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| BIODIESEL |
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Biodiesel is a clean, alternative fuel produced from renewable resources, such as vegetable oils. It can be used in existing diesel engines with little or no modification. Biodiesel is safe, environmentally friendly and an important step towards reducing global warming. Safety Biodiesel has fully completed the health effects testing requirements of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Its emissions have been shown to be substantially safer for humans than those of petroleum diesel: the use of biodiesel results in significant reductions of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter. Other harmful substances, including sulfur oxides, sulfates, and potential cancer causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are also dramatically reduced. Carbon neutrality A major environmental benefit of biodiesel over petroleum diesel is its intrinsic closed-loop carbon cycle. Burning biodiesel certainly does produce carbon dioxide, a chemical that is a major concern regarding global warming. However, the carbon dioxide released from biodiesel is exactly the same as that taken up by the agricultural crops from which the fuel was made. In other words, the plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, and this carbon dioxide is returned to the atmosphere when biodiesel is burned. There is therefore no additional carbon dioxide brought into the atmosphere: biodiesel is in essence a carbon-neutral fuel and does not directly contribute to global warming. Biodiesel's carbon neutrality clearly does not hold for petroleum diesel. Petroleum diesel, being a fossil fuel , takes carbon which has been sequestered away, locked up for millions of years, and injects that as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide which wasn't recently removed from the atmosphere, and thereby tips the natural balance of carbon and causes global warming. And it is for exactly this reason that biodiesel, even though it looks like and even burns like conventional petroleum diesel, is rapidly gaining popularity and may someday completely replace its fossil-based predecessor. References The National Biodiesel Board is a major source of information on biodiesel. Its FAQ expands on the topics discussed above and offers more technical details and biodiesel characteristics. |
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