Thank you for your knowledge about the situation. I believe we have the same situation here in Canada, where the government limits production of farm products to keep prices up. Also there have been concerns in the less devleoped world about how all the free donated grain from other countries was hurting local farmers. Until now, these things have kept me from worrying about the ethics of eating too much.
But in the near future I wonder if this is about to change. If biofuel crops become more common, the governments in north america might not have to suppress production as they do, and the farmers in the underdeveloped world might start turning to growing biofuels.
I’m asking this now because we’re in the middle of skyrocketing global food prices, as the links I posted show. Something is changing in the world food markets.
So I’m just speculating about a shift in how these things work in the near future. I hope it doesn’t change to the point where driving and eating well can only be done at the expense of someone else not having a full stomach.
You are welcome! Less developed countries are being encouraged to grow jatropha which produces a non-edible oil and grows in the worst conditions. The biggest producers are Africa, India, and the smaller Asian countries in that area. If you want to see skyrocketing prices, check out jatropha and it is totally non-edible! But then so has soy and corn too… and they are edible.
Basically, almost any oil can be used to produce bio-fuels… just some are more efficient than others and some have much less byproduct. I really think one of the worst things a government can do is interfere with supply and demand of some of these commodities. It is just like when they interfere with ecology… they always screw it up.
Personally the price of fuel has raised our food transportation costs so much that a dozen eggs is now over $2 where 6 mos ago it was under a dollar… now that is impact! It is all a balance… it is not a one or the other prospect when it comes to fuel vs food. If we didn’t use any food products to make fuel, petro products go way out of control pricewise… and if we use soley bio-fuels… we would run short on food to be shipped to developing countries… It is a balance.
Part of the problem is that we want to fix things in the short term, where we need to be looking to the long term consequences. The short term fix almost always fails.
Some of our biggest successes are from finding the right oil to use with the right alcohol to produce a low cost ultra clean product. It is all about the carbon chains and how you break them apart and reassemble them into fuel.
I can tell you that agencies like the EPA hate companies like us because we don’t assume the standard methods are the best and we experiment with the chemistry and method.
Here is an example… our process uses certain oils, certain alcohols, a radically different process than the typical. Our fuel shelf life is twice that of standard bio-diesel and has about 4% byproduct to the standard 40%… so the EPA wants us to do 2 MIL in testing to prove to them that our process is safe. Safe… does not require 2MIL in testing… we do it in house and the big things they want to know… phosphorous content, shelf life, emissions… all of which we blow the standard away… yet because we aren’t standard they want our proprietary info and we don’t trust them not to give it to the big companies… this has happened with every bio company that has ever changed from the standard formula… and what do the big companies do? They supress the knowledge, steal the patents and make it illegal for you to use your own process… the big companies… Sun Oil Company(sunoco), Atlantic Richfield(Arco), British Petroleum Co. (BP), etc… are you seeing the point? The oil companies aren’t just petro oil… they own everything and they are big enough to pay the government lobbyists, and PACS off.
I am not a conspiracy theorist… this is real life.
