Heating The Planet

…with biodiesel.

Maybe politicos should do more research before imposing half-baked energy mandates?

It wouldn’t do any good. They’re mostly too stupid to understand the results of the research, or too much on the take from the benefitting industry to care. But they get to pretend to be saving the planet.

Speaking of biodiesel, will the same be true of biokerosene? Is the “green aviation” initiative another unintended consequence on the way?

8 thoughts on “Heating The Planet”

  1. Biodiesel per se is not the problem. Biodiesel is a fine energy package. Liquid, high density, easy to handle, store. The problem is how to produce cheap biodiesel. Soy is definitively not on the list of possible cheap technologies to produce biodiesel for fuel. Heck it is too expensive for making cheap margarine in some cases.

    Palm seeds are not soy beans. Sugar cane is not corn. Check out oil production per unit area for example. There is interesting research on biodiesel production from algae but it is far from a done deal.

    Personally I think in case of constrained supply of petroleum the industry will most likely resort to hydrocracking of lower grade fuels (tar sands, oil shale) or Fischer–Tropsch of natural gas and coal. That is far cheaper for diesel production than growing crops.

    I think in the future synthetic hydrocarbon fuels will be commonplace. I just doubt they will come from crops. There could be some sort of technological breakthrough in the agribusiness but I will not be holding my breath.

  2. Rand,

    Any biofuel is until the technology is available to make it from micro-organisms or sources like garbage and feedlots.

  3. Research will likely be designed to enhance rather than mitigate future rent seeking opportunities by the researcher’s faction.

  4. One point about algae-based biodiesel is that it could be produced on land otherwise useless; the most common idea is to grow the things in transparent tubes full of water and nutrients, and it surely can’t be impossible to recycle all the raw materials (other than some of the water) that go into the actual algae – certainly all the minerals. After all, the mineral content of the biodiesel is approximately zero.

    This is extremely economical of water and of course doesn’t take up any land that could be otherwise used for food crops – similarly the fertiliser necessary would not turn into runoff, a serious problem for factory farms.

    All you really need for this is a few kilometres of plastic tubing and a small water supply, and a few square miles of desert.

    Sure, it needs some research. Maybe some of the budget for useless windmills might be diverted?

  5. One advantage for algae is that you do not need fresh water. Salt water works fine. If you have a chunk of desert with high solar exposure near an ocean you have an ideal location. Another advantage is the oil yield per unit of area.

    However the devil is in the details. From what I understand the process to extract oil from biodiesel is highly energy intensive. They usually boil them to get the oil. This is one reason why ethanol is so expensive as well. The process of separating ethanol from water, to get pure ethanol, is expensive energetically. Other issues with algae are how to ensure proper solar exposure for all the culture, instead of some algae growing in the walls and blocking the others out, or how to prevent disease from killing all the culture, or even getting cheap mass production without using small lab scale test tubes.

    Like I heard someone say once, if algae oil from biodiesel was that cheap, it would be used for producing margarine, producing soap, creams, or whatever. The fact it is isn’t means it is too expensive to grow even for those applications. If algae oil mass production was available you would likely target those applications first since they have a higher profit margin than fuels.

  6. Godzilla – Has anyone actually tried to solve the problems you mention? Billions for useless tokamak fusion research and more billions for almost equally useless windmills – and next to nothing for things that might actually work. One might well question the motives of those making the funding decisions.

  7. > Is the “green aviation” initiative another unintended consequence on the way? .. Maybe some of the budget for useless windmills might be diverted? <

    Sadly – no. As you might know the Navy is funding work on the Polywell fusion reactor. But no this years bnudget more funding goes to studing systems that generaet power with wave energy.

    🙁

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