Biofuels: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Just about everyone realizes that oil is not a renewable resource, at least not at the rate that we are consuming it. The industrialized nations are sucking oil back at incredible rates. One estimate by the International Energy Agency printed here in April 2004 shows a consumption of 75 million barrels a day. A more recent estimate extracted here from the CIA World Factbook in June 2007 shows a consumption of 82,234,918 barrels per day. There is also quite a bit of debate on how much oil is really left that we can get to. Check out this post here and this interesting analysis of production vs. consumption. No matter what, the world needs to go on an oil diet and find another way to generate power.

Worldwide many nations are using some form of biofuel already. Here in America the talk is all about ethanol from corn. However, corn is a negative return for energy; in other words, it takes more energy to make ethanol from corn that what you get out of it. Here’s a report from the Washington Post and another blog here which outline some of the problems. Wikipedia has an excellent article on biofuels which goes into much great detail that I have room for here.

There are many possible sources for biofuels: corn (a poor choice), sugar cane (used by Brazil), switchgrass (I saw a show on the History Channel that showed excellent returns from this source), and even algae (some tout this as the perfect solution). Personally, I don’t think we should use a source for biofuel that is also a food crop because there are too many people on this planet without enough to eat or without affordable food available to them.

Perhaps one of the best solutions for our fuel problem was patented in 1892 by Rudolf Diesel. The original diesel engine was designed to run on vegetable oil (peanut oil). Today you can purchase a kit to convert your diesel engine vehicle to run on vegetable oil. You may even be able to get your vegetable oil for free. Most restaurants that fry food have to pay to dispose of their used oil. They are usually more than glad to have someone take it away for free. Not sure, check out this article on using vegetable oil as fuel.

Next car I buy may just have a diesel engine. Now, where is the nearest hamburger stand?