Energy crops made from algae, woody plants and bacteria that do not compete for land with the world’s food supplies are between five and 15 years away, a senior [UK]Government scientist has said.
The more ways we can create clean energy, the better. Biofuel could be quite localized too. Make iit and use in the same area, no need to truck it or send it by pipeline for long distances. Seems like this would be perfect for large scale agriculture, they could make much of the fuel they need for their equipment.
That’s one way to do it, but there’s going to be a bit of a gap between now and then. Why not convert household, commercial and organic industrial waste (timber, garbage and so on) into biofuels in the mean time? The technology is not difficult and could be similar to that used to create biofuels from wood by pyrolysis (heating in an oxygen free atmosphere and then processing the gas that comes out of the reactor). It could be used on the proportion of waste from those sources that cannot be economically recycled and the potential is pretty big.
There’s so much technology that’s NOT being used: a car that gets 7,000 mpg, an aftermarket turbo diesel hybrid system that gets 100 mpg in a Lincoln Continental, the list goes on. Unfortunately, people are making money the old fashioned way: on coal and oil.