According to today's NY Times, in an age when private citizens are publishing blogs that have become a "critical source of news," the courts are being asked by Apple Computer to decide to whether or not bloggers should enjoy the same protections as mainstream journalists. In the past, the courts have extended latittude to journalists "in protecting the identities of confidential sources."
Spent two days in Washington last week meeting with people I trust in the Administration and congress. Don't expect a kinder, gentler President Bush in his second term. He is going all out for tort reform, private social security accounts, and tax reform. Not a good idea to bet against him.
Biodiesel is one of the possible candidates to replace fossil fuels as the world's primary transportation energy source.
And the good news is that its’ “Renewable”!
It was just yesterday that I drove to my school friend whom I haven’t met for say nearly past 3 years. Pratibha Paliwal is working for the Department of Biotechnology in the M.P. Council of Science & Technology as a Junior Research Fellow, presently too much drawn into this project on Biodiesel. I just had a fair idea about bio-fuel, but a discussion of about an hour or so was enough to make me more knowledgeable. Wow, isn’t it surprising that Biodiesel is renewable!
But, before we ponder on its positives, let’s define what Biodiesel is? Biodiesel is an alternative to petroleum-based diesel fuel made from renewable resources such as vegetable oils, animal fats, or algae. It has very similar combustion properties to petroleum diesel, and can replace it in current uses. However, it is most often used as an additive to petroleum diesel, improving the otherwise low lubricity of pure ultra low sulfur petrodiesel fuel. It is one of the possible candidates to replace fossil fuels as the world's primary transportation energy source.
Now, if you were too anxious to know these answers: It is environment friendly (almost zero emission to global warming), clean burning, requires no engine modifications, perhaps increases engine life, biodegradable and non-toxic, and easy to handle & store. Biodiesel has high cetane and lubricity and readily mixes with diesel. Since, it is a farm-fuel it provides ample employment opportunities in the rural areas. Certainly no fuel is perfect and Biodiesel doesn’t stand as an exception to this. It has certain negatives like: higher gel point, emission of NOx which contributes to smog, etc. But these don’t take any credit away from this wonderful alternative to the fossil fuels.
Imagine what wonders Biodiesel can bring to the economies of the world that are battling out against the rise in global oil prices. Would Biodiesel come as a savior? Well, stupendous research work is going on in the field of Biodiesel, but the greatest issue is of mass scale production and commercialization. Various raw materials are being used to produce commercial Biodiesel: rapeseed, sunflower oil (Italy & France), soybean oil (USA & Brazil), palm oil (Malaysia), linseed, olive oil (Spain), cottonseed oil (Greece), beef tallow (Ireland), lard, used frying oil (Austria), Jatropha (India, Nicaragua South America), Guangi-Pi (China), etc.
If one would like to question its acceptance, rest assured the top automobile majors are promoting Biodiesel (including Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler), as also Shell, Texaco, ELF & Total. And the end-user just cannot wait for such a thing to commercialize.
Pratibha seems to be working on Jatropha (Jatropha curcus, Ratanjot, wild castor) for commercial extraction of Biodiesel from its’ seeds. The plant seems to be growing in most diverse conditions and also found abundantly. She says this will bring immense employment opportunities in the rural areas, and may be able to bring down the prices of diesel once the commercial production is achieved. Internet search revealed that if 10 million hectares of wasteland is brought under Jatropha cultivation then it can yield 15 million tons of seeds which can provide 4 million tons of oil (needless to mention, 11 million tons of organic manure as a by-product).
Biodiesel is here to stay: commercial Biodiesel Gas stations are on the rise, trains have already started to run on Biodiesel & tremendous amount of research is going on. The only thing that remains to be seen is that: Will the Science Textbooks rewrite diesel as “renewable source of energy” in times to come?
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Member Comments
the league of non-aligned nations was a ploy on the part of corrupt authoritarians to capitalise on the naive idealism of pinko commie bastards. the population bomb is a fantasy invented by people who don't like dealing with the existence of lots of other people. the earth is much larger than people give it credit for, and totally full of oil.
Good Item-just look at the trend in Europe-to diesel-its a massive swing-the engine techology is such today one would be hard to pick the difference between petrol or diesel powered-the Audi diesel engine range is just superb-as is VW and many others.
this article of course, is presented by a newbie. obviously it is one of the most
important articles to put attention on. so lets get on with the biodiesel devo.
it will be interesting to discover exactly how much it costs to harvest, refine, and
extract the energy from this process. what kind of engine would it need, and all that.
wz just thinkin... vehicles... any kinds hybrid / fuel cell / electric et al... all have to be manufactured and increasingly, exotic alloys/materials are being used to do so... so to that extent a major component of vehicular pollution will still exist... the vehicles themselves.
Nice one man.... and just one more thing... a recent article i read in BusinessWeek said that better technolgies in drilling and extraction are pushing up yeilds of existing oil fields by as much as 40% in Russia! I think this could push the D-Day much farther into future than thought of before. Another article in NewsWeek magazine dealt with how Hybrid vehicles are making inroads in US, be it Honda, Toyota, GM or the other European automakers who have traditionally consummated the art of Deisel Engines. These hybrids run on Electricity + Gas... afterall they are PURENRG as Honda puts it.
In the 1980s when the gloom and doom prognosticators were forecasting that the world would run out of oil by 2010 (kinda like the population bomb crowd in the 60s-70s) one analyst quietly predicted that oil would become unaffordable long before it runs out. With increased consumption in India and China its hard to imagine increased supply offsetting emerging demands... so alternatives seem a natural outcome; they'll eventually become relatively affordable.
Perhaps the biggest promise of oil alternatives isn't merely a reduction in pollution, potential improvements in the balance of trade, etc. but the formation of democracies in countries where the "energy elites" have little short term incentive (outside of enlightened monarchies like Qatar) in the development of institutions, women's suffrage, etc; they would rather maintain a traditional system that limits oversight, regulation, accountability.
My apologies for the digression, but I couldn't help but to think that one spillover cost of oil may be a lack of real economic, political and social development in countries relying too heavily upon resource or property-based wealth accumulation versus other more egalitarian forms of enterprise (manufacturing, agriculture, retail, services, etc.) with broader benefits for a population.
I don't know anyone who says we're going to run out of oil anytime soon. The low hanging oil "fruit" has been harvested. US oil production peaked in the 1970s. It will peak elsewhere, some say sonner than later. But certainly we're running out of cheap oil. Biodiesel isn't cheap so it doesn't solve the problem.
Biodiesel productivity from agricultural land varies according to variety of plant, climate, and fertilizer/water inputs. But best case you can expect perhaps 1,000 barrels of oil per square kilometer per year. Do the math.
Biodiesel is an important product to supplement other energy sources, but by itself it's not nearly enough.
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It was just yesterday that I drove to my school friend whom I haven’t met for say nearly past 3 years. Pratibha Paliwal is working for the Department of Biotechnology in the M.P. Council of Science & Technology as a Junior Research Fellow, presently too much drawn into this project on Biodiesel. I just had a fair idea about bio-fuel, but a discussion of about an hour or so was enough to make me more knowledgeable. Wow, isn’t it surprising that Biodiesel is renewable!
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