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Plastic and Fuel That Grow On Trees
Tim Hanlon writes "Biofuels continue to lead the field in the search for a renewable, environmentally friendly replacement for crude oil. Besides its use in the transport industry, crude oil is also used to produce conventional plastics and chemical products such as fertilizers and solvents. Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can be used to produce not only fuel, but also plastics, polyester, and industrial chemicals, cheaply and efficiently."
Not to mention the energy costs. I wonder how much oil energy it takes to create a pound of plastic or biofuel. Would it cost less oil energy to just make the plastic or fuel from oil? That's the problem with ethanol, it takes a crazy amount of oil to grow corn (in worst case scenarios: 2 calories of oil energy for 1 of corn energy in fertilizer and pesticides and other stuff), then the wet milling takes another crazy amount (ignoring the energy costs to GROW corn, it takes like 6 gallons of oil energy to create 8 gallons of ethanol energy).
Simply coming up with a product that doesn't take oil in as a raw product doesn't mean that the process doesn't use any oil.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
I read this article about the railroad companies around the late 1800's that basically said they forgot what business they were in. They made the mistake of thinking they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business, and that's why they missed the significance of the automobile and in a short period of time went from being the overlords of America (in many ways) to a struggling industry that required government bailout to stay afloat.
As I already posted above, copaiba oil is remarkable exactly because, unlike other vegetable oils, it needs no further processing to be used as fuel.
Copaiba's main limitation is that it requires Amazon region climate, warm temperatures and abundant rainfall all year long. However, a researcher in Colorado is trying to insert the oil producing gene from copaiba into grasses. This could have a very interesting use, if it could be used with plants such as wild grasses that grow in regions unsuitable for growing food plants.
Furthermore, because of the high octane and increased power, you can use a smaller displacement engine, which will off set the increase in MPG while increasing the overall efficiency.
The higher the compression ratio in a combustion engine, the more efficient it is. The problem is with these so called flex fuel cars, which are low compression and high displacement originally designed for gasoline, now being fueled by ethanol. Sure it works, but its completely inefficient.
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