Re: Bio fuel not the answer!
"Biofuel" is not a good term to use. It mixes ethanol and biodiesel. They are poor answers to energy needs for different reasons.
The demand for ethanol has driven up the price of corn, which in turn drives up the cost of many food products (along with the cost of transporting the food with petrodiesel). There is not enough land to grow enough corn (fertilized and cultivated with petroleum derivatives) to meet food chain demands and still make enough ethanol to meet transportation demands if it is to replace gasoline in vehicles. Brazil is getting away with it because it has the climate and space to grow a bazillion acres of sugarcane and has only a fraction of the fuel need of the US.
Biodiesel made from virgin veggie oil screws up the food infrastructure in the same way for many of the same reasons. Biodiesel made on a minute scale from recycled veggie oil, if made correctly, makes sense for the individual making and using it, but it can't be expanded to a viable commercial scale because there simply isn't enough used veggie oil to supply it. Germany has discovered that it is using more energy and generating more CO2 to make biodiesel than it is "saving" by doing so.
It seems to me that energy extracted from inexhaustible sources like gravity (hydro), wind, solar radiation, geothermal heat, tidal flow and ocean waves offer the least environmental disruption and destruction of known sources.
I would include nuclear fission in that list if it didn't create a monumental waste disposal problem.
Nuclear fusion is yet to be controlled, but offers a sort of pie in the sky (pie in the sky, get it? The sun) energy source.
So far, we know how to extract energy from all of those sources and make electricity. We still need to find how to store that electricity in large amounts in small, lightweight "containers".
Electricity (and maybe hydrogen electrolysis) is the future replacement for crude oil based fuels.
Here the production of biodiesel out of Rapeseed oil, as you said, has cost more energy and generates more CO2 to make, than it is "saving" by doing so.
It is also so highly subsidized that farmers are producing it instead of food crops, although more is produced than can be sold, due to the higher cost, even with the artificial price limits and tax breaks for those using it.
If you drive the county side here you would think it is the only crop still grown in Germany.
Rapeseed is an excellent source for producing biodiesel, as far as grown & cultivated oil sources are concerned when compared to alternatives such as soybean. But with the prices being so high for it, and the economy so bad, normal people just can't afford it.
There comes a point where they just say "bio" for the family, or “bio” for the car. Thank you, we'll feed the family.
They protest wind energy as eye & noise pollution. My former partner was half owner of several large wind parks (the largest in the State where we live) and they got regular death threats from those living near them.
Sun is a problem here, just not enough of it to commercially justify solar on a large scale. On small scale projects you would have to wait decades for it to break even with the technology available. Germany has a city (I forget the name) that promised to go solar decades ago, and after all this time can only claim 3% percent energy comes from solar.
They refuse to use the rivers here for Hydro electric power generation, and the projects on the coast with tidal powers as a source have received court battles tying up all hope of this every being investigated on a large scale.
As the rest of Europe is planning new Nuclear plants, like it or not, Germany is still trying to completely phase them out.
Geothermal sources don't exist here.
That leaves Germany with it's only local natural source of energy, coal. They are now considering reopening old long ago closed mines. We live near one such coal fired electric plant and they don't make for pleasent neighbors, even with all the newest German technology installed. We have a constant supply of black sticky dust stuff on everything.
Germans, like so many of us, tend to be of the "renewable resources for everybody else", but "not for me", and "not in my back yard".
