[SGVLUG] Especially for Tom & his Prius....

[Dustin Laurence]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 09:21:13AM -0400, James Neff wrote:
> 
> What if we used biodiesel made from soybeans?  I don't have hard data,
> but from what I was told the carbon dioxide consumed during the beans
> growth cancels out the CO2 produced while burning it.

Yes, but it doesn't cancel out the CO2 burned for farming, and
apparently at least some of the carbon in the fertilizer is mineral
carbon.  The number I consistently see is a 78% reduction, meaning that
22% of the emitted carbon wasn't removed from the atmosphere in the
first place.

Still, nothing else comes close.

> ...Also, soybean is
> hearty and doesn't require as many fertilizers and pesticides as corn
> does for ethanol production.

Yeah, but soy oil has a high iodine number and isn't the best fuel oil.
It's just the one the US is heavily invested in producing already, so
the producers naturally don't want to switch.  Canola is better and is
conveniently already Europe's main oil crop, but frankly probably
neither is the "right" solution for a mainly biofuel economy.

> ...Biodiesel is a solution to the oil problem
> that we could implement now and can burn in any diesel engine without
> conversion cost. 

Well, depends on what you think the "oil problem" is exactly.  The
entire vegetable oil production of the US would replace maybe 5% of
current diesel production, and that doesn't even address all the cars
that are currently gasoline (i.e. it would be far less than 5% if we
converted them to passenger diesels).  I don't think there is enough
arable land in the entire US to replace current diesel usage if the crop
is soy.

But this doesn't mean biodiesel is useless--it's a great lubricity
additive even as B1 (1% biodiesel, 99% diesel #2).  So that would be
some help in moving from gasoline to advanced diesels.  But it doesn't
*solve* much.

Palm oil has some ridiculously high oil yield per acre, but people are
afraid to push that because they're afraid--with good reason, I might
add--because they're afraid that every remaining acre of rainforest
would be immediately converted to palm plantations.  *That* isn't a
great idea.  It also means we're back to importing oil; not from the
absolutely worst places on the planet as we do now, granted, so I
actually still think it's an improvement, but from the national security
aspect it's not ideal.

As an aside, I have always considered foreign oil dependence to be a
national security since I was a kid, and found it incomprehensible that
the hawks preferred not to talk about that.  I'm glad it's an issue now,
if only to try to break and re-draw the political lines on the issue.

There are also ideas to grow algae in the desert--it turns out that some
algaes produce a great deal of oil, and of course you can grow them on
otherwise non-fertile land if you can get water to them (and the very
existence of LA proves we can).  Apparently the potential production is
high enough to be well worth trying, though I haven't yet heard anyone
mention the effects on fragile and already stressed desert areas.

So is it a solution?  Well, it's closer to a solution to greenhouse
emissions than anything else that actually works with our existing
economy.  Twenty-two percent of an awful lot is a big improvement, but
it's hard to call it a "solution."  On the other hand, that 22% is in an
economy that makes no effort at all, so I bet we could do a lot better
(obviously agricultural equipment can be run on biodiesel, so that part
should be able to be eliminated entirely, and we can maybe do better
about carbon sources).  So--maybe.  Very worth trying, anyway.  But it
only works if we can grow more than 5% of diesel usage.  Right now, it's
not a solution.

For foreign dependence, the answer is about the same but of course we'd
have to grow a *lot* more oil from much more agriculturally efficient
crops in much less desirable areas than we do now.  But frankly it's
still better than depending on a few countries who only talk to us
because they are run by opressive dictatorships and oligarchs.

This may sound pessimistic coming from someone looking at buying a car
just to run biodiesel, but I think it's a *better* story than most of
the alternatives. :-(

Dustin, who has thought about this *way* too much recently

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