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November 25, 2006
The future of Bio-Fuels
It's pretty clear that bio-fuels are the future of fuel in this country. Even if we move to Hydrogen in say the next 500 years, bio-fuels are still the best storage source of hydrogen we have in the near future. The question has become what will be the source of our bio-fuels? The folks in Washington at the behest of the American autoindustry have been pushing the ethanol solution from corn. We do grow a lot of corn and it does help us out to use some of the corn for ethanol production. But by far the best source of bio-fuels is algae and the more that we research it the clearer that fact becomes. Here's a nifty chart I snagged from the AutoblogGreen folks on fuel productions from the different sources, corn and soy have about the same production ratios just for comparison purposes.
* Soy = 40 or 50 gallons of oil per acre per year
* Brassicas = 100-150 gallons per acre per year
* Palm = about 650 gallons per acre per year
* Algae = perhaps 10,000 gallons per acre per year (algae can be harvested every two weeks instead of once a year)
So that's a 200 times the production capacity per acre using Algae verses Soy folks. It's pretty easy to see why the South Africans were able to quadruple our bio-diesel production using Algae over regular food crops in 18 months. If we want to help American farmers we are going to have to break the strangle hold of Corporate Argriculture has over them, then they won't need as many bio-fuel options. Once again, we are suffering a political problem instead of a technological one.
Read more over at AutoblogGreen.
Posted by Jamison at November 25, 2006 10:42 AM
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