Biodiesel Fuels cannot help save the world?

Some essay I wrote for an English class. I'll readily admit that English isn't a good subject for me. But if you think what I'm showing here is good, then I'll take that as a complement xD

Abstract (hint: this is the tl;dr part of the essay)
In looking at biodiesel fuels, the product appears to be very versatile and more ecological than regular petroleum diesel. Almost every aspect of biodiesel fuel points to a much more cleaner environment, with little to no disadvantage presented to users over petroleum diesel. Taking a look at the industry and the production lines from start to finish, however, we get a vastly different story. Deforestation, massive crop plantations in the third world countries, and the addition of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides cause havoc to the environment. Much of these effects are backed by people who believe their cause to be in the interest of human kind as a whole.



In the current world, many people have attempted to become more environmentally friendly. Due to the possible dangers of global warming and the implications of its silent chain of disasters, many people have decided to combat the problem by altering their lifestyles and reducing carbon emissions. One of the major sources of carbon emissions and pollutants identified were the different kinds of exhaust coming from automobiles. The United States is a major consumer of gas and is definitely a large culprit in this matter. Furthermore, people knew that oil and petroleum were not going to be around forever, since they are the results decomposed organic matter millions of years old, most of which came from the Carboniferous period--hence the term “fossil fuel”. Consumption is rapidly exceeding production of such fuels. In an effort to find alternative fuel sources, some people have tinkered with the basic ideas of oil-based fuels, and thus biodiesel fuel was invented. Biodiesel fuel has a significantly lessened impact on the environment, but like many things, one can wonder what the tradeoffs are. Examination of the tradeoffs required to produce biodiesel show that they are usually not as environmentally friendly as people believe. But first, let's have an overview on what biodiesel is.

Biodiesel fuel has myriad perks for the environmentally conscientious societies. Biodiesel is a soup of hydrocarbon molecules much like regular fuels, but it is primarily made from crops that produce natural oils, especially soybeans. Used cooking oil and animal fat also work as main ingredient substitutes. It's a fuel for both cars and organisms, as hydrocarbons are ladened with energy waiting to be released when combusted. But natural oil alone isn't an acceptable fuel due to the residues that burnt oil leaves behind, which deteriorates machinery and ruins engines. A chemical reaction takes place to convert the natural oils into mono-alkyl esters (a form of hydrocarbons) using a secondary ingredient, methanol or any other short chain alcohol, and a catalyst to get the reaction going.. What comes out is crude biodiesel and glycerol (an organic compound), both of which are further refined until there are little to no impurities left. Additional alcohol can be salvaged from the glycerol residue.

Biodiesel fuels seem to be useable without upgrading current infrastructure, if you address having to switch to a biodiesel vehicle and introducing a few additives to address engine compatibility and lifespan. Miles per gallon figures for biodiesel fuels are comparable with petrodiesel fuels (fuels based on petroleum), and petrodiesel fuels can be used to generate two to three more units of energy worth of biodiesel fuels. Biodiesel fuels can also be mixed with petrodiesel fuels in nearly any percentage and can still run well in engines, or perhaps even better, since biodiesel provides more lubricating properties than petrodiesel. While the cost of biodiesel is a dozen cents higher than petrodiesel, people whose sources of biodiesel come from restaurants have a significant cost advantage: one report from a man said that his biodiesel costs range from thirty-eight to forty-four cents per gallon. What is perhaps more notable is the significant reduction of emissions that biodiesel fuel generates compared to petrodiesel as measured from the exhaust pipes of vehicles. While burning off petrodiesel or regular fuels generates carbon content in the atmosphere as well as sulfuric emissions, biodiesel burns much cleaner, and has little to no sulfuric emissions. Should biodiesel be spilled, it causes little environmental concern, as it is biodegraded and reduced nearly four to five times faster than regular petrodiesel, and without the use of specific bacteria too. These are significant advantages that biodiesel has over petrodiesel.

However, there are large disadvantages as well. What goes into making the biodiesel has great cause for concern on whether biodiesel really is the “green” alternative. There are a great variety of practices and equipment invested into some of the more modern farms in the United States. Some of the most potent pollutants involved are herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, followed by ammonium and ammonia product that comes from fertilizers. These chemical products, when used in excess, are soaked by running water and carried downwards to rivers and lakes. These chemicals can become contaminates that can either kill off the wildlife via poisoning or cancer, and this effect compounds itself the higher up the food chain you go. For example, the fish in the streams filter water through their gills to get the oxygen that they need. In addition to picking up the essentials for survival, they also pick up contaminates from agricultural wash-off. In a normal creature, these contaminates are stored in the liver. Even if the fish live their whole lives in very low contaminate levels, these toxic chemicals build up, since the liver has no way of neutralizing or disposing them. Higher up in the food chain, carnivores, especially tertiary carnivores, such as eagles, will eat these fish. All of the contaminates in the fish that the eagle eats will also end up in its own liver, and the build-up becomes excessive to the point where the eagle will get sick and die. Excess nitrogen in the soil tends to cause plants in the soil to wither and possibly die.

