we'll end up using waste oils for intercity bus service -- a very stable market and good technical match

economy's wrecked, climate's melting, oil's scarce, green's the way out.

Great article, very thorough and well researched.  

There seem to be two real issues here; the first and most obvious is that the global population and increasing standard of living do not match the ability of our planet to supply the demand.  So the bottom line is that we need to stabilize the population, accept a more reasonable standard of living, or increase the yield efficiency of our cultivated land.  

The second issue is the expectation that people have that there is a magic bullet technology that will replace fossil fuels, and that some group of scientists will swoop in and save the day.  We have to understand that the convenience and simplicity of digging a hole and pumping out a liquid fuel, basically `ready to go', cannot be matched.  We will be hard-pressed to develop another liquid fuel that can be obtained as cheaply as oil, and equally as hard-pressed to develop a liquid fuel that is less environmentally destructive than oil.  The answer to our energy problem, if it comes from truly renewable sources, will not be cheaper than fossil fuels have been in the past decades, but it will be more reflective of the true cost of energy.  

What can I say that's not been said better elsewhere? Nowhere in the fuel vs food debate is any mention of curtailing the ability of people to drive, no where in the debate is there any real mention of using municipal, domestic and industrial waste to produce alternative (biofuels) and there is very little debate about fuel efficiency.

There are some things that simply should not be done in temperate northern climates, using slow growing food crops to make biofuels is one. That would be better done using non-food crops in the tropics where growth is faster and the trade in fuel from the tropics could help to bind north and south closer together.

1) Nitrogen oxide is not a greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide is.

2)Rapeseed is not canola, although canola is a conventionally genetical engineered  rapeseed variety.

3)There is no citation for the requirement of five times land area for energy from soy versus corn.

For someone trying to 'expose' someone else, you are not doing a good job.

Looking at it again, it would be better to say:

0.66*413.1/61.95 = 4.4 times more land to produce a gallon of soy methyl ester (soy biodiesel), assuming a gallon of soy oil per gallon of SME, than to produce the energy equivalent amount of corn-ethanol.

These are only my personal opinions.

Biogas.  Made from waste.

But it is very good!  Offsetting over 20 times the GHG emitted when burning it.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Of exactly why and how mass delusion is the main product of mass media.  Withouit blaming media workers.  And why blogs are different.  Excellent!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Screw the theoretical values for energy content

I know that transport economists prefer well-to-wheel comparisons (per km driven) to well-to-tank analyses (per MJ), but the latter are not "theoretical" -- they can be measured precisely. (The differences among the values seem to be whether they are being expressed in terms of higher or lower heating value).

By contrast, for a well-to-wheel comparison, one has to assume a particular vehicle model; moreover, keeping "all else equal" when comparing the fuel economy of a vehicle powered by a spark-ignition engine (gasoline, ethanol) with one powered by a compression-ignition engine (diesel, biodiesel, straight vegetable oil) as well as with different fuels, can be tricky.

That's why I suggest keeping it simple and comparing fuels on the basis of their energy contents.

These are only my personal opinions.

Ron, that leaves out the most efficient, most GHG-free systems, solar panel or wind power to wheel.  Plugin battery driving.  6 kwh gets the same miles as a gallon of gas.

And what about biogas (from waste) to wheel, through a fuel cell/turbine generator?

Every kwh of electric power sent to the wheels with this system cancels over 20 times the CO2 it produces, by curtailing methane emitted by manure and fertilizer run off.

Trucks and trains have the capacity to carry methane tanks big enough to give the same utility as with diesel power.  Hypercars (ultralight carbon fiber vehicles) need a lot less fuel and therefore could carry the much smaller amount of methane fuel needed for backup for the plugin battery.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

We weren't talking about all the other myriad ways of reducing GHG emissions from transport. I was just making a technical point on BioD's math.

These are only my personal opinions.

That's very different then, nevermind.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog