Biofuels

Spanish version -- Versión en español

Why make biofuels?
Food or fuel?
How much fuel can we grow? How much land will it take?
Cutting fuel costs
Food miles
Car facts and transportation
Join the Biofuel mailing list

"How can you say you're environmentalists?" asked a local sceptic in Hong Kong. "Your Land Rovers aren't green at all -- one runs on leaded petrol and the other's a dirty diesel."

"Um," we said, thinking fast... "but if everyone had cars like ours, there'd be no need for roads."

In fact no car built today has such low manufacturing eco-costs as a Series Land Rover. And these old Land Rovers last and last: "My Land Rover is 41 years old and has prevented the need to build at least five replacements during that time." -- Series I owner, England, Land Rover Owners Internet mailing list, December 1999.

Land Rover stopped building the Series models in 1985. (See Project vehicles. See also The best car in the world.) The motor industry now produces 100,000 new vehicles a day worldwide. (See Car facts.)

But our critic had a point: the vehicles were green enough (even the blue one), but their fuel certainly wasn't. But we don't plan to pollute the atmosphere with dirty fossil-fuel exhaust fumes all the way from Hong Kong to Cape Town. There are better, cleaner, fuels -- and you can make them yourself!

Why make biofuels?

We had three main aims in learning to make biodiesel and ethanol:

Using renewable fuels for our journey and publicising them
As an environmental project for schools participating in Journey to Forever
As a means of improving energy self-reliance in rural communities.

Both biodiesel and ethanol are clean, grow-your-own fuels that can be made on-site in small villages from renewable, locally available resources, for the most part using simple equipment that a village blacksmith can make and maintain.

These fuels are among a wide range of sustainable rural energy options. Others are methane (biogas) digesters that turn livestock and crop wastes into cooking and heating gas, solar energy (see Solar box cookers), wood gas, charcoal and fuelwood (good fuels unless overharvesting destroys the trees themselves), wind power, water power.

Usually the "answer" is in a mix of technologies. Biofuels can be used to power small-scale farm and workshop machinery and electricity generators as well as local vehicles. Knowing how to make them provides a useful set of ecological questions in investigating local energy options which makes it more than worthwhile even if the final answer is "No".

For instance, should a crop such as peanuts be used to make fuel, or would the villagers be better off eating the peanuts? Or selling them? Or should they press them to make oil, for cooking or for selling, and feed the high-protein residue "cake" to livestock, which in turn they can either eat or sell, while using the livestock wastes (and the crop wastes) to make compost to renew the soil, or to generate biogas for cooking and heating? (The heat generated by the composting process can also be harnessed for heating.) Or should they grow a different crop altogether?

Should a grain crop be distilled to make ethanol fuel or should the villagers eat the grain? If they use the grain for livestock feed, it can be used for ethanol and still feed the livestock: the distillation process to produce ethanol converts the carbohydrates in the grain while leaving the protein. The protein residue is excellent stockfeed, which can be supplemented by forage crops which humans can't eat. This could mean improved utilization of the available resources.

This is the sort of question we'll have to find answers for in our work in rural villages. As always, it will be the villagers' views that decide the issue.

Foundation for Alternative Energy, Slovakia -- a good summary of the various ways to derive useful energy from biomass (34,000-word article):
http://www.seps.sk/zp/fond/dieret/biomass.html

Food or Fuel?

A common objection to biomass energy production is that it could divert agricultural production away from food crops in a hungry world -- even leading to mass starvation in the poor countries.

True or not? Not true: at best it's an oversimplification of a complex issue. It just doesn't work that way, and neither does hunger.

See: Food or Fuel?

How much fuel can we grow? How much land will it take?

Two very frequently asked questions.

Frequently given answers: "Not enough" and "Too much."

Are they the right answers?

Seeking to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap, there's widespread fascination with high-yielding oil crops, particularly oil-bearing algae, with oil palms running second.

