Bio fuels can be described as any fuel that is derived from biomass i.e. living organisms or their metabolic by-products. For example, crops such as corn and dung from living animals.
Therefore, there is something of a scientific debate going on over the benefits of bio fuels; we believe that the main advantage over fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) is that the combustion of bio fuels in order to liberate energy does not increase net levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is because the source of bio fuel crops, for example, has already taken an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere during their development cycle, when photosynthesis occurs.
As long as new crops are planted in place of the ones that are burned, there will be no overall increment in the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Therefore, while crop based bio fuels don’t lower the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, they are thought to be more or less carbon neutral.
The difference with fossil fuel deposits such as coal is that the coal deposits have been formed in the earth over millions of years and are therefore considered to be energy deposits rather than a component of the energy cycle. The combustion of fossil fuels on a scale required to fill up mankind’s energy needs, over a relatively short flow of time, hundreds of years as opposed to the millions of years it has taken the deposits to form, means that the burning of such fuels adds substantially to the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This in turn adds to the greenhouse gases already present in our atmosphere, and contributes to the warming of the Earth’s climate.
The central benefit however probably comes from fluid bio fuel, for the production of ethanol or bio diesel. Ethanol, a substitute for fossil fuel based gasoline, and bio diesel, which is only diesel made with crops in place of oil which is an alternate for traditional diesel fuel in diesel motor vehicles.
Neither are as effective however as vehicles running on mostly ethanol-based fuels. The latest studies indicate that prairie grasses really take out more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during their growing than they emit when being converted to bio fuel, which is significant in that they may well be truly carbon neutral.
Jeff Sokol is an author, and an expert in making cheap bio fuels like ethanol and bio diesel.Click here to make your own Fuel!
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