Biodiesel related question?

Question

I'm doing a school project and was wondering if anyone know the percentage of farmers switching to grow biodiesel crops. Anything would help thanks :)

Answer 1

Personally, I have no idea about farmers. I do know that I have a proposal in front of eyeballs at the Virgin Green Fund for growing algae on a scale that sounds like lunacy. I can grow at least a few of thousand tons of algae per day resulting in over 1,000 tons per day of biodiesel. All that on 800 acres using algae and some physics tricks. I also figured out how to retrofit the system into some airports to make bio-jet fuel on site.

I hope that what I'm trying to accomplish will someday lower the price of biofuels by providing the quantities necessary to enough industry so American farmers will be able feed people first and provide us all fuel second, instead of being under so much pressure to chase a buck. I would really hate to see a "transportation induced famine" somewhere. Such a thing would speak volumes about the human race as a whole.

Answer 2

Farmers aren't really "switching" to a fuel crop per se, the soybeans grown in the USA and abroad have changed quite a bit in the past decade however. What you'll want to search for is Low Lin Soybeans or Low Lin oil.  Basically with the advent of Trans Fat fears, the soy industry has developed a new bean hybrid that produces soy oil with at or near zero trans fats. Before we saw all the Trans Fat Free signs in McDonalds and on food labels, soy beans had trans fat in the oil. The Low Lin variety is gaining huge popularity with growers because they get a premium price for it, they also pruduce biodiesel with low lin beans...but that being said, you can still easily produce biodeisel without low lin beans.  At this point, if they made soy biodeisel with low lin beans they'd be losing money so they produce bio diesel with regular soy beans....so the inverse to your question is true....more farmers are planting low lin beans and the bio deisel industry is seing a shortage of regular beans and thus are forced to buy higher priced low lin beans to produce bio diesel and that's why soy biodiesel is more expensive per gallon than regular dino diesel.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I DONT NO