Biofuels Industry Unlikely To Thrive

The text in the meme here translates as “The EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) projects that the production of biofuel will grow slowly until 2050.”

I doubt it.  With each passing year, it’s becoming more clear that biofuels are a terrible and non-scalable idea.  A few of the major oil companies worked their butts off to make this happen, and simply gave up.

My theory is that biofuels are intrinsically inefficient, because of the theory of evolution and the second law of thermodynamics.  Plants didn’t evolve to store more energy than they need to grow and reproduce.  Any species based on such a mutation was replaced by one that didn’t have it.

If there is any chance for success here, it lies in algae, which has ~30 times more energy density than any terrestrial plant.  But even this has gone nowhere, after three decades of intensive R&D.

 

 

 

 

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