What’s up with biofuels?

All biofuels are not the same.

Biofuel like the kind Pacific Biodiesel makes is made from used kitchen grease. It is actually recycling; they don’t need to grow the stuff they use to make the fuel. Recycling is good.

But there just isn’t that much waste kitchen grease. In an emergency that biodiesel would be valuable, and reserved for public safety vehicles and for food production.

What about farmer-grown biofuel? Two years ago, farmers sat in discussions that HECO sponsored on the Big Island and Maui. Farmers quickly figured out their return and stopped going to the meetings.

Farmers knew that a barrel of oil weighed 286 pounds. When oil was $80 per barrel, 1 pound of that oil was worth 28 cents. They figured they would have to squeeze at least 4 pounds of stuff to get 1 pound of liquid.

That meant that the most they could get for growing any kind of biofuel stock would be 7 cents per pound. No sense lose money. Better plant cucumber.  Small farmers wouldn’t do it.

If they did do it, it would have to be very expensive—more than $320 per barrel expensive. And as oil prices rise, the cost of growing the biofuel would rise too.

What about cellulosic ethanol? It is still just an idea. Lots and lots of federal money went down the drain trying to force this to work. And as fossil fuel prices go up, the cost of this process goes up too.

And how about algae-to-biofuel? We all hope this will work. But it is still very far off and may never be scalable. “Wishing” and “hoping” is not an energy policy.

Biofuels, except for the kind made from kitchen grease, have an Energy Return on Investment of less than 2 to 1. Dr. Chas Hall says that a modern society needs an EROI of more than 3 to 1 to sustain itself.