Biofuels have certainly been coping some flak recently in light of concerns over escalating food prices, which some say, is due to farming land being used to produce food crops exclusively for fuel use. That may or may not be true and it’s quite difficult to filter through all the noise on the topic to find any soundly researched case that’s based on factual data.

Such a report would not be calculated over night and currently we can see the easy road of finger-pointing being opted for once again rather than hard effort of searching for the truth without fear or favor. So, is there under supply from the combination of drought, emerging middle classes in developing countries and food used as fuels or is there plenty of food but it’s simply to expensive due to being inflated by speculators and rising input costs such as oil. Perhaps a combination of all, and more? If they stopped producing fuels in this manner could the situation actually get worse?

There is much to be nutted out.

All that aside, there is actually a great disservice taking place by media and various groups, perhaps unintended, that have now tarnished biofuels as something evil. Little do they mention that there is some ground breaking research taking place into biofuels that are not produced from food crops and in many cases not even requiring the use of farming land.

Biofuel can be produced in many ways including from wood chips through to animal waste and from food crops after the food component has been removed. Excitingly, there is much research going into Cellulosic ethanol and Algae biofuels. So, let’s not write biofuels off just yet…

The video is of vertical Algae biofuel production plant in the US. More info on biofuels can be found at the CSIRO and at Solar Biofuels .

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algae biofuel, biofuel, cellulosic ethanol