Biofuel — the future of mobility as we know it

As reserves of crude oil constantly decrease and new oil sources are increasingly difficult to exploit the development of alternatives becomes more and more interesting. In the long term, the only option is the use of energy from renewable resources. The most important of these are electricity from sun, water or wind and biofuel from regrowable plants. Biofuel is used as a substitute for conventional gasoline in combustion engines. There are two types of biofuel: bioethanol and biodiesel. Bioethanol is identical to the alcohol that is used in alcoholic beverages. It is mostly produced from sugar cane, but also other plants such as potato or maize can be used. In Brazil, ethanol is used as a major fuel for cars. Conventional gasoline is substituted with ethanol to 25% and many flexible-fuel vehicles even allow the use of pure ethanol as fuel. Recently, bioethanol has been implicated in being the causative agent of drastically increasing prices for food in developing countries. This has raised debate over whether one should make fuel rather than enable the poor to feed themselves. In contrast to bioethanol, which is derived from carbohydrates, biodiesel is produced from various vegetable oils. Therefore, other plants are employed for the production of biodiesel. In Europe, mostly rapeseed oil is used, although rape is not a very efficient source for oil. Some more efficient sources are e.g. oil palms and jatropha. Oil palms are cultivated in tropical countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. They give a much higher oil yield per acreage than e.g. rape. Unfortunately the growing demand for palm oil is leading to massive and irrevocable destruction of tropical rain forest. It is important to note that during the production of one liter of palm oil biofuel releases more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere than by burning the equivalent amount of conventional fuel. The jatropha plant seems to be an interesting alternative, since it grows in semi-deserts, but still produces nuts with very high oil content.