Biofuels: Fields of dreams

We can run our cars on corn, sugar cane or wheat: limitless cheap energy grown on our doorstep. But are biofuels the answer to exhausted oil wells or just another nightmare scenario?
ohn Anderson is motoring with chip fat. Sir Rob Margetts swears by fizzy drinks and chicken feed. George Bush is banking on corn. Everyone, from pub to parliament, knows we’re going to have to do something about transport fuel. Oil prices have already passed the threshold of pain, and emissions targets for greenhouse gases will not be met unless we wean ourselves off petrol.

The solution is both easy and obvious. In place of fossil energy – the power of ancient sunlight – we can recover the solar energy locked up in field crops, which, unlike mineral oils, we can endlessly replenish. With plant oils in the tank, we will ride to work on sunbeams.

There are two kinds of biofuel – biodiesel, which is made from oil-rich crops such as rape, soy and palm; and bioethanol, which substitutes for petrol and is made from starchy crops such as sugar cane, beet, maize and wheat. The case against biodiesel is that virgin rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia is being cut down to make way for soy and palm. Result: more CO2 is being released into the atmosphere by deforestation than is being saved by reductions in fossil fuel.

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High CO2 cars targeted by budget

Cars that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) will be hit by new measures in Wednesday's budget, according to reports.

Chancellor Alistair Darling is expected to introduce measures to encourage the use of cars with low CO2 emissions.

Weekend newspaper reports say the Chancellor might introduce a levy on new, larger cars that could increase their price by £2,000.

The tax would hit new saloons, estates and people carriers the reports say.

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Winter price freeze costs SSE £400m in potential revenue

A DECISION by Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) to hold out against industry-wide price increases this winter has cost the company £400 million in lost potential revenues, the Sunday Herald has learned.

But even as energy suppliers anticipate punitive Budget measures next week in response to consumer outcry over perceived excessive profits, Scotland's last remaining energy utility is expected to raise its prices later this month.

Pressure on the Treasury to deliver a windfall tax has mounted after average rises of 15% by ScottishPower, British Gas, npower, E.ON and EDF Energy were followed by stellar full-year profits from British Gas owner Centrica. Its residential arm saw a fivefold increase in pre-tax profits to £570m.

"Scottish and Southern promised not to raise its prices until the end of March when British Summer Time begins, but everybody expects it to increase its prices after that," said Angelos Anastasiou, an analyst at Pali Capital.

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Recycling carbon dioxide into petrol

A new reactor could make chemically recycling carbon dioxide back into petrol a worthwhile endeavour, US scientists say.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, are to test a prototype device this spring, which will use concentrated solar energy to drive chemical reactions that split carbon dioxide molecules to get carbon monoxide. The same system was originally designed to split water to form hydrogen; and these two products can then be combined to synthesise liquid hydrocarbon fuels - such as methanol or petrol.

Splitting the stable carbon dioxide molecule is so tough that many researchers think the most economic course of action is simply to bury the greenhouse gas underground. And solar plants usually generate electricity, rather than split CO2.

But the Sandia team led by Jim Miller, Nathan Siegel and Richard Diver, who work on the 'Sunshine to Petrol' (S2P) project, think their device's chemical reactions are efficient enough to make it a worthwhile way of producing liquid fuels from CO2 . Ellen Stechel, manager of Sandia's fuel and energy transitions department, explained to Chemistry World that the ultimate aim is to have a series of solar-powered reactors, each collecting around 22kg of carbon dioxide and 18kg of water daily, and churning out some 2.5 gallons of petrol, based on target conversion efficiencies. 'Liquid fuels can be stored in trucks or piped using existing infrastructure,' Stechel pointed out.

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