Biodiesel: Green or Fraud?

[WildCat]

There's been a lot of press lately about biodiesel. This is a diesel fuel substitute made from vegetable oils that burns cleaner than conventional diesel fuel.
However, I suspect this is really a form of farm subsidy masquerading as enviromental policy but am having trouble finding data to prove it. Specifically, I want to know if it is possible to manufacture a gallon of biodiesel while consuming less than a gallon of fuel in the process, I'm talking from seed to pump.
I say this in light of a similar experience w/ ethanol, here in Illinois all fuel sold must contain 10% ethanol even though the production of ethanol consumes more fuel than it produces. It's really a farm subsidy that increases pollution and dependence on foreign oil.
Anyone here have the info?

[daver]

There was a paper written up about a year ago showing that, if all processes were performed as efficiently as practical, that ethanol had about a 25% payback--that you could get 5 gallons of ethanol for every 4 gallons of ethanol equivalent that you burned. One advantage was that a good fraction of that 4 gallons was electricity, and could come from non-fossil sources. I might have the web site saved on another machine if you're interested.

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations--if all of the US was as productive as Kansas, planting all of the US in corn would provide just about the US petroleum consumption.

Bio-diesel right now is not a crock. If you take fry oil that would have been thrown away anyway and convert it to diesel, you're getting the equivalent of something for nothing.

I just threw out about a gallon of fry oil; it had been accumulating for about three months. My own production of fry oil is woefully insufficient to fuel my own car, but perhaps the daily output of a McDonalds would be sufficient to keep their employees in gas.

I don't have figures on efficiency; biodiesel would seem to require less post-processing than ethanol, but i don't know about the productivity.

There was an article in the news a week ago about a new way of producing oil from biological material. That might change the equations.

Oops, silly me, it's being discussed in this forum.

[a_unique_person]

I did drive behind one of these buses, and they do seem to be a lot cleaner. I am asthmatic, and diesel is bad news.

However, the farm subsidy side of it is absolutely true.

[emerycorp]

Biodiesel is certainly not a fraud although making it from virgin corn oil will never make sense. I have a neighbor who goes around and collects 55 gallon drums of used fry oil (mostly from local Asian restaurants) and makes enough diesel fuel for himself and four employees. If I’m not mistaken they estimate their cost per gallon at about 50 cents (although they made a $5k investment in equipment first). There are no issues using biodiesel relative to the more familiar petrol version. Corn yields about 20 gallons of oil per acre-year making it impractical except when recycling used fry oil from a variety of industries (tortilla and potato chip manufacturers come to mind).

I just started a new thread here about a company that recently showed up on the stock market that is developing a variety of algae types for producing vegetable oil suitable for a variety of fuels (claiming yields of 20,000 gallons of oil per acre-year; and even larger amounts not requiring farm land when using their vertical closed loop bio reactor). I’m no expert in this field, which is why I started the new thread for comments. If you're interested you'll find it at:

forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=116077

There is a youtube link provided.

Steve

[Hellbound]

Just to point out: Biodiesel and ethanol are NOT the same thing.

Biodiesel does make sense, although it'll never replace petro products (not enough of it). As others have mentioned, you can make biodiesel from used fry oil, which is otherwise thrown out, so it's a good recycling practice. It'd work for limited uses...perhaps cities could use it to power public transportation, providing restaurants with a small "finder's fee" for their waste oil or something.

Ethanol is, essentially, purified moonshine :). It's corn-based alcohol designed for fuel. Unlight biodiesel, which can use waste products, it must use the corn itself. The sugars and starches are what is needed to produce the alcohol. That means that, currently, the balance of ethanol production and food production is a zero-sum game.

Ethanol could be useful if some of the current research in making ethanol from cellulose pans out. IF that works, then the waste products of corn and other plant production (stalks, husks, etc) could be used to make fuel. Again, there isn't enough arable land for this to come anywhere close to a petro replacement, but it could help. I could see farms runnig their own equipment and vehicles from ethanol produced from the waste material, and possibly even fueling the shipping fleets carrying farm goods to markets.

Anyway, neither is the answer to the fuel/energy question. They're useful sidelines, much like wind and solar are currently.

[INRM]

I never thought it actually burned cleaner... however if it does I'm glad to hear it!

However, what I did know is that it was a lot CHEAPER... it's one of the few chemicals I actually do know how to make myself.

INRM

[luchog]

Biodiesel does make sense, although it'll never replace petro products (not enough of it). As others have mentioned, you can make biodiesel from used fry oil, which is otherwise thrown out, so it's a good recycling practice. It'd work for limited uses...perhaps cities could use it to power public transportation, providing restaurants with a small "finder's fee" for their waste oil or something.
It doesn't necessarily need to be a recycling product to make sense; and replace a substantial percentage of the current petrol usage (though hardly all, as some have claimed).

Although the algae bio-reaction production of fuel-grade oil looks promising as a future technology, it's not ready now. However, hemp as a feedstock is currently available, and would serve as an excellent interim source of biodiesel due to the fact that it has the highest yield per acre and per total kg of any oil-producing crop, as well as containing a lower percentage of glycerides than most. On top of that, it grows well in marginal land, so it doesn't displace foodcrops like soy and rapeseed do, and it doesn't deplete soil the way many other crops like corn do. Growing for fibre and plowing detrius back into the soil returns nitrogen; so oil and fibre crops could easily be rotated. Rotating with nitrogen-fixing marginal land crops ike clover in a 4-year cycle also generates improved sustainability.