Is Bio-Diesel Really Better for the Environment?
Now that the price of petroleum is on the rise, many people are looking for less costly alternatives. Among the most viable options that are available is the bio-diesel that automotive engines were first designed to run on. Now available in most cities in North America as fuel for transportation and heating, bio-diesel fuel is also becoming the low-cost alternative, compared with petrol-diesel.
Biodiesel has been highly touted as one of the fuels that may be able to allow North America to grow much of its own fuel. Like ethanol (made from maize), vegetable oil that can be made into bio-diesel is indistinguishable from the stuff you consume, before processing.
Most often, this is genetically modified soybean oil in the United States, but other energy-dense oils such as canola (also known as oil rapeseed) and even rendered chicken fat. Each most locales use an oil from plants most suited to their environment, such as palm oil in the south seas and canola in Europe.
Diesel vehicles that can be very easily modified to run on modified vegetable oil, whether old or new, are highly in demand. While many of them have more displacement than a typical car might, there are also quite a few high-quality older cars that can be made like new with a bit of maintenance. In short, there has been a new resurgence of interest in diesel vehicles and, not just among people looking to haul several tons up the side of a mountain.
But, while it may be in increasingly less expensive option, is bio-diesel really any better for the environment? There certainly are far fewer asthma-inducing fine particulates to be found bio-diesel exhaust. Moreover, there are a large number of petrochemical byproducts that are toxic to wildlife and the surrounding environment. The amount of lead and heavy metals is negligible, and fuel made from recycled vegetable oil very often has the often pleasant aroma of french fries.
That said, when considering what sort of environmental net impact bio-diesel has, one must consider all aspects of production, manufacture and distribution of this commodity. Each step has an energy input that almost always includes climate change-inducing carbon dioxide. Each step also has an impact on the local ecosystem, especially in the case of rapidly expanding industries.
On the production side, there is the input of mostly chemical fertilizers into mono cultured systems. This releases a great deal of carbon from the soil, especially when new land is put into cultivation to meet a potentially vast demand. There is also the embedded fuel and emissions involved in the production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the machines to tend it all. Over 80% of bio-diesel produced in the United States is conventionally produced soybean oil. The rest is made up from a variety of other crops, though the most energetic oils are produced in tropical climates.
After harvest, the seeds are taken to a rendering plant where energy consuming machines macerate and press the seeds into oil. This oil is then further processed into fuel that most bio-diesel compatible vehicles require. While there are some vehicles that can run used fryer oil with no more treatment than to remove the chunks of potato, such vehicles tend to have lower fuel economy. Petroleum is most often used to move this fuel around on traditional types of transport, from the processing plant to the pump.
Each type of vegetable oil has a different amount of carbon dioxide emitted per calorie of energy released. Canola and soybeans both emit just slightly less CO2 than gasoline. You can be certain that there is essentially no organically produced crop that is being made into bio-diesel, so the vast mono-cultures are detrimental to migrating animal populations as well as disastrous to the biodiversity of the soils they inhabit.
While there is a great deal of promise for fueling a fraction of the vehicles on the road with bio-diesel, unless vehicles become a great deal more efficient or energy usage becomes highly restricted, there simply isn’t enough arable land to meet our fuel needs. Given that agricultural production is just barely keeping up with hunger in much of the world, this isn’t an option.
Bio-diesel has many advantages for the pocket book and can certainly be a stop-gap measure while the world weans itself off petroleum fuel, but the net environmental cost is about even, which is to say, not so great. Moreover, the price of bio-diesel is not independent of the price of petrol – as one goes up, so does the other, though more slowly. Perhaps the ultimate good that bio-diesel fuel can do the environment is to become so expensive as to be conserved.
