"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet." - William Gibson

We have to decouple feedstocks from fossil fuels

by Nate on January 3, 2010

in Posts

What energy sources have a feedstock decoupled from fossil fuels? Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, Biomass?

There are multiple problems that will make it difficult for biodiesel to ever compete without subsidies. In a nutshell the key problem is that the feedstock costs are linked to fossil fuel prices. The feedstock is generally a vegetable oil and methanol – an alcohol typically produced from natural gas. A second big problem is that biodiesel is an inferior fuel to hydrocarbon diesel (especially in cold weather). Further, the by-product of the biodiesel process is glycerin, which has limited value (especially at the volumes produced when biodiesel production is ramped up).

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