Posted by
Andrews on Friday, April 24, 2009 3:09:44 PM
I see that
biodiesel is causing fires around the country, as amateur cooks manage to catch their biodiesel refineries on fire. However, that is not the subject of my post. What I found interesting was the elaboration on the refining process.
As I wrote earlier, the idea that one can take used cooking oil and fuel a car is wrong, as is the idea that it will save us from pollution.
You see, as the article describes, biodiesel is made by taking cooking oil and then combining with methanol. I have seen two different processes, one of which uses caustic soda the other which uses heat. In either case, there are clearly several energy inputs separate from the cooking oil.
My point being that the "clean" energy from cooking oil is not clean. First, cooking oil is produced form plants raised using modern, mechanized farming, with all the attendant pollution. However, many will argue the oil would exist anyway, and just be thrown away, so they are "recycling" and we should not count that pollution.
But we then have the other half of the equation. The methanol used to make the diesel is also created in a polluting manner. While methanol is called "wood alcohol", most does not come from the fermentation of wood but form methane and coal. In other words, from fossil fuels. In short, biodiesel is turning out to be, in part, petrodiesel. Add to that the heat used, which comes form either electricity (generated using coal or gas or diesel) or from butane or propane, and we have yet another source of pollution.
So, once again, the "green" energy source is not green, but merely a means of hiding and relocating pollution to make the users feel good about themselves. As I have
said over and over, except for nuclear, there is no "green" energy which does not require
a reduction in our standard of living. Anything which promises otherwise is almost always just a means of moving and obscuring the sources of pollution.
POSTSCRIPT
Aside from the links above, my best arguments about green energy are found in my posts "
A Thought On Solar Energy", "
Passing Thought on Green Energy" and "
Running an Economy on Compost, Saw Grass and Solar Cells".
POSTSCRIPT II
Amusingly, I just saw an advertisement for "clean" geothermal heating and cooling. Now, I will grant that by using the earth as a heat source/heat sink, these systems do manage to heat/cool without an external energy source. However, they do so by blowing air through a very lengthy underground channel. As the heat source/sink has a lower temperature difference than a furnace or air conditioner, the distance needs to be much longer, and something has to push the air through this channel. So, while it is true that it doesn't use gas or electricity to heat or cool, it does use quite a bit more electricity to push that air through the underground channels. Which makes the advertisement a bit misleading, to say the least. Then again, it is a perfect example of a system which shifts the pollution, in this case from heating/cooling to moving air.
Please note, I am not saying whether geothermal is better or worse than gas/oil/heat pumps/etc. It may require more energy or less, I have not looked into the matter. My point is that the idea that it "uses no electricity or gas" is a bit misleading, as it does so by using more electricity to move air. That is why I used it as an example.