Hydrocarbons beat biofuels on all counts; In fact, they're more environmentally friendly

Coal and oil are made from plants and animals that died millions of years ago, when the atmosphere contained abundant carbon dioxide plant food. They are now concentrated forms of energy that can be extracted from small areas of land. Burning these natural hydro-carbons returns CO2 and fresh water to the atmosphere, thus greatly assisting global plant growth. If we are lucky, these extra gases in the atmosphere may also slightly delay the start of Earth’s next cooling cycle, but this looks unlikely.

Ethanol and biodiesel are made from plants growing now -— sugarcane, beets, palms, and grains. Growing these crops requires large areas of land and valuable fresh water for irrigation.

Growing biofuel crops extracts CO2 from the atmosphere, but burning them quickly puts it back. This is a zero-sum game that does nothing positive for the environment or the climate.

Coal and oil are thus more enviro-friendly than biofuels. Locking the gate on coal, oil, and gas while supporting policies that waste land, food crops, and water for motor fuels is environmental desecration.

Speculators should be free to make biofuels, but these should not be subsidized or mandated.

SOURCE: https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/what-coal

Coal formation

All living plants store solar energy through a process known as photosynthesis. When plants die, this energy is usually released as the plants decay. Under conditions favourable to coal formation, the decaying process is interrupted, preventing the release of the stored solar energy. The energy is locked into the coal.

Coal formation began during the Carboniferous Period - known as the first coal age - which spanned 360 million to 290 million years ago. The build-up of silt and other sediments, together with movements in the earth’s crust - known as tectonic movements - buried swamps and peat bogs, often to great depths. With burial, the plant material was subjected to high temperatures and pressures. This caused physical and chemical changes in the vegetation, transforming it into peat and then into coal.

One of the things I like to explain to children is that a log laying on the ground is going to release all of its carbon into the atmosphere. You can either let it rot for a few years as it releases it, or you can throw it in a fire and it will get released in an hour or two.

But regarding hydrocarbons, I’m not of the mind that they came from plants and animals. Unless we believe there was a thriving ecosystem on Titan.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html

Human beings are preventing huge natural disasters, like used to occur regularly in the history of the planet.

We are extracting oil and coal from the underground and surface, and then turning them into fuels, which eventually go back into the earth’s crust and into the waters and into the atmosphere, where recycling of those natural elements occur.

If oil and coal were not consumed by humans, then, the ever-evolving/changing planet would find ways for those fossil-fuels to be ‘consumed’ via hugely dramatic disasters.

Humans ‘were placed here” on planet earth, just in time to reduce the overflowing fossil-fuels. When did humans ‘arrive’ on the planet? Right after the dinosaurs disappeared, who were very busy populating the planet with all of their biological ‘deposits’.

... Speculators should be free to make biofuels, but these should not be subsidized or mandated.
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Good logic being used in this sweet little article.

I think Viv Forbes could have added a little extra to that last sentence.

It would read better if she had said, “Speculators should be free to make biofuels, wind turbines, or solar panels (job creation and all), but these should not be subsidized or mandated.

Coal and oil MAY have has as one of their basis for formation, the conversion of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, but there is also abiotic means of formation of both coal and petroleum.

Down at the interface between the rocky crust of earth, and the molten interior, there lies a curious formation, the Mohorovicic discontinuity. Much physical and chemical activity takes place here, using supercritical carbon dioxide as a fluid and resulting in the formation of high-carbon compounds both in combination with the monatomic hydrogen, striped of its electron, and as major precipitation of nearly all-carbon layers, as graphite, coal, or even diamonds.

A relatively good grade of crude oil, kerogen, may be made on an industrial scale using a process called Thermal Depolymerization, using hydrous pyrolysis for the reduction of complex organic materials (usually waste products of various sorts, often biomass and plastic) into light crude oil. It mimics the natural geological processes thought to be involved in the production of fossil fuels. Under pressure and heat, long chain polymers of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons.

All that is needed is heat and pressure. Heat may be provided by using a concentrated heat source, like Thorium-fueled molten salt atomic reactors (which may also be used for electrical power generation), and in a sealed container which also has some amount of water. The water becomes superheated steam, which provides the pressure, and also, at about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, water decomposes into monatomic hydrogen, providing the conditions similar to those found at the Mohorovicic discontinuity. Evolution into petroleum proceeds quite rapidly, often a matter of minutes, depending on the kind of biomass used as feedstock.

We need never run out of petroleum.

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