In this age of pollution and energy source deficit, there are many benefits of bio-fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. The first good characteristic of biofuel is this that these fuels are obtained from agricultural crops, they are renewable–and our own farmers typically produce them domestically, decreasing our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil. Moreover ethanol and biodiesel discharge less harsh pollution emissions than petroleum-based gasoline and diesel. They also do not add to global warming, as they only discharge back the carbon dioxide (CO2) to the environment that their source plants absorbed out of the atmosphere.
Advantages of Biofuel
Apart from the fact that bio fuels help us to keep the environment clean, they also help us to use the resources provided by nature in an effective way. They reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, which are fast depleting. As stated above they are not increasing the pollution level any more since they produce very less carbon dioxide than other fuels. The emission of other harmful gases, like carbon monoxide and sulfur is comparatively lesser. Biofuel come across as high quality fuels and can be used within the kind of infrastructure we now have without much up gradation or improvement. They also support the agricultural community of the world and contribute in agricultural development.
Biofuel are considered as potential substitutes for non-renewable sources of energy though are not really readily available like other renewable sources of energy like solar energy, wind energy or water or hydro energy for that matter. While for all the forms of energies, biofuel are not at all difficult for people to transition to without special apparatus or a change in the model of vehicle or home heating infrastructure, it can just be filled in the existing car, truck or home oil tank but if gasoline has to be replaced with ethanol then a "flex-fuel" model is a must-have that can run on either fuel. In other cases a vehicle would run as smoothly on a bio-diesel as on a regular diesel.
Disadvantages of Biofuel
The advantages do convince us that biofuel can at last replace the all powerful fossil fuels and we are compelled to think that governments, across the world should encourage the production and use of bio-fuels since it considerably decreases the use of fossil fuels, the umbrella term would be non-renewable sources of energy like coal and petroleum; though some critics are of the opinion that it is absolutely unethical to use food as the source of energy and environmentalists also say that use of biofuel can create other kinds of environmental problems and can emit other kinds of greenhouse gases. Therefore the production of biofuel is becoming a bigger challenge everyday since there is an upward rise in the need of forests as well. Statistically to produce just five percent of the total diesel consumption of United States, approximately sixty percent of the crops would have to be diverted towards the production of diesel.
In fact there are a few questions regarding the production of biofuel since it seems they actually require more energy than they have the ability to generate. So energy given to the production of energy and then the energy utilized to convert the crops into biofuel just doesn’t add up to the energy it actually it actually produces back. Therefore at the end of the day there is no conservation of energy and there is evidently no benefit in replacing liquid fuel with biofuel.
Though we all know the pros and cons of liquid fuel yet it is a mindset that needs to be changed and which is going to take time. There is no jury-rigged expedient for weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels and start using biofuel one fine morning though we can hope that in the future we might use a combination of sources, that is, from wind and ocean currents to hydrogen, solar and biofuel meeting our energy needs. The bottom line still remains the same that we must reduce our consumption, not just find replacements because if we do not reduce consumption we would end up exhausting any and every source of energy. Hence the best alternative is to conserve fuel…