Biofuels (like ethanol and biodiesel) are just another sort of carbon-based flammable liquid, like regular gasoline. So they do produce CO2 when burnt.
The rationale behind their use is that the carbon in fossil fuels has been "locked away" from the ecosphere for millions of years (there are no bacteria digesting oil in underground oil reserves, for example, nor any termites eating coal in buried coal seams). So when you burn them, you are releasing carbon (as CO2) into the atmosphere, which is available for organisms to use, and adding to the total amount of carbon in the ecosphere.
Biofuels OTOH *use* atmospheric CO2 to be produced; the plants they are made from extract CO2 from the atmosphere to use in their growth. So when you burn them, you are just releasing this carbon back into the atmosphere, and are not actually adding any *new* carbon.
A similar idea is "carbon sequestration", which is where you remove CO2 from the atmosphere (usually by growing plants), and they bury it somewhere away from availability (like in an exhausted coal seam). This means you are removing some of the "extra" carbon we've added to the ecosphere, and (hopefully) decreasing the elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The problems with biofuels are:
[1] the agricultureing processes required to grow the plants, and the industrial processes that make them into useable fuels both produce lots of CO2. This therefore means they are *not* coming out at a balance. It is possible that better techniques developed in future will reduce or eliminate this, but not yet.
[2] they use land that we need for food production. If you grow sorghum for producing biofuels, then you are not growing it (or anything else) as food. And the world is currently experiencing a global food shortage (food riots in Africa, Asia, and Central and South Ameria), with food prices skyrocketing.
The optimum approach would be to abandon fossil fuels altogether, and concentrate on renewable energy sources (like solar, wind, geothermal, hydrological, and tide power). Unfortunately, we've rather left it too late for that: there aren't enough alternative energy generation stations to meet our needs, and research in improving their efficiency is *way* behind where it needs to be.
So I think we'll need to concentrate on nuclear power for the time being, in order to reduce our needs on fossil fuels, while increasing the number and effectiveness of alternative energy production. Nuclear power may be potentially dangerous, but it does not release greenhouse gasses.
The pollution caused in their production is worse than using the same amount of gasoline. Not to mention the fact that using what are normally considered 'foods' to produce them is the main reason food is so high today. Seems the 'bio-fuel cure' is worse than the fossil fuel disease.
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Verified answer
Absolutely.
Biofuels (like ethanol and biodiesel) are just another sort of carbon-based flammable liquid, like regular gasoline. So they do produce CO2 when burnt.
The rationale behind their use is that the carbon in fossil fuels has been "locked away" from the ecosphere for millions of years (there are no bacteria digesting oil in underground oil reserves, for example, nor any termites eating coal in buried coal seams). So when you burn them, you are releasing carbon (as CO2) into the atmosphere, which is available for organisms to use, and adding to the total amount of carbon in the ecosphere.
Biofuels OTOH *use* atmospheric CO2 to be produced; the plants they are made from extract CO2 from the atmosphere to use in their growth. So when you burn them, you are just releasing this carbon back into the atmosphere, and are not actually adding any *new* carbon.
A similar idea is "carbon sequestration", which is where you remove CO2 from the atmosphere (usually by growing plants), and they bury it somewhere away from availability (like in an exhausted coal seam). This means you are removing some of the "extra" carbon we've added to the ecosphere, and (hopefully) decreasing the elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The problems with biofuels are:
[1] the agricultureing processes required to grow the plants, and the industrial processes that make them into useable fuels both produce lots of CO2. This therefore means they are *not* coming out at a balance. It is possible that better techniques developed in future will reduce or eliminate this, but not yet.
[2] they use land that we need for food production. If you grow sorghum for producing biofuels, then you are not growing it (or anything else) as food. And the world is currently experiencing a global food shortage (food riots in Africa, Asia, and Central and South Ameria), with food prices skyrocketing.
The optimum approach would be to abandon fossil fuels altogether, and concentrate on renewable energy sources (like solar, wind, geothermal, hydrological, and tide power). Unfortunately, we've rather left it too late for that: there aren't enough alternative energy generation stations to meet our needs, and research in improving their efficiency is *way* behind where it needs to be.
So I think we'll need to concentrate on nuclear power for the time being, in order to reduce our needs on fossil fuels, while increasing the number and effectiveness of alternative energy production. Nuclear power may be potentially dangerous, but it does not release greenhouse gasses.
The pollution caused in their production is worse than using the same amount of gasoline. Not to mention the fact that using what are normally considered 'foods' to produce them is the main reason food is so high today. Seems the 'bio-fuel cure' is worse than the fossil fuel disease.
Yes