Advantages and Disadvantages of Biofuels – The Energy Source of Our Future

With all of the talk about our dependency on foreign oil and its economic and environmental costs people are very hungry a cheaper alternative that is also good for our atmosphere and biofuels could be that next energy source. We should however analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using biofuel to replace gasoline as the dominant fuel source not just in our country but globally.

Advantages of biofuel

1. It is a very green friendly fuel that can help to halt and even in some cases reverse our current rising levels of green house gas that oil has had a major contributing factor in.

2. It can be made from many sources such as plant material, fungi and algae and since these source are available in abundance and can potentially reproduced on a massive scale they are an energy source that is potentially unlimited.

3. It will end our need to depend on opec and other foreign countries for our energy needs and can potentially help to bring world peace.

4. Biofuels can also help to stimulate jobs locally and can thus have the potential to turn around a global economy that has been slumping for a while now. They are also much safer to handle than gasoline and therefore cause lesser long term health effects on the human body.

As you can see these are all very good advantages in favor of this awesome new fuel source but just like all others, there are also some negative factors involved here.

Disadvantages of biofuel

1. As of right now even though biofuels produce much lesser green house gases the machines that are used to cultivate and produce them still have some problems with carbon emissions so we still need to work on newer ways to produce them in a more greener way.

2. Our technological process to produce biofuels are way to costly for us to be able to afford on a massive scale. We still need billions of dollars of research money into having a manufacturing process that will produce them at a cheaper rate.

3. We still don’t have anywhere near the amount of biofuel converted cars to be able to take advantage of this fuel source. We will need to invest trillions of dollars to change the automobile infrastructure to allow us to take advantage of this awesome natural fuel.

4. Once we are able to build large manufacturing plants we will need to find a way to deal with the very bad smell that is the outcome of the biofuel production cycle and large towns will not want to put up with this bad odor produced.

While there are some disadvantages to biofuel the potential is just to great to ignore and push forward with. This is the energy source of the future so the sooner we can get it to the manufacturing process and made available to the masses the faster we will be able to solve the problems we are now facing with gasoline only lasting another 20 to 30 years.