Originally Posted by Geof  Donna; Regarding "Here is some food for thought." I am disappointed, you are cherry picking. I pulled down the Montegnegro article, started reading and thought I might pull out a few of the inconsistencies and assumptions.
The list was getting a bit long but then I came across this:
Incidentally in the context of your "This is doable, cost effective and probably the way to go. comment on bio-diesel from algae take notice of the first two sentences in what I copy below. Also in the case of the algae source never mind economic feasibility it has not been done on anything other than a research scale and it is very difficult to scale this type of thing up.
Making biodiesel from algae is analogous to making ethanol from cellulose. Both technologies hold great promise but neither has been proven economically feasible.
The following two sentences sound contradictory:
Over its lifetime, pure biodiesel emits about 78 percent less CO2 than conventional diesel ... They also found that biodiesel reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by 41 percent compared with fossil fuels.
Also note that this is for soy biodiesel. Palm oil biodiesel is far more CO2 neutral but about 100% more destructive of biodiversity, which makes it worse from a global warming perspective because further production of palm oil will require destroying remaining carbon sinks (the destruction of which presently accounts for about 20% of all global warming).
When Tier 2 emissions standards bring biodiesel up to par with gasoline and ethanol for air pollutants, biodiesel seems like it should be a no-brainer for green energy.
Note also that these standards will bring cars that burn regular diesel up to par with gasoline cars. In other words, one of the biggest reasons to use biodiesel (less pollution) will be mooted. That will leave energy independence and reduced CO2 as the remaining arguments. But, since we can only replace half of a percent of our diesel (as you point out) the energy independence argument is a farce and should be tossed. That leaves one argument for its use. It produces less CO2. But, is that 78% less or 41%? But again, because we can replace less than half of a percent of our diesel use, we can only reduce our CO2 production by half of that, making CO2 reduction about a quarter of one percent. These numbers make the CO2 argument rather farcical as well since we will leave 99.75% of our CO2 production from diesel untouched by using soy biodiesel.
I have never used the word farcical but it is appropriate. |
Hi Geof,
You said: But again, because we can replace less than half of a percent of our diesel use, we can only reduce our CO2 production by half of that, making CO2 reduction about a quarter of one percent.
I'm lost, why can we only replace less than one half of a percent of our diesel?
I really thought ya'll would be easier to convince, this is proving much harder than I envisioned. Here's a plan, build a nuke plant on the west coast next to a desalinization plant. Nuke plant powers the desalinization plant and pump the water into the desert to make biodiesel out of algae. Why is it I can here Mariss laughing all the way from the west coast and I'm almost deaf? Well you could run the numbers and see how it came out, might be feasible. Might yield $5 a gal gas as well. But that would give you a baseline for figuring what it was going to cost.
Donna