Plants : The Next Petroleum ?ENERGY

Plants : The Next Petroleum ?

ENERGY FROM PLANTS

Inventors of early automobiles like Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel in the late 1800s and early 1900s expected that the engines of their cars would run on fuels derived from plants, but then cheap petroleum became popular. So the cars that were used by the general public ran on gas.
Nowadays, with rising oil prices and growing ecological awareness, biofuels are more and more in demand and will be replacing petroleum as a source of power for cars, trucks, and aircraft in the future. Biofuels are made from plants and vegetable oils and other things that grow in nature. So they are renewable sources of energy.
Biofuels produce less carbon dioxide than petroleum fuels, and therefore they do not contribute as much to global warming. They also produce fewer toxins, which contribute to respiratory diseases in people in many cities. While nature takes billions of years to make oil,biofuel in limited only by growth rates of plants and the availability of farmland. Biodiesel and ethanol are two types of biofuels.

BIODIESEL

Biodiesel is a fuel that is made from materials such as vegetable oils, animal fats, and waste matter. In the case of waste matter, a year’s worth of Europe’s used cooking oil could produce more than a billion liters of biodiesel fuel. In order to convert starchy and oily plants like repeseed and soybean fats into biodiesel, they have to be heated. After processing, unlike regular vegetable oil, biodiesel has combustible properties very similar to petroleum diesel, and can replace it in most cases. Biodiesel is a good possibility to replace fossil fuels as the world’s primary energy source for vehicles. There are two reasons for this : biodiesel can be used in current car engines, and it can be transported and sold using existing infrastructures.

ETHANOL

Ethanol, also known as grain alcohol, is produced from starchy grains like corn or from sugarcane. It can be used by itself or added to gasoline. Ethanol cuts down on polluting emissions but it produces less energy per liter than gasoline. However, the cost of the fuel is as little as half the cost of gasoline in countries like Brazil, which is the world’s biggest ethanol producer. In Brazil, the fuel can be found at every service station from downtown Rio de Janeiro to the remote Amazon region.

FOOD OR FUEL?

Although the advantages of renewable nonpolluting fuels are clear, there are many who object to their use as an alternative source of energy. They say that growing plants for fuel production could divert agricultural production away from growing crops for food in a hungry world, and less food could lead to more starvation in poor countries.