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Before the advent of plentiful, low-cost Middle Eastern petroleum in the years following World War I, U.S. motor vehicles burned a variety of locally produced biomass fuels. It was in order to improve and standardize the fuel supply for his new Model T, that Henry Ford built the first industrial scale ethanol fermentation plant in 1908 in Atchison, Kansas. While Ford campaigned to make ethanol the universal motor vehicle fuel, in Europe Rudolph Diesel was developing a new engine capable of burning peanut, rapeseed and other virgin vegetable oils. He predicted that it would be of great benefit to farmers and would transform the economies of agricultural nations.
Today, with increasingly expensive and less secure petroleum supplies, and mounting evidence of the link between vehicle emissions, global warming and climate change, biofuels are again at the forefront of the nation’s agenda. More than 5 billion gallons of fuel ethanol were produced in the U.S. in 2006, along with 250 million gallons of biodiesel. Biofuels have particular importance today as technologies for reducing pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. Corn, soy and other growing biomass crops remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and emit less carbon dioxide from the tailpipe during combustion. At present most production and transport of biofuels is powered by fossil fuels, but these emissions too could be reduced as more biofuels and biopower systems are applied to farming, production and transport of biofuels.
Current biofuels research and development primarily focuses in two areas. The first is Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), a cradle to grave evaluation of the energy and environmental costs and benefits of specific biofuels and production technologies, both in comparison with each other, and with fossil fuels. One gallon of biofuel may contain more or less energy than a gallon of another biofuel, or a gallon of gasoline, as the following table of energy equivalents illustrates.
The second focuses on increasing the production efficiencies and output of biofuels through research on production technologies. Ethanol production often requires different processing and fermentation technologies for each biomass feedstock used, with the result that the technology research is closely linked with efforts to diversify ethanol biomass sources using new crops such as sugar beets, sugar cane, and cellulose from prairie grasses, fast growing trees, and agricultural and urban wastes. Biodiesel is currently produced from oilseed crops and waste fats and greases by a relatively simple conversion process. Some new sources of biodiesel, such as aquatic algae, may require different production technologies.