If we assume that the "next gen" biofuels are able to achieve their claims, there is still a fundamental problem with biofuels: liquid fuels are energy dense (that being one of their primary virtues), and biomass is not. Unless you assume a very high conversion efficiency, producing biofuel from any kind of field-grown biomass becomes an enormous logistical and transportation problem.
Why liquid fuels though? Isn't methane captured from compost a biofuel? Isn't dried compressed kudzu fed into pellet stoves a biofuel? Isn't rendered Bush a biofuel?
All true, though when someone says "biofuel" these days, they pretty generally mean "methadone for my petroleum problem". I'm actually pretty jazzed about the idea of wastewood gasification for energy generation or chemical production, but I think they'll have to figure out how to get the gasifier to the waste source, rather than trying to truck all the waste to the gasifier.
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Think, for instance, of the CO2 emissions that could be saved if all the kudzu in the US could be processed into fuel.
Of if we could process recently retired political leaders into biofuels, rather than sending them off in helicopters...
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Oh, gee, someone did.
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