I READ IT IN '72, MUST BE TRUE... (via Gene Brown):

Fuel For Thought: Cars that run on vegetable oil? Do-it-yourselfers and entrepreneurs alike fill 'er up with the nation's fastest-growing propellant (Frances Cerra Whittelsey, September 2005, Smithsonian)

Skeptics have questioned whether it takes more fossil fuel to produce biodiesel—to fertilize crops, transport them and press them for their oil—than the resulting biodiesel replaces. But Jim Duffield, an agricultural economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), says the "few lone voices" who still make that point have not kept up with improvements in agriculture and biodiesel technology. Indeed, a study by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy in 1998 and another in 2002 for the French government show that soybeans and canola oil yield three to four times more energy than is needed to make the fuel. (Similar skepticism has also dogged ethanol, a corn-based fuel mixed with gasoline to create gasohol. But USDA and other studies show that today's ethanol provides up to 30 percent more energy than it takes to make it.)

Another benefit of burning biodiesel is cleaner air. Compared with fossil fuels, it emits less carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, as well as sulfur compounds related to acid rain. Pure biodiesel also substantially reduces overall emission of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to climate change, because the plants from which the oil was extracted absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide while they were growing. A bus running on pure biodiesel would emit 32 percent less particulate matter, which has been implicated in the dramatic increase in asthma cases in cities. The only air pollution downside of pure biodiesel, according to the 1998 U.S. study, is a slight increase of smog-inducing nitrogen oxides.

Those lone voices may be deep in their bunkers, surrounded by their stacks of Krugerands, waiting for the world to cross over Humbert's Peak, but they still find time to comment here....

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2005 9:54 AM