kinser5mfan

http://www.biodiesel.org/members/assoc/
anyone familiare with any of these?
we are getting a plant 30 miles from here soon called heartland biodiesel (its on the list) and i was thinking of investing in it and was wondering if anyone else new anything about it

infidel

Did you look at this? http://www.heartlandbiodiesel.com/

It's amazing how many new BD plants are opening everyday worldwide, take a look
http://news.google.com/news?sourceid...el&sa=N&tab=wn

kinser5mfan

the first web site is the same as a packet i got in the mail. the second is very intresting that it is world wide concern
my question is centered around will it make prices cheaper in this area or does it in the other areas that have them??

infidel

Don't know that new plants will effect prices for quite some time, good ol' supply and demand should keep prices up.

Here's one way to look at it, if 100% of the cropland in the US was dedicated to producing BD it could only produce 7% of our diesel needs and 0% of our food needs. Lets make a very generous assumption that only 50% of the cropland produces BD, we're now down 3.5% of our fuel needs. As more and more states pass laws requiring a certain percent BD, usually 2%, we creep very close to demand exceeding supply.

Just because BD can only supply a small percentage of our fuel needs doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue it, the solution to our county's energy problems will have to come from several small alternatives.

Lunyfringe

That's assuming current crops (soybeans?).. I'm more interested in oil from Algae.. they say it uses .3% (yes, point 3, not 3%) of the land that traditional crops (soybean, rapeseed) use...
from a DOE/NREL study:
consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert... what else can you grow in the desert?

this interests me especially since I own 47 acres of high desert in Colordao...
there has been development going on with closed systems that co-habitate with ethanol production (CO2 is a by-product of fermentation, and the algae needs high concentrations of CO2 to grow)

I think the overall technology is there- it's a matter of fine-tuning the procedures & systems needed to automate it effectively..