts of the plant such as seeds.

The problem is that only a very small part of the overall plant, just a few percent of its dry weight, is made up of these esters. The rest is basically some kind of cellulose or starch. So you'd be throwing away that part of the plant (or doing something less useful with it) rather than making fuel from it.

Their may be a niche for biodiesel, using by-products that we'd throw away anyway (like old vegetable oil) , but it would never make sense to grow plants for this purpose -- it would be too expensive (which is what i was trying to get at).

FYI About Biodiesel:

The Penn State site has this to say about the disadvantages of biodiesel:

Biodiesel requires very high production costs. The reasons for this are mainly that soybeans, the predominant source of biodiesel, only yield 20% oil, when much more is needed. Recycled oils can be used more cost effectively, but there isn't nearly enough recycled oil to satisfy the demand for biodiesel as a fuel. Understandably, there are also a lot of steps taken to produce and utilize the soybeans. The cultivation of the crops and the transformation of them into biodiesel takes time. The numerous amounts of manpower and machine needed for this process adds to the high cost.

FYI About Ethanol:

From USA TODAY:

Politically it's hard to go wrong promoting an alternative fuel made from American corn. But, as often happens, reality rears its ugly head.

Ethanol is a cleaner-burning fuel than gasoline, to be sure — using ethanol instead of gas can reduce greenhouse gases by 35-46%, according to Argonne National Laboratory. But it's not as efficient a fuel as gasoline. In fact, it takes a gallon and a half of ethanol to give you the same energy as a gallon of gas.

Let's do some math.

To get a gallon of ethanol, you need a little more than 26 pounds of corn, and an acre of land can yield about 9,400 pounds per year. In other words, one acre of land can generate about 362 gallons of ethanol per year.

But people in the U.S. use about 174 million gallons of gasoline per day just for their cars (so says the Department of Energy). If the Magic Fairy came down and all our cars suddenly ran on ethanol we would need about 261 million gallons per day.

That would require more than 260 million acres of corn to produce. Considering that in 2000 farmers in the U.S. harvested about 73 million acres of corn, it looks like they'll need to get cracking.

They'll also need to get spraying. See, you can't get that kind of yield without fertilizer, and I'm not talking about manure. Corn growers in the U.S. use about 137 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre, according to the 2002 Agricultural Chemical Usage. They'll also need weed control about a pound per acre of atrazine, the most popular herbicide. And let's not forget all the fresh water for irrigation.

So let's cut to the chase: To get enough ethanol from corn to power our cars, Americans would need to use almost 13 million tons more fertilizer, and dump more than 93.5 million tons of atrazine into the environment every year. (The potential health effects of atrazine read like the small print in a drug ad: congestion of the heart, lungs, and kidneys; low blood pressure; muscle spasms; weight loss; damage to adrenal glands. And that's in the short term.)

There is a lot of good to say about ethanol ” it's renewable, it's easily portable, it's fairly 'energetic,' and it burns cleaner than gasoline. But it's not the answer. It's not magic. Remember that politicians are very good at bending the truth and forgetting to mention the down sides. And just because something grows on trees ” or stalks” doesn't mean it doesn't cost.

And about Methane/Nat Gas

20 years is a nit in the annals of history. Global cooling was the big environmental issue back then, but few paid attention to it (similar to global warming 10 years ago). And Amoco was looking for a way to market more natural gas. Strictly economics on their, and the consumers, part. The chemistry of burning methane/natural gas shows there are many fewer pollutants power unit of energy. Mainly CO2 and Water. The need for catalytic converters goes away (and the expense). But we do start carrying pressure vessels for the methane. I understand this is still less weight per unit energy applied to the wheels than any of even the newest battery technology. The ones I don't like to see are the folks that use methane to chemically separate out the hydrogen (a simple process) to feed they hydrogen to fuel cells. It is one thing for testing, but not to try to foist on the public as green any more than burning natural gas is. The end chemistry is the same, CO2 and water come out when you break down the methane. But for the fuel cells, CO2 and Oxygen come out, the hydrogen is stripped off to go to the fuel cell, where it is combined with the (now) atmospheric oxygen to generate electricity and water. But that could just be my sensibilities showing (as yet another aside, I saw a program on PBS in the last month or so where an set of scientists were interviewed, about global climatology. They said that yes, global warming is real, caused by emitted gasses, but so is global cooling, caused by particulate matter (ash) put into the atmosphere by burning coal and other carbon ash producing activities like flying jet air planes. They are saying that global warming is not as bad as the models predict, because of global cooling that is counteracting more of the warming than we initially thought. ... They were able to show the effects of global cooling by measuring the temperature changes that happened the 3 days air planes were grounded in the USA after 9/11/2001. The graphs and data, not speculation and hand waving, made me a believer that BOTH are happening. If we stop polluting our air with 'ash' we will get global warming happening in spades. If we stop generating 'green house gasses', we will enter a man-effected ice age shortly. So we need to balance what we do, and on a global scale, this makes the balancing act even harder to perform.) Yes, the Pickens Plan has its flaws. But even Mr. Pickens says it is NOT THE ANSWER, but it is a bridge to buy us time to do the really right thing, the right answer, whatever that is. Wind power is great, and not very polluting after we get the initial investment made in the infrastructure. There is still noise, and locals in many areas say visual pollution. They seem to have some issues in the path of migrating birds, on the birds. I am sure balloonists and the like would rather not fly near them either. There are bound to be other issues that come up we have not thought about yet either. Methane, other than natual gas is being used some places. (TVA is tapping a covered dump or two near Memphis and using the methane in a power plant. ... But this is just one example.) But non-natural gas methane will never be a big player, it is just another small part of 'the answer'. By all odds, I think that the public will do another 'oh my, how nice' on the Pickens Plan, just like they did on the EV1 that GM smashed several years ago. (Whether it was in conjunction with oil companies or not, is still a debatable point. I used to work for companies in the 'oil patch', and I wouldn't put it past many of the corporate executives'.) For every vehicle we do convert, Mr. Pickens is right, we will send fewer dollars over seas, and they will be available for reinvestment here rather than Dubai or Moscow. That alone, can help the domestic markets. I do remember seeing MANY pickups in West Texas while I was a boy that had big butane or propane tanks, and were dual fueled. Why? Economics. Gas cost more per mile back then. I do not know the current status of this practice. I was consulting for a local propane company where I live in TN a couple of years ago. I asked why they didn't use propane in their vehicles, especially since their fuel acquisition cost was less than retail. They said it was because they could not develop enough power in the pickup they had to make it up some of the hills in Middle Tennessee (not even the Smokies, but much more than the planes of west Texas). So they did not even encourage use of it for transportation here. Propane and methane have similar energy densities, so I expect that methane in vehicles may not work well 'everywhere'. But where it does work, it is still a better answer, until we are able to make the next step and get off of petroleum based fuels for even vehicular transportation. Given we have the largest proven reserves in the world of natural gas, I find it odd that we are importing it. (Large East coast ports are in Cove Point Maryland and Savannah Georgia, and I don't remember where on the west or south (Gulf of Mexico) coasts.) If the overall solution was simple, and a discussion on a blog would fix it, the solution would already be implemented. This is not a simple series of linear equations, and there is no one right answer. Sorry for belaboring the point, but this is obviously a personal hot button. I am sure there are many points I am wrong about, but thinking and working in the energy industry most of my life, I have tried to work through many scenario's, and not just those that directly benefit me or my company. What I want is for US to come to and implement a 'basically correct' solution, whether it is optimal or not. The next round of addressing it will give a better solution, but not addressing it at all is the worst answer of all.