Or does it take more electricity to make biodeisel than biodiesel to make electricity?
What about the environment, does biodiesel have a low impact? Or does the process to make it produce waste materials that are harmful and hard to dispose of environmentally?
Technically its not efficient, because it takes energy to grow the plants, transport them, manufacture the diesel, and make the plant to turn it into electricity.
But it partly depends what the source of biofuel is. If its recycled chip fat plus ethanol made from waste, plants grown on waste land or algae, thats not so innefficient.
Biodiesel is oil plus ethanol brewed from plants and yeast. Food grade plants are used to make it, thats taking farmland away from growing food crops. Thats good economics but not good ethics.
Sadly the choice we are making as a bio diesel fuel is not the right one, it is not efficient as far as energy production is concerned, the decision was made too fast and subsidies now make farmers unwilling to give it up, but it’s cost is not simply that of the energy, involved, but the loss of habitat, and farming ground, there is a bio fuel alternative as reported in Scientific American/ New Scientist that does make sense, and it is a form of grass that can be grown economically in very poor (sub standard for farming land), and is a form of grass, but whether a change in policy is still possible now is hard to say, the last month has shown us British labs that have perfected a form of lab based process that can convert sugars into high grade fuel, from bacteria , maybe this is the solution, but when will it reach the market, and at what price ?
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Technically its not efficient, because it takes energy to grow the plants, transport them, manufacture the diesel, and make the plant to turn it into electricity.
But it partly depends what the source of biofuel is. If its recycled chip fat plus ethanol made from waste, plants grown on waste land or algae, thats not so innefficient.
Biodiesel is oil plus ethanol brewed from plants and yeast. Food grade plants are used to make it, thats taking farmland away from growing food crops. Thats good economics but not good ethics.
Sadly the choice we are making as a bio diesel fuel is not the right one, it is not efficient as far as energy production is concerned, the decision was made too fast and subsidies now make farmers unwilling to give it up, but it’s cost is not simply that of the energy, involved, but the loss of habitat, and farming ground, there is a bio fuel alternative as reported in Scientific American/ New Scientist that does make sense, and it is a form of grass that can be grown economically in very poor (sub standard for farming land), and is a form of grass, but whether a change in policy is still possible now is hard to say, the last month has shown us British labs that have perfected a form of lab based process that can convert sugars into high grade fuel, from bacteria , maybe this is the solution, but when will it reach the market, and at what price ?