Quick Comment on Biofuels

I’d like to think that the people who made this video believe they are doing a service to the environmental movement, suggesting that chips of cactus in the desert can be turned into biofuel in a fashion that isn’t a complete economic joke.   Yet whatever their motives and beliefs, nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s not as if biofuels hasn’t been the beneficiary of enormous amounts of research and development resources, but it has largely failed due principally to the laws of biology, i.e., life forms don’t evolve to store more energy than they need.  And if that’s true of things like corn, woody biomass, and the rest, the cactus has it down to an art-form. They’re very good at staying alive in the harshest possible conditions, and that means doing only what is absolutely necessary for survival, reproduction, and extremely slow growth; the saguaro (pictured above) begins growing its “arms” at approximately age 90.

The main issue, obviously, is the minor detail that we care what we pay for energy.  If you want to make gasoline from cactus and sell it at $300/ gallon, that’s fine, but good luck finding a customer.