Has electric killed off biofuels?

[dayglo jim]

Sort of following on from various threads...

Are biofuels a dead end? Is electric the only way to go?

I'm not an engineer but it seems me that it would involve less time/cost/tooling to modify an ICE bike to take biofuel (if any adjustment was needed). Could there be a revival for two strokes?

[The Spin Doctor]

Porsche are producing synthetic 'e-fuels'. Not bio-fuel but there's no reason you couldn't use bio-fuels to power the e-fuel plant.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/indu ... fuels-2022

[mangocrazy]

If by bio-fuels you mean ethanol, I sincerely hope so. Growing crops that could be used to feed people but instead turning it into fuel is a perversion and needs to stop. If the rush to electric means that bio-fuels wither and die, at least it will have served one good purpose.

[Asian Boss]

I'm not an expert but biofuel might be part of a workable interim solution.

I think all forecourt fuel is up to 7/10% bio these days. Under the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation.

It sounds small but there is no silver bullet; just a range of measures which could work effectively together.

[demographic]

IIRC diesel is currently B7 where I fill up.
Pretty sure the biodiesel is actually cleaner burning than the normal petrochemical stuff.

[Mr. Dazzle]

The trouble with synthetic fuels is that they don't necessarily reduce CO2...they can, but it depends what you feed the process with.

BioFuels take CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel via photosynthesis (OK so there are a few steps in between!) so they're carbon neutral. Synthetic fuels can use all sorts of feeds including but not limited to biological sources. You can make synthetic fuels with coal for example.

[dayglo jim]

I'd like to think both are still viable routes.

I do agree about crops should be grown for eating but with a lot of agricultural land being turned over for solar farms I'd hope there could be an option for some crop, maybe not food grade, could be grown alongside covering both bases. A friend of mine, in Italy, regularly moans that the olive groves given over for solar have removed the root systems which tied the soil together increasing the chances of landslides (they get a lot of tremors as well heavier rains).

[demographic]

I reckon I ran my Transit on legal biodiesel for thousands of miles.
It was processed from used vegetable cooking oil, sometimes smelled like donuts, like a chippy, or a chinese restaurant. Once driving home one of the guys phoned me to say my van was making him hungry.
Seemed like each batch was different but it ran just fine.
I'm not entirely sure what would have happened to that waste vegetable oil if it wasn't powering my Transit but it wasn't grown specifically to be used as vehicle fuel so erm... <shrug>.

[Mr. Dazzle]

The (further) touble with bio fueled ICEs is that they're way less energy efficient than electric vehciles.

Plants only turn a couple of percent if the sunlight that falls onto them into useful energy. A piston engine then only turns about a quarter of that into useful go.

Compare that to a solar plant which might be 10 or 20 percent efficient, then it powers an EV which is maybe 80% efficient all in.

So you can see from that than solar powered electric cars should use much less land area to get the power they need. Solar power is also quite land inefficient compared to other sources of electricity.