The situation now is that soy is grown and processed for cattle feed. There is much oil left over, which is now starting to be processed for biodiesel. So biodiesel is a byproduct of food production (at this point).
Ethanol has the corn industry behind it, so we are making ethanol from a crop that is not the best producer per acre. Perhaps that should be the focus of the complaints about ethanol, rather than saying is will take food from people at some point in the future.
Actually, the cattle industry is using 17 pounds of plant protein for every pound of meat protein, IIRC. Perhaps this is taking more food from people than ethanol.
>The grain required to fill the petrol tank of a Range Rover with ethanol is sufficient to feed one person per year. Assuming the petrol tank is refilled every two weeks, the amount of grain required would feed a hungry African village for a year
Are we feeding all the hungry Africans now? Will future ethanol production take food from them? Or will it just make it harder for poor people here to afford meat.
>Much of the fuel that Europeans use will be imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is being burned to plant more sugar and soybeans, and Southeast Asia, where oil palm plantations are destroying the rainforest habitat of orangutans and many other species. Species are dying for our driving
I'm not in Europe. People in Iraq are dying for our driving, which is a more immediate concern to me.
>If ethanol is imported from the US, it will likely come from maize, which uses fossil fuels at every stage in the production process, from cultivation using fertilisers and tractors to processing and transportation. Growing maize appears to use 30% more energy than the finished fuel produces, and leaves eroded soils and polluted waters behind
Too many ifs for me, plus that EROEI that "appears" to come from the oil industry, via Cornell.
>Meeting the 5.75% target would require, according to one authoritative study, a quarter of the EU's arable land
The EU would do well to study the UNH biodiesel initiative, as the EU can, and does, use biodiesel fuel right now.
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html>Using ethanol rather than petrol reduces total emissions of carbon dioxide by only about 13% because of the pollution caused by the production process, and because ethanol gets only about 70% of the mileage of petrol
Another reason to use biodiesel.
>Food prices are already increasing. With just 10% of the world's sugar harvest being converted to ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled; the price of palm oil has increased 15% over the past year, with a further 25% gain expected next year.
Another reason to use biodiesel.
>Little wonder that many are calling biofuels "deforestation diesel", the opposite of the environmentally friendly fuel that all are seeking. With so much farmland already taking the form of monoculture, with all that implies for wildlife, do we really want to create more diversity-stripped desert?
Did everybody catch that? The article uses ethanol as a bad example, citing hypotheticals, no less, and then trashes biodiesel. That should put to rest any question about trusting the authors of this piece.
Bill