Bio Diseal as an alternative energy source?

Question

Hey would you consider bio dieseal a good alternative energy source?

What are its benefits and put-backs?

Answer 1

Biodeisel takes food out of the mouths of people living in marginal food security by increasing the competition for grain reserves, and thus the price of grain. Is it ethical to drive a starvation wagon?

If you include the real cost of fertilizers, pesticides, land use and degradation, shipping of grain and extraction, it is no bargain, and is not a net energy gain. This might change with the new microbal extraction method, but it has not yet.

Biodiesel does not provide the same lubricating qualities that actual diesel does, and so either you trash your engine over a period of time while enduring poor performance, or yu use additives that take it back to the same polluting status as regular diesel.

So. It is not cleaner, it is not cheaper, and it starves people.

Answer 2

Off the top of my head, I remember reading that there's a 3:1 ratio of energy received versus energy used in the production of biodiesel. Also, the pollution is greatly less than burning petrodiesel. The one drawback is the amount of land needed to completely replace our petroleum fuel. Crop failure being another.

Answer 3

Here's the truth about biofuels in general.

We can't produce enough bio stuff to replace the fossil fuels we are using. Remember, gas, oil and coal came from biomass in the first place and took 100s of millions of years to build up to be enough for us to use up in about two hundred years. So, how can the earth produce every year what it took a million or so years to produce in the first place?