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It was great to hear some balanced coverage on biofuels.

#1 we all have to drive less, walk and ride bicycles and use public transportation more.

Having said that, we're never going to lose the need for liquid fuel. We have a handful of choices, and they all take energy to produce. Biodiesel has the highest return on energy of anything we have -- for every unit of energy you put in you get 3.2 units out. That's a total lifecycle and transportation calculation. Using the same calculus, petroleum is a net loss at 1 to .8 and ethanol is only slightly positive at 1 to 1.3.

What biodiesel does is reduce the amount of ten million year old carbon we pump from sequestration under the earth into the atmosphere. It reduces the toxicity of tailpipe emissions massively. It creates local jobs, improves our energy security, and is ten times less toxic than table salt. It isn't flammable, requires no conversion to use in a normal diesel engine, and biodegrades faster than leaves. Some extremely smart people are working on biodiesel from algae, and that gives me great hope for our future.

As far as the food vs. fuel debate goes, there is a tremendous amount of waste in all of our systems. I read a report recently that Americans waste 40% of their food. 40%!!! I think we can all agree there is room for improvement there, and that losing even 40% of our food production might be overcome being more thoughtful about our food use. Who knows how much we could save if people stuck to a reasonable caloric intake as well?

More importantly, China is going to an American meat-heavy diet, and they are sucking up a lot of grain production to feed those cows. It takes 50 times the grain to feed every meat eater. And petroleum prices have gone through the roof. Remember all those people who said we'd never have oil over $70 per barrel? They seem pretty silly now. Those are the primary causes of food prices increasing.

Corn ethanol is a factor, but everyone in ethanol knows that corn ethanol is a short term bridge strategy. Nobody in the industry seriously believes we'll be harvesting corn for fuel for long. But we're in trouble and we have to find a way to jump start production, and corn is what farmers know how to grow - they have seeds, equipment and experience.

Part of the solution is driving more electric cars, but even electric cars aren't perfect. In Oregon more than 50% of our electric energy comes from non-renewable resources like coal, which is about as bad as you can get as an energy source. Not only does coal pollute, but it adds radioactivity to the atmosphere. Why isn't that ever discussed? And the energy cost to create those batteries is quite high as well - and let's not forget that those batteries have to be replaced every few years, and improper battery maintenance can rapidly reduce the useable life of the battery pack. Still, I'm glad that Tesla is now selling cars and I hope they someday put GM out of business.

There are no perfect solutions. We'll have to compromise. So let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Brian Jamison
BlueSky Fuel (the owner of the pump described in the start of the show)

posted 4 years, 10 months ago
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