Bio Fuel and Bio Diesel

Grow our own fuel is the battle cry of the move to bio fuels and bio diesel. In fact the American Trucking Association is now endorsing a plan for up to 5% blend of all diesel fuel to be bio diesel.

Sound great right, well a few climate-ologists say not so fast, what about severe storms and crop failures? In fact I myself have some issues with Bio-Diesel that no one has bothered to answer for me. You see it takes water to grow our fuel. The more we need Bio-Fuel the more water we need to process and to grow the Bio Diesel. It also takes fuel to grow it from the Tractors and farm equipment also that also includes turbines to keep crops from freezing, cultivators, irrigation pumps, etc.

Indeed as Monsanto with terminator seeds and Cargill with genetically modified seeds are getting the growing water usage issues down to 2-gallons of water to grow the equivalent of one gallons of fuel. Then it takes 8-gallons to process and refine with fairly good super water purification, filtration and recycling. That means it takes 10 gallons of water to produce one gallon of fuel and Lots of capital costs too to build all these refineries and filtration stations.

But if our bio-fuel is subsidized by government, by reducing taxes and funding, then it seems in the end economically it is not a good deal? If the government halved the taxes on fuel now, the prices would come down by quite a bit and help our economy and lower normal diesel prices and thus, make the competition of Bio-fuels real cost even more gapped. Crude is relatively free, you suck it out of the ground. That is a good amount of cost of goods sold. Like selling dirt and filtering out the rocks and selling those for people’s gardens. We take crude and refine it and then sell the other to chemical and plastic companies.

The issues are with the efficiency in getting the Bio Fuels grown, ready and to market Then there are the bouquet fuel issues demanded by governments. So Bio-Fuels have some reality checks and hurdles to get over in my opinion, I want the real numbers. Sounds like a Corporate Welfare deal without a demand for deadline proof, that it is really economically viable, without fudging the figures? So much for SOX, free pass on Bio-Fuels? I have questions, no one will answer and you cannot find them in Ethanol News or any other place, so I kind of like the “Turn Coal into Fuel” better. Battelle has some very interesting new technologies there and the State of Montana is up on the Research stuff there too and it is getting some political play also.

I have nothing against whatever makes sense, but it must be economically feasible and viable before we go running off without an efficient solution to our supply and demand issues in the World Wide markets as China and India come online with needs of their own, needs which will eventually far surpass the demand here at home. Yes we need to do something, will someone please show me the real numbers, complete reality and stop the BS? Think on this.