The reason for the interest in biofuels is that,
ideally, they only
put back into the environment the same amount of CO2 as the plants used to create the biofuel
took out of the environment.
In contrast, with fossil fuels, we are putting back into the environment millions of tons of CO2 that were taken out of the environment millions of years ago in plant material that was buried under layers of rock and ultimately converted by geologic processes into coal and oil.
Note that I said "ideally" in the first line. The current enthusiasm for biofuels is being tempered a bit by the concern that we are not properly and fully accounting for the actual CO2 "footprint" related to creating a given biofuel. I am no expert on this but the logic goes along these lines:
- OK, you are producing ethanol from corn and the corn took CO2 out of the environment as it grew.
But you had to apply a lot of fertilizer to the crop and the fertilizer to x amount of energy to manufacture.
And you cultivated, harvested, etc. the crop with a huge tractor that, erh, burns diesel not ethanol.
And then you had to ship the corn to a ethanol plant in a big, erh, diesel truck.
And the ethanol plant has its own energy requirements.
I think the solution to the energy/environmental crisis is going to be huge patchwork of solutions not a single homerun. First and foremost we need conservation... more efficient cars, better insulated houses and offices. And then we need to explore alternative energy sources like crazy but recognize that no single one is going to save us.
Right now ethanol is "out" and switchgrass is "in". Similarly, there seems to be a lot less enthusiasm for fermentation and a lot more interest in biogasification.
But, who knows if any of those will ever have any real impact.
But the important thing is that 2007 seems to be the year that we all woke up and smelled the coffee. With China and India on the scene, the era of cheap energy may really be behind us forever and everyone now seems to accept that global warming is real.
So now, folks are starting to get serious. If energy prices stay high that will encourage innovation and investment in alternatives (whatever they may be) and there will be research money coming from the politicians.
But, I was around in the late 70's and early 80's for the first energy crisis and I can remember all the boondogles, swindles, and waste. People will be throwing money at things that don't necessarily make sense. And the politicians will be making policy that, similarly, makes no sense.
We have Congress writing mandates about ethanol in gasoline, not because bioethanol is necessarily a good thing environmentally but because the farm lobby thinks they will make a fortune growing corn for ethanol.
Oh well, for better or worse these will be interesting times.
--ChemE
