is a good green alternative, but it will never provide more than a tiny percentage of drivers with fuel-- there just isn't that much waste fat around in comparison to the fuel we burn.

Biodiesel from virgin oil is a choice to feed a car or truck rather than a bunch of people.

I understand that a mixture of as little as 2% biodiesel mixed into ultra-low sulfur petroleum diesel restores at least as much fuel lubricity as Grandpa's diesel had, making engines last much longer. This is also a very effective sort of resource efficiency.

...has already gone out of business.

Can't be competitive without government subsidies. Inconsistency of the product caused filters to stop up.

Why they built this in Gonzales I don't know. No one nearby grows soybeans and they weren't able to get enough soybeans to service the plant.

Small scale plants using ground mesquite trees to make methanol will probably work. Cut a mesquite tree off and it returns from the root except you get more trees in a short amount of time. But you canot transport the material very far so each plant must be small and have an adequate amount of mesquite pasture available.

The most promising sounding thing I've heard of is using algae to produce fuel.

None of this will replace declines in petroleum production but they might help soften the blow for awhile.

Bottom line: we will have to learn to drive less.

I did inhale.

... that seems pretty promising: using algae to strip CO2 from stack vents and then harvesting the algae for biofuels.

But I'll also touch on your point #4: Agribusiness. In the American system, an extremely hard look and restructuring needs to take place in the farm subsidies arena. Until the practice of paying farmers to not grow crops stops, it's hard to grasp the cost-talk that surrounds the "biofuels are too expensive" and "we can't produce enough food if we make biofuels" jargon which is now leading into the "biofuels pollute more" argument.

And I'm suspect of these new studies and the NY Times article. The MSM really warps scientific publishings when they first hit and then people need to set the record straight or just debunk them for the next few months. It's not just taking info out of context. It's getting it plain wrong. I would like to look at the funding for these studies, although the Nature Conservancy name/brand lends some credibility.

And I'm a little concerned by this:

In the wake of the new studies, a group of 10 of the United States’s most eminent ecologists and environmental biologists today sent a letter to President Bush and the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, urging a reform of biofuels policies. “We write to call your attention to recent research indicating that many anticipated biofuels will actually exacerbate global warming,” the letter said.

Who are these "10 most eminent ecologists and environmental biologists"? 10 out of the thousands that work in the States? After two studies just hit the stands? No names?

My take from the NY Times article is that all the info can be applied to current farming practices and trends regardless if the the crops are used for biofuels.

“We don’t want a total public backlash that would prevent us from getting the potential benefits,” said Nicholas Nuttall, spokesman for the United National Energy Program, who said the United Nations had recently created a new panel to study the evidence.
“There was an unfortunate effort to dress up biofuels as the silver bullet of climate change,” he said. “We fully believe that if biofuels are to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, there urgently needs to be better sustainability criterion.”

Exactly, it's not just petrol fuels (although that's a big part). It's about energy consumption. As for the studies, I'm not saying there isn't credibility here, but I'm smelling a lot more hype than anything else.

But it's also the structure of how the industry is being encouraged. Probably 90% of the firms in the industry exist solely to sop up subsidies, issue stock, create a buzz and then disappear. It's all being done supply-side, and we all know how well that works.

If we had the cars, the tanks and pumps would show up quickly. We've known how to make methanol from anything for a long, long time and progress on other fuels would come quickly. Engineers like to see their efforts used for something other than flim-flams.

Algae produces significantly more biofuel per acre than anything else... like 500 times more than corn or soybeans.

Also, algae feeds on pollution!

There were two projects like this... one at MIT that fed air pollution to special algae greenhouses. It reduced air pollution by 85%, and created TONS of oil. Another one, currently underway in Minneapolis, is using wastewater at a sewage treatment plant. I blogged them here:

http://bexhuff.com/2008/01/minnesota-project-to-make-oil-from-algae

Not as glamorous as fueling your car with used oil from a bakery, but it gets it done.

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

is the destruction of agriculturally marginal areas.

People are plowing hills and windbreak formations in the grain growing area, which makes it more likely that catastrophic weather does long term damage.

In Indonesia, people are using the idea of oil palm plantation as a means to harvest wood that it would otherwise be illegal to cut.

I did some numbers on oil producing algae. It would be very expensive, but less expensive than the alternative wars in the middle east.

The energy system of the future will shift from being like the current water system to being like the Internet. Multi-directional complex connectivity of producer/consumers of very different sizes and scales, linked together a constantly varying complex interaction.
Developing the technology will be hard work.
Developing the required social capacities will be a much more difficult challenge.

Far be it from me to meddle in Stirling's relationship with his shift keys (though I am pleased to see that they've reconciled; I thought they'd broken up for good after his "nude generation" post). However I was for a moment confused when I read the first line of the post, as these two statements are very, very different, in my line of work:

Two studies in science show the land clearing effects are significant.
Two studies in Science show the land clearing effects are significant.

I believe the relevant one is the second.

Anyway, now that I have taken the opportunity to be annoying, this was quite an interesting post; I had never considered the downside of biofuels. I am reminded of something totally unrelated that I saw on the news a few days ago, about how bamboo is replacing cotton in fabric, in part because it is ostensibly more environmentally friendly to grow. However, the story pointed out that taking into account the emissions generated from shipping the bamboo to the places it needed to go probably erased any possible environmental benefit...