Biofuels Worse then Gasoline?

Read here: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/studies-say-bio.html


And discuss!

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I think its not about environment now days but more about what fuel we can use before gasoline runs out

 

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The only people this will come as a shock to are the ones who burn E85 in their cars and get shittier fuel economy so they can pat themselves on the back for "being green", even though they're not.

 

isnt there another thread on the same topic going?

 

Corn-based ethanol is the most poluting and is highly inefficient. What has been proposed outside of the US is cellutose and sugar cane based ethanol. Both of which can be up to twice as efficient as corn ethanol. Cellutose alone has 85% fewer CO2 emmitions than corn ethanol.

 

Doesn't suprise me really, in fact a friend of mine that tried making biofuel even found it was more expensive to produce than gas! Well, using whatever method he was using anyway, I'm sure the economics can work out with scale and such. I'd be willing to have a plug-in electric car with a modular generator to charge the car during, say, a long road trip. I say modular because since this generator wouldn't be hooked straight to the drivetrain like in the currently-produced hybrids, they could be swapped out relatively easily, so you could choose to have a gas generator, a diesel/biodiesel generator, a hydrogen fuel-cell, another rack of batteries, whatever will fit the generator and gas-tank "slots" and generate some power for the car. While I'm at it, I'd slap a solar panel on the roof to let it get a little charge during the day, so if it's parked at the company parking lot for 8 hours on a sunny day, you get a little bit of free power.

Dunno, an idea, maybe not the right thread for it, but meh.

 

You didn't actually read the link, did you?
Biofuels aren't as bad as gasoline, they're worse. And depending on the estimates, they can be a lot worse.

 

I did not think these factors would amount to such negative returns.

 

Growing the corn or whatever takes more gasoline to actually grow than we get out of it. Too many energy conversions. Furthermore, with the horrible agricultural policies in America, American farmers don't have any incentives to actually learn how to farm, which just leads to more inefficiently produced corn. If they actually had to compete with 3rd world farmers, maybe we'd see an biofuel product that didn't take more energy to grow and convert than what's recovered.

 

It's really too bad. Now we have to find another source, I guess...:shrug:

 

The simple fact is that the enviro-whackos can't stop whining to save their lives. To hell with them.

 

Total environmental costs of biofuels worse than gasoline

kmguru:

Roman is quite right about his statement that biofuels are worse than gasoline.

I did a study last year of energy densities of crops for biodiesel where we had a choice of canola, cane, soybean, switchgrass, and about a dozen other less efficient oil crops. To meet the current requirements for fossil fuel energy consumption in the U.S. required conversion of ALL current agricultural land to fuel crops. Which meant that we either had to import all our food, or bring into production poorer land. Of course to produce the new agricultural food lands required destruction of abotu 450 million acres of other habitat and a release of the carbon sequestered in those forests and grasslands. And the use of fuel crops mandates a monoculture crop - which has the twin problems of killing biodiversity, and being vulnerable to catastrophic loss due to various pathogens and parasites. Wish I could find a copy and load it up here.

On the other hand, there was a more promising article by a guy over at UNH about the use of algae for oil production. Supposely only required 15,000 square miles (a bit less than 10 million acres) converted to pondland for production. Of course the WATER use for that is a bit of a problem, but still had much less environmental impact than dryland fuel crops.

 

oh wow...kmguru is indeed correct, in the cycle of this biofuel production, the net CO2 released is much less than gasoline...plants take in by photosynthesis the CO2 and that CO2 goes through complex system to be biofuel.

 

don't tread on Al Gore, he was the one who made Kyoto protocol a reality

he also buys carbon offset each time he travels by aircraft, as well as drive hybrid vehicle