For the last year or so scientists have been talking a great deal about alternative energy sources. We all know the basics of energy production -- natural gas, coal, and oil, but it seems the trend now is to take a local crop and resource and use that as the core component of their new alternative fuel.
Farmers in the midwest, with their vast fields of corn want corn-based ethanol, while the people of Michigan want to use peat as the ethanol derivative of choice. Guess who has one of the largest supplies of peat? Yep. Michigan. There are many different ways to derive ethanol, amongst them sugar beets, which in terms of inputs, actually requires less resources than corn. (Minnesota and North Dakota are where 50% of the U.S. sugar beets come from)
This week, the spotlight has been on compressing coal to a liquid -- with production costs at $45 a barrel, it's considerably cheaper than the $60 a barrel for gasoline, but liquid coal and peat are far from being carbon neutral sources of power -- we'd just be replacing our dependency of foreign oil to a dependency on some local resource, and polluting up the world with different carbon emissions.
What's the solution? Obviously renewable fuels are better than expendable fuels and the less pollutants they leave behind the better. While my own preference is that biomass derived ethanol is best, but it has to be done in a way that doesn't strip us of our own natural resources -- corn takes a vast amount of land and water, not to mention that corn is a edible food source for humans. I've always liked the idea of Biodiesel from Algaculture, as it requires neither farmland or freshwater, and has a very high energy yield compared to corn or soybeans.
Leave a comment