How Green Is Biodiesel? Friday , April 17, 2009 By Jason Gurskis When
it comes to our energy woes, there may be a light at the end of the
tunnel -- a green light, and one not powered by petroleum.
We may be able to curb our addiction to fossil fuels by using
plants, animal fats and old restaurant grease. But there are a few
drawbacks.
Consumers are already familiar with ethanol, a simple alcohol
distilled from corn and often added to gasoline. But even easier to
produce is biodiesel, a mixture of more complex molecules that can be
made from all sorts of fats and oils, including leftover foodstuffs.
• Click here for more photos.Biodiesel is safe to handle, nontoxic and biodegradable. Its
proponents says it's a cleaner-burning replacement for petroleum-based
fuels and that its use will greatly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and
other toxic air pollutants.
"Biodiesel could be one of the best carbon-mitigation processes
available today for heavy-duty vehicles like trucks and buses," says
Jenna Higgins, spokeswoman for the National Biodiesel Board, based in
Jefferson City, Mo. "It works with what we have, and we don't have to
wait for new technologies to use it."
The concept of biodiesel is surprisingly old. In the 1890s, Rudolf
Diesel envisioned vegetable oil as a fuel source for his engine. In
1900, the diesel engine was demonstrated at the World Exhibition in
Paris, France, running on peanut oil.
Biodiesel can be used "neat" in a formulation known as B100 (100
percent biodiesel), or blended with petroleum diesel. A 20 percent
blend is called B20. The Department of Energy says B20 reduces a diesel
engine's carbon-dioxide emissions by 15 percent, and B100 by more than
75 percent.
And carbon dioxide released by biodiesel combustion is offset by the
carbon dioxide sequestered while growing the soybeans and other
feedstock.
Yet biodiesel almost sounds too good to be true -- and many experts say it is.
"Biodiesel is, of course, made from vegetable oils that are food
crops, such as palm and soy, which have played a significant role in
deforestation," explains Jimmie Powell of the Arlington, Va.-based
Nature Conservancy. "Dramatically expanding production to meet new
demand for biodiesel would not only continue to worsen the problem, it
would also have severe impacts on food prices in the developing world."
In some places, current crops can't keep pace with the bio-materials
needed for producing biodiesel. Even though biodiesel is undoubtedly
greener than traditional petroleum-based fuel, there's little or no
regulation on how and where it's produced.
Palm oil, for example, is commonly used for cooking and as an
additive in foods. Growing it has been big business in Southeast Asia
since the mid-19th century, and it's only getting bigger.
Between 1995 and 2005, nearly 8.6 million acres of land in
Indonesia, including vast tracts of forests and peat bogs, were
converted to palm-oil plantations, more than doubling total plantation
area, according to a recent report by Credit Suisse.
Tropical forests help remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere every year. Burning and clear-cutting these forests to
grow biofuel crops not only eliminates one of the planet's own natural
air-filtration systems, but the process of land clearing itself
releases even more carbon dioxide into the air as smoke or gases
released during the decomposition of forest waste.
"It's unfortunate these practices give biodiesel a bad name," says
Robert McCormick at the DoE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in
Golden, Colo. "There are plantations that are sustainable."
According to the National Biodiesel Board, a vast majority of the
feedstock used to make biodiesel in the United States is grown
responsibly and sustainably. Most of the domestic stock comes from
soybean oil, mainly because the U.S. is the world's largest producer of
soybeans.
"Sixty-five percent of all biodiesel used in this country comes from
soybeans," explains Victor Bohuslavsky, executive directory of the
Nebraska Soybean Board, based in Lincoln, Neb. "Eighty-six percent of
soybeans produced was used in food. We can find good uses for the
balance, and biodiesel is one of them."
Most experts agree that biodiesel is a good alternative to imported petroleum, despite the complications.
"It's not an easy problem to solve, because we've built our entire
system around coal and petroleum," explains Kert Davies, research
director for Greenpeace. "We have to be creative and look at a diverse
set of solutions to solve our addiction to oil."
The DoE's McCormick agrees.
"Using biodiesel is not going to end petroleum imports," he says, "but it is an important part of the solution."
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,516738,00.htmlSounds like it is sustainable only if you limit production to a sustainable level.
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