Originally Posted by Kwikkordead
I agree with you on every point here.
I have to wonder though, a 100% organic source of fuel for everyone in the world; I think that there might not be enough farmland on the planet to supply. We would have to sacrifice wilderness areas and turn them into giant fuel farms.
I played around with those numbers one time and you're right. The US has a *lot* of unused arable land and could grow a *lot* of soybeans, but it would be difficult to supply a large fraction of even the current diesel utilization in the US (never mind trying to switch over to biodiesel as the more common fuel source instead of gasoline.) I think you could easily turn our nation's diesel supply into B5 or B10, though, which would be a *huge* positive in terms of cutting our crude oil needs and lowering pollution... not to mention putting a lot of farmers back to work.
... but there are other sources of base stock for biodiesel.
Despite the super-sizing of the US waistline, there's not enough used fryer oil to replace all the petrodiesel with biodiesel, but we should definitely use all that anyway - it uses up what is currently a waste product that fills landfills.
They have done studies with turning algae into biodiesel:
Click here for DOE study. That has the advantage of being quicker turnaround than a crop like soybeans.
There's a process called "thermal depolymerization" that takes pretty much any material except nuclear waste and efficiently turns it into its base components, which come out as a gas (which is fed back into the process to heat the next batch!), a diesel-like oil, and a fertilizer-like solid material. I had a link to a great article on the subject, but the magazine doesn't archive their articles forever, so it's gone now.
You can click here for a more scientific paper on the subject. The early tests have been done with the waste products from turkey processing plants (body parts and poop), but the process can be tuned to work with anything from pig farm waste to plastic 2-liter bottles. (The no longer available article even theorized about what would come out of the process if the average human were thermally depolymerized, and they were joking, but what an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation for an eco-freak!) I like this strategy because it can get rid of existing pollution problems while solving part of the energy problem.
Soooooo.... if you can't tell, I think we should work towards making biodiesel a standard and cost-effective part of our fuel choices, and once that ball is rolling I think the sources for all that base stock will start presenting themselves, as more and more people ponder the problem and come up with innovative solutions.
Duncan