Biofuel Basics

Trevor Craig

Energy Science 110

Biofuel Basics, 20

11/19/11         

This lecture was all about biofuels, general information about them, and all the different types of biofuels. Biofuels are considered to be solids, liquids, or gasses. We used to use biomass mostly in the United States, in 1800 we used around 100% of our biofuel was from biomass, and now in 2000 we use about 0% of biomass, where the world uses about 17% of biomass for their biofuels.

 Oil prices are going up so we are going to need to find a solution or start using more biomass again to balance out the price for our energy consumption. The era of cheap oil is over, in 1993 it was about $10 but now the price has increased and in 2007 it reached a new high of $140, that is a very big rise for oil, and when there is a big rise in the price of oil that usually causes our economy to follow the same trend and have recessions and other bad things. When we import our oil we have less of an option of how our economy is going to react to the prices of oils, in 2008 the United States imported about 60% of its oil, and that number is expected to increase as we run out of our reserves and start having to use more expensive ways of extracting oil.

What are some ways that we can reduce our need for foreign oil? One way we can reduce our need for foreign oil is by using ethanol, in 2010 the United States reduced foreign oil imports by $34 billion dollars by using ethanol, and this in turn lowered the price of gasoline in the United States by about $0.89 per gallon, but this also increased the price of corn by about 36% for the years 2006-2009. The United States is producing a lot more ethanol  now that we can see some of the benefits from it, in fact when you look at the production of biofuels, ethanol produced in the United States accounted for about 43%, where Brazil made 32% sugarcane ethanol, and Europe made about 15% and 10% other. This looks like a promising way to lower our dependence on oil, but when we look at how much biofuels take a part of the final energy consumption it is a little disappointing, transportation biofuels only use about .3% of the full energy consumption.

We need to continue to look for ways to decrease our energy consumption, and our dependence on oil and fossil fuels.

Biochemical- are products used for various applications in the drug development industry and may be used widely, particularly in a research environment for testing. They involve chemical processes in living organisms.

Transesterification- A chemical process which reacts an alcohol with the triglycerides contained in vegetable oils and animal fats to produce biodiesel and glycerin.

ENSC110 Craig Biofuel Basics 20