Ethanol isn't the goal

I've been pretty enthusiastic about ethanol on this blog - and I continue to be enthusiastic about processes like the plasma/FT hybrid I wrote about last month. But it's worth pointing out something that should be obvious - ethanol, in and of itself, isn't the goal. This is especially true of ethanol as it is made today. It is doubly true of methanol or ethanol derived from coal. The goal is sustainability, not ethanol or some other fuel. If ethanol can be made sustainably, then great. If not, then move on.

I mention this only as a way of recommending a blog - r-squared - which I found via The Ergosphere. Robert at r-squared is not nearly as optimistic about ethanol as I, and he's actually a chemical engineer, so he's certainly worth reading in this regard. However, Robert doesn't dispute the need for biofuels - he simply prefers algae-based biodiesel. Given some recent advances in selecting new algaes and catalysts, I certainly agree with him that it's an extremely promising technology.

The only hurdle in my mind to biodiesel is that nobody in North America actually drives diesel cars - well, almost nobody. However, the most recent development I've seen about biodiesel comes from a few months ago, where a type of algae that produced both biodiesel and ethanol was used to get pretty staggering levels of production - 15,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre! - meaning that we could get both types of fuel from the same process.

Anyway, algae-based biofuels are certainly another type of renewable we should be keeping our eyes on. I'm not competent to say which should be preferred, but we should also reject the fallacy that governments and markets can only do one thing at a time. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and all that.