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Trevor Craig

Energy Science 110

Biofuel Basics, 20

11/19/11

This lecture was all about biofuels, general information about them, and all the different

types of biofuels. Biofuels are considered to be solids, liquids, or gasses. We used to use biomass

mostly in the United States, in 1800 we used around 100% of our biofuel was from biomass, and

now in 2000 we use about 0% of biomass, where the world uses about 17% of biomass for their

biofuels.

Oil prices are going up so we are going to need to find a solution or start using more

biomass again to balance out the price for our energy consumption. The era of cheap oil is over,

in 1993 it was about $10 but now the price has increased and in 2007 it reached a new high of

$140, that is a very big rise for oil, and when there is a big rise in the price of oil that usually

causes our economy to follow the same trend and have recessions and other bad things. When we

import our oil we have less of an option of how our economy is going to react to the prices of

oils, in 2008 the United States imported about 60% of its oil, and that number is expected to

increase as we run out of our reserves and start having to use more expensive ways of extracting

oil.

What are some ways that we can reduce our need for foreign oil? One way we can reduce

our need for foreign oil is by using ethanol, in 2010 the United States reduced foreign oil imports

by $34 billion dollars by using ethanol, and this in turn lowered the price of gasoline in the

United States by about $0.89 per gallon, but this also increased the price of corn by about 36%

for the years 2006-2009. The United States is producing a lot more ethanol now that we can see

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some of the benefits from it, in fact when you look at the production of biofuels, ethanol

produced in the United States accounted for about 43%, where Brazil made 32% sugarcane

ethanol, and Europe made about 15% and 10% other. This looks like a promising way to lower

our dependence on oil, but when we look at how much biofuels take a part of the final energy

consumption it is a little disappointing, transportation biofuels only use about .3% of the full

energy consumption.

We need to continue to look for ways to decrease our energy consumption, and our

dependence on oil and fossil fuels.

Biochemical-are products used for various applications in the drug development industry andmay be used widely, particularly in a research environment for testing. They involve chemical

processes in living organisms.

Transesterification- A chemical process which reacts an alcohol with the triglycerides contained

in vegetable oils and animal fats to produce biodiesel and glycerin.