Elon Musk, founder of Telsa Motors makers of the first modern all electric roadster, talks about cars and the environment. When asked “Do you think biofuel will be able stand a chance against electric?”, he said:
“My motivation behind Tesla is really to do as much good as possible for the environment and the electric-vehicle revolution.”.
I think for high-value applications like jet fuel, it ( biofuel) makes a lot more sense than it does for cars. Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good. The current cultivated land is what’s needed to provide food for about 6 billion people. The energy used by a car is much greater than a person. A person might use 3,000 calories in a day, but a car would use 300,000. Cars take a lot more energy than people do.
It’s obviously tricky to convert waste cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.
But in general, crops are not a very efficient way of turning sunlight into mobile energy. A solar panel from SunPower is probably 20 to 22 percent efficient, but if you look at the actual efficiency of plants, if you take the sunlight incidence and then how much of that gets converted into plant matter and then what it takes to take that plant matter and convert it into ethanol or some other energy source, it actually ends up being well under 1 percent efficient.