It seems obvious that the highest-yielding crops will produce the most energy from the least amount of land.

But high yield is not the only factor in farming, and it may not always be the most important factor. It can make more sense for a farmer to grow a lower-yielding crop if it has more useful by-products or requires fewer inputs or less labour or it fixes more soil nitrogen for fertiliser or it fits a crop rotation better. Or if it fits an integrated on-farm biofuels production system better. The how-much-land estimates don't seem to include such things as integrated on-farm biofuels production systems. There are quite a lot of things they don't include.

Sustainable farming

Biofuels crops have to be grown, and there's a lot of common ground between growing sustainable fuel and growing food sustainably.

Large-scale industrialised farms claim to be the most efficient. They concentrate on growing high-yielding monocrops (only one crop) by mass-production methods with a lot of inputs, and they use a lot of fossil-fuel to do it.

A sustainable mixed farm can produce all its own fuel, with much or possibly all of it coming from crop by-products and waste products without any dedicated land use, and with very low input levels.

That sheds a different light on how much land is needed to grow "enough" biofuels: less land with sustainable farming, which also has much lower fossil-fuels inputs. Sustainable farming is the fastest-growing agricultural sector in many countries, millions of farmers worldwide are turning to sustainable methods.

Although sustainable farms require fewer inputs than "conventional" (factory-style) farms, yields and production are not lower. See for instance this message to the Biofuel mailing list from a large-scale organic farmer in the US, one of many:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg12485.html

See: Small farms

The case for organics -- Scientific studies and reports

City farming

Looking at it from a different angle, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation more than 15% of the world's food supply was produced by city farms in 1993. That was enough food for 900 million people, produced with few inputs other than urban wastes, and with the use of no farming land at all.

City farming is sweeping the world, in the industrialised countries as well as 3rd World countries. Many cities would have difficulty handling their wastes without the urban farms recycling them as livestock feed, compost and fertiliser.

Such an approach suits localised biofuels production very well, and it integrates well with city farming. For example, only about 10% of the waste vegetable oil (WVO) produced in the industrialised countries is collected, billions of gallons a year aren't collected. Apart from the waste oil produced by restaurants and food outlets and food processors, an estimated 1.5 million US gallons of grease and oil goes into the sewage system every year for every one million people in some US metropolitan areas. Extended nation-wide that's hundreds of millions of gallons wasted every year. US restaurants produce about 300 million US gallons of WVO a year, much of which ends up in landfills.

Like newspapers, bottles and aluminium cans, waste cooking oil won't be recycled effectively without locally based initiatives, it has to start at the source. Local biodiesel brewers around the world are now reclaiming millions of gallons of WVO and turning it into good, clean fuel.

Similarly, large amounts of fuel ethanol can be produced from city wastes by local micro-breweries, and the high-protein distillers mash by-product fed to city-farm livestock (or micro-livestock). Large amounts of biogas can be produced from wastes in backyard methane digesters for cooking and heating, and the sludge composted for use as fertiliser.

Could enough bio-energy be produced for 900 million people this way? Probably it could. "How much land will it take?" None.

Bio-regional energy -- India's Talukas

Here's another response to the "How much land" question, from the Biofuel mailing list:

"We did a study in India where we showed that it is possible to take care of energy needs completely by biomass and its various derivatives for a block of about 100 villages." -- Dr. Anil K. Rajvanshi, Director, Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI)

Here's Dr. Rajvanshi's study:

Microchips to Potato chips - Talukas can produce all, published as an editorial article in the Economic Times 24 May, 1998, Anil K. Rajvanshi, Director, Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI), Maharashtra, INDIA.
http://education.vsnl.com/nimbkar/taluka.html

Talukas can provide critical mass for India’s sustainable development, Anil K. Rajvanshi, Current Science, Vol. 82, No. 6, 25 March 2002
http://education.vsnl.com/nimbkar/criticalmass.html

India's food and energy self-sufficient Talukas are groupings of about 80-100 contiguous villages pooled together to achieve a critical mass economically. A Taluka can be thought of as a closed biomass and rainwater basin, with a combined population of about 200,000 people. There are thousands of them in India. One Taluka studied produced 100,000 tons a year of surplus agricultural residues available for biomass energy production. In conjunction with energy plantations and energy crops this could produce the energy equivalent of 30 million litres a year of petroleum products, filling local energy needs and creating 30,000 local jobs.

