BioFuels

What are BioFuels?

Let's start with the fuels part. In our culture the word "fuel" ubiquitously conjures that liquid stuff we put in the gas tanks of our vehicles. Let's step back and take a broader view. Fuel is a substance (energy in form) that is utilized for an energy exchange at which point it is broken down and/or recombined into other forms of energy. Everything that we know on this planet that has a physical form, from mountains to air molecules, is just energy in form.

Bio-fuels are forms of energy that originate from living substances. Living substances derive their energy in form from primary fuels. Primary fuels are what the ancients of many cultures called the four elements - fire, water, air, and earth. There is a fifth primary energy element called "ethers" or "spirit" that we don't really understand because it doesn't have a known form, but it is perhaps what makes living substances living.

Plants utilize the primary fuels - energy from sunlight, water, air and earth minerals - to grow living carbon-based structures we know as herbs, grasses, shrubs, and trees. Living structures become the basis of what we generally call fuel, but for the purposes of our discussion we will call them bio-fuels or secondary fuels to differentiate them from the foundational primary fuels. When secondary fuels (bio-fuels) are burnt, digested, or composted, they are eventually "decomposed" back into primary fuels - heat (fire), water, gasses (air) and minerals (earth).

Plants utilize primary fuels to form secondary fuels. Animals are also fueled by the primary fuels - sunlight, water, air, and earth minerals. Animals obtain most of their primary fuels in a concentrated form through consumption of secondary bio-fuels - plants and other animals. When we eat plant or meat foods, food is our bio-fuel. When we consume bio-fuels, we are eating concentrated primary fuels. When we are eaten by a large carnivore, bird of prey, or soil micro-organisms, we are bio-fuel. When bio-fuels are digested or burned, they are either changed into another form of bio-fuel or returned to primary fuels. For example, when we eat food, some if it is converted through digestion and metabolic processes into primary fuels that support our structure and biomass (bones, muscles, nerves, blood, etc.); some of it is released as bio-fuel (poop); and some of it released as primary fuels (heat, water, minerals, gasses).

When we look at it this way, we see that there is a sustainable cycle of energy that exists between primary fuels, secondary fuels (the plant and animal kingdoms) and back to primary fuels.

So, it turns out that just about every fuel we use is a bio-fuel, including petroleum, natural gas and coal. Technically, petroleum, natural gas and coal are hydrocarbons, condensed forms of bio-fuel that are created from plant and animal material under high heat and pressure in the absence of oxygen inside the crust of the earth over thousands to millions of years. We can think of hydrocarbons as tertiary fuels because they are composed of primary fuels concentrated into secondary fuels, and further concentrated into hydrocarbons. They are useful for fuel because they have very high energy density (highly concentrated).

Tertiary hydrocarbon fuels have been around as long as life on our planet. Coal, for example, has been used as a fuel in various places for thousands of years. Hydrocarbon fuels only become a problem when entire civilizations depend on them for their energy as we now have since the industrial revolution. The problem that has arisen since the industrial revolution is that primary fuels are returned to the atmosphere at a rate that is out of balance with the natural absorption of primary fuels by living substances (plants and animals), causing those primary fuels (especially greenhouse gasses) to accumulate in the atmosphere. And that leads to rapid and catastrophic global climate instability. We're taking stuff that's been naturally stored away for millions of years, extracting it and burning it all over a few hundred years. It is comparable to condensing all the volcanic activity that ever occurred on the planet over millions of years into just a few hundred years. And you don't expect something drastic to happen!?

Renewable bio-fuels are carbon-neutral because the primary fuels released when they are burned is equal to the amount the plant absorbed from the atmosphere over their lifetimes. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, release thousands of lifetimes of absorption all in the span of a single lifetime. Renewable bio-fuels are a closer fit to the sustainable energy cycle that keeps our planet stable.

Two renewable bio-fuels that we are using for transportation fuel are Waste Vegetable Oil and BioDiesel. Neither of these are truly carbon-neutral because plenty of hydrocarbon energy currently goes into their production. Nevertheless, they are a move in the right direction...which eventually leads us to truly carbon-neutral forms of bio-fueled transportation like walking and horseback riding!

The real deal folks, from my perspective and shared by many, is that our civilization is now built and based on the highly concentrated tertiary hydrocarbon fuels. Take those fuels away and the civilization as we know it lacks the energy to maintain its current infrastructure. Without those fuels, every piece of infrastructure of the modern city and even many off-grid rural homesteads crumble, never again to be rebuilt in the same way. That is both the bad news and the good news. I can feel better running WVO and bioDiesel in my F250 instead of petroDiesel. However, I know that the days are numbered in which our civilization can keep such a vehicle, or any other within the current paradigm, on the road...What road? What vehicle manufacturing facility? What replacement parts? etc..? None of those exist in the way they do now without the tertiary fuels.

Join me on the path of learning to rebuild our cultures, lifestyles and communities in ways that are independent of hydrocarbon fuels.