No Food For Fuel bump!
Our company sells equipment to these Bio-industries and the way they conduct business, I find it hard to think it is legit. Meaning, our tax dollars are just flowing into their pockets.... Unless you get people in there that really believe what they are doing and don’t use TAX money to run these businesses, they’ll never be efficient.
Yet more proof that God wants us to make ethanol from corn, not rape seed.
ping
This can be done. The county must simply get direction from Hugo Chavez on proper procedures.
What a marroon!
In 2007, the median family income was $50,233. With this number in mind, it is easy to put the costs of such projects in perspective of real people and real families.
For every $1 million in government spending, a project consumes the income of roughly 20 American families. If the project results in support for more than 20 families, we are better off, if not than we are worse off.
I think a few farmers got snookered by the environ-mentalists.
Snohomish Co. is sort of infamous for these kinds of decisions. I used to live there. They built a nuclear plant back in the 1970s without proper permits. Well, the utility did. The rate payers sued and won in court and the utility had to tear down the plant and refund the money to the people in the form of energy grants for weatherizing your home — max. $4000 per household. These were available to everybody, including renters, regardless of income.
We moved there about that time and we super insulated our home with our money. Some people installed new windows and woodstoves (we already had both) or solar panels. Everybody got so energy efficient that in a few years the utility company nearly went bankrupt because nobody was using any heat. Then the county prohibited the use of high efficiency wood stoves on many days. They are nuts in Snohomish County.
I still have one of my wood stoves and I use it all the time in Wisconsin.
“Supporters urge patience. In time, they say, an improved economy will boost demand for locally grown oilseed crops, such as canola, which can be turned into biodiesel.”
Canola Oil; now one of the widely used, and growing, sources of “vegetable” oils, for the home, restaurants and manufacture of packaged foods (also made more cost effective (temporarily???) due to the massive diversion of corn to ethanol).
As with most “bio-fuel” schemes, there are and will be added costs (plenty of them) that will show up outside the direct area of the “bio-fuel”, due to the changes (distortions) in supply and demand of resources diverted to produce the “bio-fuel”.
So...it’s a good investment for the County is it ? Another words, it really sucks to be a Tax Payer. Their the ones that will be throwing all that money down a Rat Hole. Until the day arrives that Private Business says that a profit can be made, forget it.
Biodiesel makes a lot of sense, but only if it is based in algae. Other forms of biodiesel pale in comparison.
To start with, algae can be grown in quantity in most of the US. Some types are as much as 50% vegetable oil. It grows in gray waste water, and helps to purify it in the process, and its growth is accelerated by adding otherwise expensive to dispose of waste CO2 and nitrous oxide gases. So even before it produces diesel, it is profitable.
Once the oil is squeezed out, the remainder can be sold as animal fodder. The oil is mixed with ethanol and common lye, which turns it into biodiesel. Then it is strained, and 1% petroleum diesel is added to it, as a preservative.
Diesel engines need just minor modifications to run on biodiesel, which has 96% of the energy of petroleum diesel. Diesel engines are also scalable, from motorcycle engines, cars, trucks, trains, to even ships. Manufacturers do not need to retool to make diesel engines, and they can be refueled at ordinary gasoline stations.
In other words, algae based biodiesel is head over heels of any other form of transportation energy. America could phase out most gasoline use in a decade with a slow and orderly change over to diesel engines. No need for coercion or spending vast amounts of taxpayer money.
Otherwise note that most research into algae biodiesel is being done by the oil companies, who have quietly built several test production facilities. These are people who know energy and engines.