Dr. Rajvanshi's study became the basis for India's National Policy on Energy Self-sufficient Talukas in 1997 and is being implemented nation-wide by the Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources (MNES).

Meanwhile India's railways are planting oil-bearing jatropha curcas trees along the railway lines. That's a lot of jatropha curcas trees producing a lot of oil for fuel, again without using any farming land.

Negawatts

"Using existing technology we can save three fourths of all electricity used today. The best energy policy for the nation, for business, and for the environment is one that focuses on using electricity efficiently," says Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in the US.

"More efficient use is already America's biggest energy source -- not oil, gas, coal, or nuclear power. By 2000, reduced 'energy intensity' (compared with 1975) was providing 40 percent of all U.S. energy services. It was 73 percent greater than U.S. oil consumption, five times domestic oil production, three times total oil imports, and 13 times Persian Gulf oil imports. The lower intensity was mostly achieved by more productive use of energy (such as better-insulated houses, better-designed lights and motors, and cars that were safer, cleaner, more powerful, and got more miles per gallon), partly by shifts in the economic mix, and only slightly by behavioral change. Since 1996, saved energy has been the nation's fastest-growing major 'source.'" -- Amory B. Lovins

"Negawatts powerplant" energy efficiency programs can save large amounts of energy and large amounts of money. 2.1 jobs are created in energy efficiency/conservation in comparison to one new job for an equivalent amount of BTUs in new energy production.

From a message to the Biofuel mailing list:

"I remember canvassing the Orlando, Florida area attempting to generate public support for a 'negawatts powerplant' rather than Orlando Utilities Commission expanding Curtis Stanton I into Curtis Stanton II (both coal fired). The most conservative calculations were that a modest to robust energy efficiency program could forestall the need for Stanton II for at minimum 10 years, in turn saving the public literally hundreds of millions of dollars. (Mind you this is a publicly owned utility, with the supposed obligation to serve the public interests.)..."

For the rest of the message see: http://snipurl.com/iesa 'Energy Efficiency and "Stuff" in general' (the whole message thread is linked at the end of the page).

The Negawatt Revolution, Amory B. Lovins, The Conference Board Magazine, Vol. XXVII No. 9, September 1990, 232kb PDF.
http://www.rmi.org/images/other/Energy/E90-20_NegawattRevolution.pdf

Mobilizing Energy Solutions, Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, The American Prospect, Volume 13, Issue 2, January 28, 2002 -- Part 1:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/2/lovins-a.html
Part 2: Energy Forever
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/3/lovins-a.html

Energy Library -- articles and studies by Amory B. Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid171.php

Invisible farming

Industrial hemp is a high-yielding multi-purpose "fuel and fibre" crop that has great potential for biomass energy. Hemp yields four times as much biomass as a forest can yield. An acre of hemp yields 10 tons of biomass in four months, enough to make 1,000 gallons of methanol fuel, with about 300 lb of oil from the seed (about the same as soy).

Hemp is widely grown in many countries but not in the US, where it's illegal because of a stubborn confusion with the plant's cousin, the drug marijuana. Industrial hemp is the same species of plant but without the drug. In fact hemp contains another chemical (CBD) that actually blocks marijuana's drug effect -- hemp is not only not marijuana, it could be called "anti-marijuana".