It's true that a certain level of agriculture already exists, but creating a new niche of demand for more crops is what biodiesel fuels did, and the farmers will make use of extra plots of land in order to fill in the supply gap. The cost of corn and soybeans is rising due to the demand for these two crops to produce biodiesel fuels, which creates incentives for farmers to produce more output as well as more byproducts such as waste. Some people are also concerned that certain parties might resort to clear-cutting forests in order to meet the biodiesel fuel demand; ironically biodiesel industries are more than likely to be thinking “green” when they consider acquiring new property. The fear that the increased demand for biodiesel-producing crops will result in increased deforestation is not without precedent, as there is the example of the clear-cutting the Brazilians did. Their purpose for doing what they did was mainly to increase farmlands for soy crops. That may strike some people as a country situation, but the economies and environmental problems of the world of today are increasingly global, not domestic. A CNN report seems to imply the fact that American farm investors can buy land much cheaper in Brazil than they could in America. Figures alone would show how Brazil is vaulting onto the world stage: soybean farms in Brazil are nearly ten times larger than the farms in America, and the financial costs of such operations certainly back up the advantages of farming in Brazil. Brazilian infrastructure is not considered to be the most reliable, but the people have managed to clear over half of the original forest lands in major regions in a span of less than twenty years just for soybean farms. Brazilian diet is almost devoid of soy products. Add additional foreign investors , and there will be increased deforestation for certain.

Another environmentally unfriendly aspect of soybeans is that they are planted throughout the whole of the year. That is, there really isn't any crop rotation, a necessary method in sustainable farming practices. Crop rotation is a method for cycling different kinds of crops throughout the earth's year so that different depths of the soil are utilized according to nutritional requirements and bacterial activity. For example, tobacco plants require lots of sunlight, and their roots drain the surface soil of its nitrogen, while leaving deeper deposits of detritus and rich soil largely untouched. But if you persistently plant the same crop every year, the nutrients in the soil will become depleted. This is where fertilizer comes in handy, as it saturates the soil with usable nitrogen and other nutrients that plants require. Unfortunately with soybeans, their seeds cannot be saved for replanting, so the plants are saved instead of letting the nutrients in the soil replenish. Due to the unsustainable nature of non-rotated crops, many chemicals are used on the Brazilian soybean plantations in order to preserve and continue growing their crops. This leads to a moderate dump of contaminates in the environment throughout the year. Additionally, non-rotated crops become water dependent. This leads to concerns regarding the recycling contaminated water for their farming operations,which does not affect the health of soybean plants, but causes a greater concentration of contaminants.

If this can happen in Brazil, commonly considered to be a third world country, it can happen in many other third world countries. Looking at a typical third world country, they have poor GPA, and many people make a living producing agricultural foods and goods. Farming is relatively easy to start up compared to manufactured goods, so dozens of potential land investors would choose to grow crops and start up their own business. Since biodiesel fuels are a relatively new resource that's high in demand, many of the third world countries will try to meet that demand and reap the profits that the richer nations are willing to pay out. If these countries follow the routine that Brazil has fallen into, and it's reasonable that they will take such a path, then there will be a multitude of despoiling of natural land, where many plants, animals, and other wildlife have called home. Massive deforestation will also take place. Since trees and plants take in carbon dioxide from the air and replaces it with breathable oxygen, reduction of trees and plants will cause the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere to build up, and deforestation makes this problem worse. Biodiesel fuels reduce carbon emissions, but whether this makes up for the chopping down of trees in the short-term is debatable. Looking at the long-term picture, it will take years for trees to grow back, if the land is ever relinquished from the soybean crops. A major reason for biodiesel fuel demand is to help protect what is left of the natural world, as opposed to simply finding an alternative fuel source for automobiles, but the farming practices that the majority of the providers use are highly deleterious to those desires.

If one can accept this connection between biodiesel fuels and the destruction of natural land, then perhaps the next question is how much are we already dependent on biodiesel? According to the Energy Information Administration, a United States government agency that provides official energy statistics, in the year 2005, the world produces 82.5 million barrels of oil per day, and the world consumes 83.7 million barrels per day. The United States alone consumes 20.6 million barrels, of which 9.2 million barrels are used as motor gasoline. According to the US Department of Energy, in the same year, 75 million gallons of biodiesel fuel, or nearly 1.8 million barrels, were consumed in the United States. But the next year, 2006, 250 million gallons of biodiesel fuel, or almost 6 million barrels, were consumed. If exponential growth of the biodiesel industry is what the big picture is looking like for the United States, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that the same trends are being shown in Japan and many of the European countries, all which are first and second world countries. There is a correlation between biodiesel fuel imports for these first/second world countries (especially Japan) and third world country exports of biodiesel fuel, which in turn leads to deforestation. Pressure from biodiesel demand and rising crop prices will cause many more plantations and farms to spring up, leading to a rapid deterioration of forest land. This problem, unlike global warming, is highly visible, as lush green color from the land eventually erodes into dusty brown in satellite imagery.

As it turns out, while we enjoy cleaner atmospheres from cleaner-burning, more efficient biodiesel fuels, many of the third world countries are removing several dozen acres of forests and wildlife in order to create wide-spread plantations for crops for the biodiesel fuel industries. In addition, chemical run-off from the plantations is slowly poisoning the environment downhill from these operations, killing animals and destroying the soil. Biodiesel is hardly a role model of an “environmentally friendly” alternative fuel source.

An issue I didn't completely address:
Some people may say that the good majority of soya farms in Brazil, as well as other crop plantations elsewhere in the globe, are actually for helping solve world hunger. While this doesn't change where most of the biofuels come from, it does shift the remedial solution to the problem (something not discussed in the essay) to better management of where the sources come from. Also, should the biofuel imports magically not come from some place cheap like Brazil, costs of biofuels would have a significant raise, which discourages efforts to enact regulations and laws to help implement cheap biofuel usage into society.