According to this morning’s NPR segment, Deep-Fried Fuel: A Biodiesel Kitchen Vision, Willie Nelson, Shooter Jennings, Leon Russell, Kinky Friedman, and Texas truckers are in love with biodiesel. (Listen via Real or Windows)
Willie Nelson has gone apeshit enough to brand a commercial version as “BioWillie” (very phallic) and collecting fry oil from fast food grease traps, filtering it, activating it, and running his truck on Maui on it.
I want to do that, too! I want to run out today and get myself an old diesel Land Cruiser or Land Rover (both rare) and start running on grease. I would feel smug and cool on so many levels: recycling, resourcefulness, treehugging, eco, sustainability, bragging rights, innovation, and because I would be a better American because I wouldn’t be putting money in the pockets of Middle Eastern kings, princes, and despots, right?
What is biodiesel? According to Wikipedia, “Biodiesel refers to a diesel-equivalent, processed fuel derived from biological sources. Though derived from biological sources, it’s a processed fuel that can be readily used in diesel-engined vehicles, which distinguishes biodiesel from the straight vegetable oils (SVO) or waste vegetable oils (WVO) used as fuels in some modified diesel vehicles.”
The pros of pure biodiesel are many: burns clean, smells good, is a renewable resource, helps farmers, bypasses the Middle East, can be cheap, and if you reclaim and filter fast food fry grease, it can be free. Even better, biodiesel can put the bounce back in the step up America’s farmers. The premium on growing for fuel is much higher than growing for people. All those moldering mountains of nuts and seed these farmers can’t sell will sell very well indeed.
I mean, feeding people is amazingly unprofitable! Firstly, beans, nuts, and seed have become completely commoditized and are as cheap as dirt. Invest in agribusiness now, Wall Street, organics are for the birds! F-150s and 18-wheelers don’t care about pesticides! Besides, the margins of organics will be nothing compared to the margins on biodiesel! And processing won’t need to be for human consumption.
And people have always been willing to pay more money to clothe and feed their automobiles than they ever have been willing to feed their fellow man, right?
Well, they had better care more about their vehicles more than people, because of the con, according to Mark Harrison in Biodiesel is Food Not Fuel, “Worldwide, we are consuming around 85 million barrels of petroleum every day - that’s 13.5 billion liters per day. The entire human population only eats around 328 million liters of food oil a day. So, let’s compare: 13,500 million liters of fuel oil consumed every day vs. 328 million liters of food oil consumed every day. That’s 41 times more fuel oil than food oil consumed.”
Biodiesel is not a solution. It is politics, it is spin, it is agribusiness profits, it is a hobby.
By Mark Harrison“Soy and canola and oil palm are food, they are not fuel. Do you really want humans to be competing with cars for their food source?
A human consumes on average 20 liters of edible oil a year. 20 liters - around five and a quarter gallons. Per year. How long does it take your car to consume five gallons of fuel? Half a day?
Worldwide, we are consuming around 85 million barrels of petroleum every day - that’s 13.5 billion liters per day. The entire human population only eats around 328 million liters of food oil a day. So, let’s compare: 13,500 million liters of fuel oil consumed every day vs. 328 million liters of food oil consumed every day. That’s 41 times more fuel oil than food oil consumed.
What makes biodiesel proponents think that biodiesel is an alternative to petroleum? How could we possibly increase food oil production by 41 times? Cut down the rest of the mangrove swamps for oil palm plantations? Raze the rest of the rain forest for soy bean fields? Just to run the world on B10 (10% biodiesel, 90% petroleum diesel - hardly an end to petroleum dependency) we’d have to increase plant oil production by a factor of four. That alone would require destroying the rest of our suffering ecosystem, and that type of food oil consumption would likely raise food prices to the point where the majority of the world’s population living on just a few dollars a day would starve to death - the world’s poor simply can’t compete with our cars.
So, the world running on 10% biodiesel = ecological disaster and mass starvation. Not an optimal solution. We’re still dependent on petroleum, but manage to bury the ecosystem and starve billions of people.
No, biodiesel is not a solution. It’s something for a small group of hobbyists. It is something for politicians to make hay off of. It is something for fools and people who can’t do simple math to fall for.
What is the solution - solar? Wind? Nukes? I can’t say, but it is certainly not dreaming that we can farm our way out of this, and the solution is certainly not in wasting our time and resources pursuing this dead end.”
I have a petrol-burning performance sedan I love. My second car will have a biodiesel conversion. Either a rare standard diesel Toyota Land Cruiser or Diesel Land Rover Discovery.
Comment (1)
Great post… except for the wingnut article by Mark Harrison. Remember 48.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot!
In N.A. we plow or burn off (waste) enough oil plants like canola to run every car on biodiesel – each year. But no one says the “answer” is to run only one fuel. BioDiesel is a part of the solution - not the whole solution! – so the supposition about oil use is silly. By the way, my 2006 Jetta runs just fine on B50 - B100 with no mods.