News and information about Biodiesel & alternative fuels.

2004/03/17

Toward The Hydrogen Economy

Biodiesel was mentioned in a kuro5hin article about the mythical Hydrogen Economy:
While changing from the current crop of gasoline powered cars to, diesel electric hybrid cars would reduce fuel usage significantly, we still need to produce diesel by some other way than by getting it from fossil sources. There are two major ways to do this. One is to produce it from biomass, i.e. we get biodiesel. The other is to produce it by adding environmentally friendly produced hydrogen to industrial carbon dioxide emissions, i.e. we get synthetic diesel."

"Currently biodiesel is made mostly from vegetable oils, but it is possible to produce it from any kind of biomass with the help of e.g. pyrolysis, Fischer-Tropsch synthesis or perhaps even thermal depolymerization, if that turns out to not be a hoax. The question is thus to find a plant that grows as fast as possible and is cheap to harvest. Hemp has been proposed as a good choice for biomass production, but will certainly face political opposition.
[via Emergic]