Also I find it funny that gas companies have had no problem making money cutting my gas with alcohol for decades (this was even before MTBE elimination). Yet when I go to use it as a main source, its too impractical to use.

Even though it may ultimately only satisfy a small segment of fuel consumption, there is still good reason for us to diversify our energy sources. Diversity will offset the volatility and dependence (aka gouging) that happen by using a single primary energy source. There are very few practical ones out there. Nuclear and ethanol are about the only real things we can add to oil and coal.

Maybe an X-Prize contest for a cheap nano-printed 4×8 solar panel retrofit kit. No battery storage, just send the power directly to the household power utility box. If the kit can be produced for $3000 and be simple enough for weekend warriors to install then it might just work.

Prices are supposed to rise and fall to allocate resources to their most valued ends, and to increase the potential returns in respective industries to attract more investment to increase supply. We didn’t die of starvation due to food shortages. Something tells me to the extent biofuels can take over for petroleum, they will, and will do so with minimal fuss and as always happens in the economy, in those areas where the benefits of using them outweigh the benefits of using fossil fuels.

Thinking in terms of replacing fossil fuels on a one for one basis, and pointing to current shortages based on what might be demanded in the future, simply belies an ignorance of how the world economy actually functions.

You need to be aware that, like renewable energy which is overwhelmingly hydroelectric despite what you may hear, currently biofuels are mainly landfill gas. So any numbers you may hear about biofuel supply are misleading and even deceptive.

Having said that, biofuels supply can be increased in two ways. One is to process otherwise ‘waste’ bio-materials into fuel. This is superficially attractive until you understand that there is far less of this waste than you are led to believe and other initiatives, such as recycling, have had a major impact on the supply of waste and hence their availability as biofuels. landfill gas for example, is largely a legacy of earlier more wasteful times.

In summary, the biofuel potential in waste is both less than you are led to believe and rapidly runs into finite supply and economic competition with other uses.

Which leaves new supply as the source of biofuels, which is where the real problem is. New supply of bio-materials can only come from land not currently utilized to supply food or other bio-materials, or from more intensive agriculture. And bear in mind that demand for food is rapidly increasing driven by increasing populations and affluence.

Bringing ‘new land’ into production necessarily takes it away from some other use. Most of those uses will be more or less natural ecosystems although not necessarily pristine. And in our globalized world it will happen far from where we see the impact. In the same way developed countries have become ‘clean and green’ by exporting their polluting industries to place where they pollute far more, biofuels will be sourced from natural environments in the developing world, bulldozed to make land available to produce biofuels for western demand.

I happened to have travelled through one of the biggest palm oil plantations in Asia. Palm oil is booming as it is a prime source of biofuels. These plantations are huge. The one I saw was several hundred square kilometers. A few years earlier it had been mostly undeveloped tropical rainforest. Now it was uninterrupted monoculture. An ecological disaster.

As we drove through the plantation, my driver said that a couple of weeks earlier he had seen a dead tiger beside the road. I asked, was it hit by a vehicle? He replied, that it might have been, but it was all skin and bone and was clearly dying of starvation. Starving predators come to roads because they find roadkill carrion there.

I remember reading articles and essays 30 years ago that pointed out the problems with bio-whatever that folks are now “discovering”.

Sheesh!