Is there a future for biofuels?
Image from Wikipedia
What happens with biofuels? (biofuels can be distinguished from biomass, because they need a chemical process to extract the liquid fuel and the biomass is burn directly or after just cutting and drying)
There are frequent news about promising biofuels , about good and bad perspectives at the same time in Neofronteras , some really negative from climate progress , some more standard and encouraging news from Denmark or other explaining the possibilities of biotech , and this last one about the interesting possibilities of marginal lands for biofuels.
Consequently, in this subject, we can say that clearly there is no consensus.
I think that the problem is that we are talking about too many things when saying biofuels. Nowadays there aren’t many doubts about the problems and scarce utility of using crop to fuel our cars, or destroying some hectares of rain forests for getting some liters of ethanol called “green”. And maybe the greatest sin have been to think they could be a direct substitute of petroleum. They can’t.
Nevertheless, there are many other possibilities of obtaining energy from plants or their wastes. I do not think they will solve our dependency to fossil fuels but they can contribute to certain extent and in some places help to get a self-containing solution because they can use the long experience we have on moving things by burning liquid fuels. For example, I imagine some marginal lands in a farm that are useful to obtain fuel for some machinery there.
So, let’s include some biofuels as part of the solution, even if small, being , at the same time, critical with their production process, giving priority to food but remembering that they are the most ancient solar power stations. In fact, they power our bodies.
Amateur Climate Change 