Wow, what an interesting thread. It started off about bio-fuels and food costs, and from there it has wandered all around all kinds of social, economic, political, environmental, ethical, and moral ground!

Anyway, back to biofuels...

Food crops are not a good feedstock for biofuels because they are expensive to farm and because we need them for food. Right now the eaisiest feedstocks for ethanol are grains like corn because the technology has been around forever (ethanol plants are basically giant whiskey stills). The ethatnol-producing yeasts need sugar to convert to ethanol, and there is plenty of sugar in corn. In Brazil they use sugar cane for ethanol and do not import a drop of oil. The breakthrough technology will be the new enzymes and/or microbes that can break down other hard-to-digest carbohydrates such as cellulose into sugar that can be digested into ethanol. At that point we will be able to turn things like farm waste, cornstalks, grasses, wood chips and other easy-to-come-by non-food materials into ethanol. We won't need to use food.

There are other technologies for converting non-food waste products into fuels other than ethanol which will alse be important. The microbes that digest organic waste into methane are less picky than the ethanol yeasts --- basically you can feed them any kind of shit, literally. My local wastewater treatment plant gets 80% of its electricity by digesting sewage sludge into methane and burning that for electricity --- yours probably does too.

Garbage pretty much turns to methane naturally. My local landfill has a system to capture methane that comes form naturally occuring decomposition inside the pile. Mostly they burn it for electricity, but now the garbage company is installing a liquification facility and they are going to convert the entire garbage truck fleet to run on liquified natural gas from the landfill. This process can be made even more efficient by not putting the organic waste in the landfill in the first place --- instead you capture it first and run it through a digester.

And there is even a technology to convert ANY kind of organic material into oil --- garbage, sewage, slauhgterhouse waste, old tires, plastic, toxic chemicals, ANYTHING organic. It uses a reactor vessel that is very similar to what is used in exisiting oil refineries, and it heats the organic material to extremely high temperatures and pressures in the presence of water. Under those conditions, organic material breaks down into oil that can be run throguh the normal refinery process to make any kind of fuel or industrial petroleum product. They are running some of these plants in Europe, and there is one demostration plant in the US. It hasn't been cost effective in the past, but with oil at $140 a barrel, I bet it is.

I think the future of transportation fuel will be a combination of these methods of converting WASTE biomass into fuel. We won't need to use our food supply. We make enough waste that we can run our socisty on it if we learn how to use it.

Ok, back to random discussion. may I suggest...

  • Don't eat beef, don't eat soy --- eat bugs!
  • Bush is a big fat liar!
  • Evolution!
  • Stop workin' for the Man, man!

Or we can just stick with biofuels....