horse wrote:Racer-X wrote:the bio-oxygenates will be replaced by bio-hydrocarbons. The most common bio-hydrocarbon today is the bio-diesel from vegetables or animal fat but there are researches going on to produce gasoline from the same sources.
I don't like the idea of F1 moving to bio-fuel. It's a real dead end in automotive technology. There will
never be enough land to serve every car in the world with bio-fuel and it puts pressure on land and food markets.
It's the same scam as hydrogen - oil companies want a product to sell, through a pump, and bio-fuels fits this bill nicely. Admittedly, biofuel might be the only option for aviation, but straight electricity has to be the ideal for cars. Hydrogen might be required if other energy storage options are not workable.
If you limit yourself to first generation biofuels that use only the energy stored by the plants in the form of oils (bio-diesel) and sugar/starch (bio-ethanol), that is correct, making enough fuel would be difficult. But second generation biofuels can go around that problem. Gasfication can for instance convert any hydrogen and carbon containing material into synthesis gas (CO + H2) which then can be used to "build" the fuel from the ground up. It is usually used to produce hydrocarbons using the Fischer-Tropsch process or methanol and dimethyl ether. A large proportion of the waste heat created by the process can be sold for district heating (some electricity production can also be possible), so the overall efficiency is very high. Since the biomass is gasified it also doesn't matter what type it is; sugar, starch, cellulose, lignine or what ever, everything goes.
But of course, we must also use much less primary energy per person in the future than we do now. Security of supply really starts with energy efficiency.
Also, there is nothing that says we can only use land to produce biomass.
Biomass is also a primary energy unlike hydrogen, which is only an energy carrier. So hydrogen will never be a replacement for oil. Electricity is also only an energy carrier, and thus not a replacement for oil.