OK so what do you think of biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel etc)?

Question

So I have to do a project on biofuels for a science fair, what do you think of them?

Answer 1

Well, biofluels seem to be great at first, but when you dig deeper you can find some major flaws in them. They are using up a lot of the already limited food supplies some parts of the world lack already. By then making food more scarce, and more valuable, inflation takes place. This makes poorer people unable to afford food, which causes then to be malnourished. Bio fuels, in the long run, probably will have a negative affect on people.

Answer 2

Biodiesel is summarized as corporate "greenwashing" by this professor due to its significant global social, environmental, and climate impacts:

http://www.wrm.org.uy/subjects/biofuels/...

"The United States will not be able to produce sufficient biomass for biofuel domestically to satisfy its energy appetite. Instead, energy crops will be cultivated in the Global South. Large sugarcane, oil palm, and soy plantations are already supplanting forests and grasslands in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, and Paraguay. Soy cultivation has already resulted in the deforestation of 21 million hectares of forests in Brazil, 14 million hectares in Argentina, two million hectares in Paraguay and 600,000 hectares in Bolivia. In response to global market pressure, Brazil alone will likely clear an additional 60 million hectares of land in the near future (Bravo 2006)."

"Conclusions

The energy crisis—driven by over-consumption and peak oil—has provided an opportunity for powerful global partnerships between petroleum, grain, genetic engineering, and automotive corporations. These new food and fuel alliances are deciding the future of the world’s agricultural landscapes. The biofuels boom will further consolidate their hold over our food and fuel systems and allow them to determine what, how and how much will be grown, resulting in more rural poverty, environmental destruction and hunger. The ultimate beneficiaries of the biofuel revolution will be grain merchant giants, including Cargill, ADM and Bunge; petroleum companies such as BP, Shell, Chevron, Neste Oil, Repsol and Total; car companies such as General Motors, Volkswagen AG, FMC-Ford France, PSA Peugeot-Citroen and Renault; and biotech giants such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta.

The biotech industry is using the current biofuel fever to greenwash its image by developing and deploying transgenic seeds for energy, not food production. Given the increasing public mistrust for and rejection of transgenic crops as food, biotechnology will be used by corporations to improve their image claiming that they will develop new genetically modified crops with enhanced biomass production or that contain the enzyme alfa-amilase which will allow the ethanol process to begin while the corn is still in the field—a technology they claim has no negative impacts on human health. The deployment of such crops into the environment will add one more environmental threat to those already linked to GMO corn which in 2006 reached 32.2 million hectares: the introduction of new traits into the human food chain as has already occurred with Starlink corn and rice LL601."

"Clearly, the ecosystems of areas in which biofuel crops are being produced are being rapidly degraded, and biofuel production is neither environmentally and socially sustainable now nor in the future.

It is also worrisome that public universities and research systems (i.e. the recent agreement signed by BP and the University of California-Berkeley) are falling prey to the seduction of big money and the influence of politics and corporate power. In addition to the implications of the intrusion of private capital on the shaping of the research agenda and faculty composition—that erodes the public mission of universities in favor of private interests—it serves as an attack against academic freedom and faculty governance. These partnerships divert universities from engaging in unbiased research and preclude intellectual capital from exploring truly sustainable alternatives to the energy crisis and climate change."

Ethanol has serious economic, environmental and climate change drawbacks as well:

http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/hot_...

"E85, a blended fuel consisting of 85-percent ethanol and 15-percent gasoline, has been championed (by GM in particular) as a viable and green solution to the petroleum problem. Unfortunately, both adjectives are a stretch. You could fill volumes with debate over the benefits and social, fiscal, and environmental costs of ethanol, at least the starch-derived strains, so we won’t.

What you need to know is that E85 reduces the fuel economy of any vehicle burning it by about 25 percent."

"Pres. George Bush recently announced a proposed mandate for 35 billion gallons of ethanol production by 2017, so you’ll probably see more vehicles so equipped, regardless."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080207/ap_o...

"The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming."

Good luck on your project.

Answer 3

Bioethanol has to made from starch or sugar at the moment, what we need is a method is to convert wood waste into ethanol, but remember ethanol has a lower calorific value. A better idea is to make Butanol form waste starch, Chaim Wiseman made butanone from Horse Chestnuts in WW1, the same system can be used for Butanol.

Answer 4

As long as they are NOT using edible food, I'm all for them.  But I see the results already in increased price of corn for horse feed.  I can't imagine what it's going to do to the cattle & dairy farmers. We may just be passing on the problems to another part of society.

Answer 5

Ethanol is a joke.  It takes more energy to make a gallon of ethanol than a gallon of gas.  So much crop land has been devoted to growing corn for ethanol, that it has created a shortage of all feedstock grains, and has caused the price of all our food products to skyrocket.  It only seems to be good for some farmers, but mostly huge corporate agricultural operations like Archer, Daniels, Midland who are getting richer off gov't subsidies.  Ethanol gives fewer miles to the gallon than gasoline.  Ethanol is not the answer, unless possibly it is made from something like switchgrass which we do not otherwise eat.  Biodiesel probably makes some sense, but there would probably never be enough of it for general auto use.

Answer 6

Current biofuels will not provide us with any great source of energy. We cant grow enough corn, or any other crop, to make it fesiable with the current technology.