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Why care

I'm always hearing about biofuels and their potential to save us from an oil crisis. This article though sets out some reasons why they might not be so good for the environment. A recent report from the Royal Society says it all depends on the method of producing the biofuel as to whether it actually reduces CO2 emissions (or has a neutral effect).

Growing sugarbeet and maize often uses lots of oil-preduced fertilizers and then they're the emissions caused from processing and transporting the fuel to forecourts. There is also concern that the rush for biofuels is causing swaths of rainforest to be cleared for their production. What's more people think it could be causing global food prices to rise in some of the most huger-struck areas of the world.

A tricky one, so the society recomends tht each biofuel and its production methods are looked at in detail before they are pased as environmentally friendly or not. Whether governments would demand environmental standards, I'm not sure... More likely the consumer wil make the choice, maybe there'll be two pumps at the forecourt - one with biofuel and the other with 'premium (environmentally-friendly) biofuel'.

The story

The principle behind biofuels is essentially the same as that behind fossil fuels such as oil. Both biofuels and fossil fuels have stored the energy of the Sun in the form of biologically-produced chemicals called hydrocarbons. The energy stored in the fuels results from the ability of plants to carry out photosynthesis – the manufacture of sugar, starch and other complex organic molecules using sunlight.

However, unlike fossil fuels, biofuels have the potential to be carbon neutral, meaning that the loss of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere caused by burning them is offset by the absorption of carbon dioxide by the biofuel plants when they are growing. (The carbon locked up in fossil fuels was put there by plants that lived and photosynthesised millions of years ago.)

If this were true – that there is a perfect balance between absorption and production of carbon dioxide – then burning biofuels would not cause an overall increase in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, one of the principal greenhouse gases. Unlike fossil fuels, biofuels therefore have the potential to help to prevent global warming if they could replace the burning of oil-based fuels such as gasoline and diesel. They also have the added advantage over fossil fuels in that they are renewable.

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