Continuing my civic issues blog on renewable energy sources I want to talk about the advantages of biofuels and some disadvantages that are commonly brought to the surface. For those that don’t know biofuels are broken into 2 main groups, ethanol and biodiesel. Biodiesel is a fuel generated from recycled fats and oils, such as leftover fry oil. There is a huge abundance of used fry oil in our nation since we love our fried foods and an abundant supply of biofuel base. the recycled oil is gathered then cleaned and then can be run in almost all of the diesel engines on the market today. One downside of running biodiesel is that it can be problematic to engines in the winter. When it reaches a certain temperature the biodiesel tends to gel, almost form into a puddy substance that cannot be changed back until temperatures warm up again.
Contrary to biodiesel using the waste oil and vegetable oils to run, ethanol is an alcohol created from the sugars of plants such as corn, sugar cane, and even lawn clippings. Ethanol can be seen as both something positive and something negative, meaning there are arguments for and against it. Some positives of creating and utilizing ethanol are that it releases less carbon emissions into the atmosphere by an average 25% per mile driven. Another positive is that the ethanol is in fact biodegradable and the infrastructure to sell E85(ethanol gas) is already built and available to consumers. Some negatives of using this mainly corn based product is that it does use a large quantity of our food supply to create. This is a pressing issue in our world where we face the issue of creating more food or creating more fuel. continuing to talk about the downsides of ethanol use, the E85 is not nearly as efficient as regular gasoline; Meaning that there is on average lower MPG produced from ethanol fuel compared to gasoline or diesel fuel. The last downside and the worst in my opinion is that ethanol is very corrosive and cannot be transported via pipeline. The corrosion is also detrimental to engines on cars if not treated properly.
After talking about both ethanol and biodiesel it is easy to see that both have stars as well as scars where improvement is necessary. If more improvements can be made to both biodiesel and ethanol to make them even more effective in terms of higher mpg and lesser emissions I think that could be a great progressive step.
http://greenthefuture.com/ETHANOL_PROSCONS.html
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html