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Taking the bat to biofuels
November 16th 2009
Biofuels continues to be the focus of controversy with a new study claiming that even the next generation would emit more carbon dioxide than plain old regular gasoline.
Personally, this industry watcher believes that it is high time that governments that have been mandating the mixture of biofuels into regular gasoline sit up and actually run studies on the many and various impacts that biofuels actually have.
You know, the kind of impacts like how it affects food production or that growing plants of most kinds requires nitrogen-based fertilisers, the making of which isn’t the cleanest thing in the world.
Both are points that the study, which was published in Science, point about the so-called cellulosic biofuels.
It notes that the land required to plant fast-growing poplar trees and tropical grasses would displace food crops, and so drive deforestation to create more farmland while the crops need fertilisers which are the source of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.
Biofuels have always had a major question mark over its viability. Sourcing waste oil from fast food restaurants was never going to be a major contributor to the equation and using food crops seriously leads one to question about the sanity of some of its proponents.
I believe that only with algae or perhaps jatropha-based biofuels would we see biofuels becoming a viable alternative or addition to the current fuel mixed.
The former would benefit from needing tanks of saline water to grow in while producing low levels of carbon, according to a research project by the University of Adelaide. This would remove any competition with food crops for space as the tanks or ponds can potentially be located even in desolate regions.
Meanwhile, Jatropha is capable of growing on land unsuitable for normal cultivation and is resistant to drought.
A jatropha sourced fuel was also mixed in equal amounts with regular aviation fuel to power an Air New Zealand 747-400 at the beginning of this year.
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