Does this study ignore the use of Bio-Diesel? It seems to me that would reduce the dependence on foreign oil and cut down on coal emissions at the same time.
Apparently they are ignoring it as fast as they can.........
The funny thing about bio-diesel is that it is only economical if there is no demand. If you are willing to collect refuse cooking oil and process it in your garage, keep quiet. As soon as it becomes popular, restaurants will quit giving it away.
Most bio-diesel is currently being made from food crops.
That’s bad. Using edible fats to power vehicles just makes no sense to me. You can’t feed petroleum or coal to people, so let’s reserve the food crops for feeding people and animals, eh ?
What gets me about the whole electric vehicle and plug-in hybrid vehicle vs. CTL is that nobody ever questions the ultimate end point. You can’t fly fighter jets, bombers, or even passenger jets on electricity yet, but you could on CTL. Not sure about bio-diesel in jets, but I don’t like the idea of burning edibles anyway.
Biodiesel is great fuel, but it’s too expensive to make and it takes way too much land to make a little fuel. Per gallon, biodiesel is a lot more subsidized than ethanol. Blenders get a one dollar tax credit for every gallon of biodiesel that they blend with regular diesel compared to the fifty one cents blenders get for every gallon of ethanol they blend with gasoline. Most all biodiesel sold in this country is made from soybeans, a subsidized crop just like corn. (With current high corn prices very little corn subsidies are being paid by the way.) Biodiesel needs the bigger tax credit because it’s so expensive to make. It’s so expensive to make because it takes a whole lot more land to produce a gallon of biodiesel from soybeans than it does to produce a gallon of ethanol from corn. This makes feedstock prices are really high for biodiesel. You only get something like 50 gallons of soy oil per acre of beans on average, if that, and you don’t get a full 50 gallons of biodiesel from 50 gallons of vegetable oil. No biofuel concoctions we make for our cars are going to do much to reduce our dependence on foreign oil until we can figure out how to make one cheap enough to compete with petroleum based fuels on a cost basis and be able to make enough of that fuel from every acre we devote to it to supply several drivers. Maybe something like biodiesel from algae or cellulosic ethanol will pan out, maybe not.