About Biodiesel...

I've been reading a lot about Biodiesel lately in terms of an alternative energy source. It's attractive since it's a closed loop cycle type of fuel. Vegetable oil from plants like Rapeseed (Canola), Peanut, and Soybean can be converted into a fuel suitable for running in diesel engines. Rudolph Diesel, the German inventor of the engine, initially ran his engine on peanut oil in the very early 1900s. With the advent of cheap petroleum, diesel fuel extracted from crude oil was more cost effective to run in these engines.

You can read about the benefits of a diesel engine here.

Biodiesel seems to be gaining in popularity with the current rise in gasoline prices (As of today, crude oil goes for about US$120 per barrel). There seems to be a grassroots movement for home made biodiesel fuel, a Youtube search for biodiesel shows a lot of instructional videos on how to make it.

CBC Marketplace has a good article about the fuel. Canada Clean Fuels is a Canadian company that distributes biodiesel and their website has a lot of good information about the benefits and drawbacks of using the fuel. Other good resources can be found here, here, and here.

As I understand it the main benefits and drawbacks are as follows:

Benefits

• The carbon contained within the fuel is extracted from the atmosphere by the plants harvested for the fuel. No carbon is transferred from underground storage (petroluem) to the atmosphere.


• Pure bisdiesel (B100) burned in a diesel engine has significantly lower CO2 emissions that current gasoline engines.


• Engines run with biodiesel run cleaner and more efficiently. They also last longer and require less maintenance than when run with petro-diesel. Biodiesel does not contain the substances that can gum up an engine.


• Lower cost fuel.

Drawbacks

• Increased NOx emissions. These can be offset with good catalytic converters.


• Poor cold weather performance. Biodiesel becomes very viscous and can freeze at the cold temperatures that Canada experiences in the winter. Blending biodiesel with petro-diesel can alleviate this problem.


• Large areas of agricultural land will need to be devoted to growing the plants needed for large scale fuel production.


• Not readily available at gas pumps


• There aren't a lot of passenger vehicles that have diesel engines. Volkswagen is at the forefront with the Turbo Diesel Injection engines (TDI)

In a previous post about Tim Flannery, I mentioned a Canadian company called Dynamotive and their process for producing Bio-oil through pyrolysis. I started wondering if the Bio-oil could be used to make Biodiesel. That way the process has a double effect on removing CO2 from the atmosphere: carbon sequestration and reduced tailpipe emissions. Maybe that was their original intent with their business idea.

I also started thinking that a series hybrid vehicle with a small efficient diesel engine generator would be a relatively simple car to develop. This sort of solution has already been implemented for locomotive engines and buses (see here and here).

Maybe it's just a matter of time before this type of solution is implemented economically for passenger cars. I guess we just have to be a little more patient...