Guzzling biofuels

I'm just buried in things I want to post, and I want to get to a summary of the contentious around the upcoming Copenhagen debacle (there is NO way any kind of useful climate change agreement is going to be reached), but I thought what I'd do today is simply sum up the status of biofuels. Now, I've thought that biofuels had a lot of potential ever since the "everything into oil" (thermal depolymerization) article in Discover a few years ago. I'm a nuke proponent -- hard to miss that -- but I realize that the transportation sector is going to be the hardest to crack, even with plug-in hybrids, BECAUSE of how difficult it's going to be to substantially increase the size of the nuclear slice of the energy pie.

For that reason I think biofuels have a lot of potential as a transportation fuel. Now, thermal depolymerization fell partly because the cheap feedstocks (waste chicken parts) turned out to be marketable elsewhere, more profitably. It's hard to imagine WHAT, but that's the case. So maybe thermal depolymerization isn't the answer. I posted yesterday about the potential for food recycling -- we throw away a lot of food, and that could be a feedstock. Then of course there's the ethanol conversion route; corn is not the way to go, but sugar cane (natch) and biomass, even biomass crops like switchgrass, could be the way to go, particularly if they can engineer the enzymes into efficient lignin digesters.

So anyhow, I think biofuels have promise. And all of that is a lead-in to an article about them.

Global biofuels growth to double by 2015

Note the part about India:

"Of note, if India's own projections were realized, it could outpace Brazil in ethanol production and exporting by 2015. Nonetheless, despite India's ethanol production expansion Hart projects that Brazil will remain the leading global biofuels exporter."

Now, getting into something I'm going to get into more this week, here's a preview of India's Copenhagen outlook:

India wants less 'evangelical' climate talks

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh renewed India's vows not to be the deal-breaker in Copenhagen but stood by the developing world's refusal of binding requirements on cutting emissions blamed for global warming.

"I would say the developed world should be less evangelical and I think the developing world should be less polemical as far as Copenhagen is concerned," Ramesh said on a visit to Washington.