The US previously acknowledged the distinction and hemp was widely grown there -- the US State Department still acknowledges the difference internationally. But domestically, growing hemp is banned in the US. In Europe it's subsidised, like oilseed rape and flax. Canada, Russia, Japan, China and dozens of other countries grow large quantities of hemp, while Americans pay $25 million a year for imported hemp fibre and oil products.

Meanwhile an estimated 32 million law-breaking Americans smoke marijuana, probably a lot more than that, and that's not counting Canada. Most of the drug is locally produced, not imported. We've no idea what acreage that represents, but it's obviously a major agricultural industry, and it's invisible. How can you hide a crop for 32 million people? It's produced with no extension agencies, no subsidies, no bureaucrats, no chemical corporations, no marketing boards, no Big Agriculture, and with no apparent use of farming land.

How would the Americans who claim there's not enough land to grow biofuels explain that? Could enough bio-energy for 32 million people also be produced that way, from harmless industrial hemp, tucked away out of view off the agricultural map and nobody even notices it?

Of course it's clandestine and hidden because the US marijuana growers are under pressure from the law, but on the other hand the whole human race is under much more pressure than that to find sustainable answers to its energy problems, and so far we're not being very imaginative about it.

However the illegal drug growers might be managing it, it's obvious that people estimating how much land it will take to grow enough biofuels aren't asking the right sorts of questions.

Hemp Biomass for Energy
http://www.fuelandfiber.com/Hemp4NRG/Hemp4NRG.htm

A different approach

Replacing fossil fuels with biofuels isn't the answer. Replacing fossil fuels isn't even an option -- current energy use, especially in the industrialised countries, is not sustainable anyway, whatever the energy source.

A very large portion of the energy we use is just wasted, and that's where to start, not with the 60 billion gallons of petroleum diesel and 120 billion gallons of gasoline the US consumes each year, not to mention the heating oil and the power supply.

A sustainable energy future requires great reductions in energy use, great improvements in energy efficiency, and decentralisation of supply to the local-economy level, along with the use of all ready-to-use renewable energy technologies in combination as local circumstances require.

But instead people chase the mirage of the highest biofuels crop yields in the hopes of finding the right answer to the wrong question.

The powers-that-be mostly toy with the problem and go right on hitting the good old massive daily fix of fossil-fuel like it's a narcotic.

In most of the industrialised countries biofuels are still treated more as an agricultural commodities issue than an energy issue, and the industrial farming lobby pulls the levers. Big Soy runs the National Biodiesel Board in the US, Big Corn the fuel ethanol business.

But growing supposedly clean green renewable and sustainable biofuels crops by means of Big Agriculture's unsustainable industrialised agriculture monocropping methods with their heavy dependence on fossil-fuel inputs is hardly the best way of replacing fossil fuels.

Once grown, the stuff undergoes the same insanities as the "food miles" fiasco, where food is transported thousands of unnecessary miles before it reaches consumers, with huge waste of energy and no good reason for it. Similarly, why waste energy trucking energy crops to a distant large-scale central processing unit and then waste even more energy trucking the finished fuel all the way back again, instead of processing it and using it right there where it was grown?

Small is beautiful

There are of course economies of scale in fossil-fuels production, but that's no more the case with biofuels production than it is with food, as we saw above with the example of city farms. The farms of the future are highly productive, low-input/high-output, integrated, mixed, sustainable farms, and they're small farms -- family farms, small and local. All over the world small farms are more efficient and productive than big farms and out-produce them, including the US. See: Small farms fit. As with food crops, so with fuel crops.

Also at the local level, the worldwide community of biofuels homebrewers have developed cheap, effective and safe small-scale production methods that produce high-quality fuel and that anyone can use. There are now many kinds of independent small-scale local operations producing and using millions and millions of gallons of biofuels a year, growing fast. Most of it goes right under the official radar, nobody calculates it, nobody has any clear idea of how much it is or of quite who these people are. But they're forming active networks of grassroots-level biofuels producers in many countries, and they have the potential to expand very quickly.

The possibilities for localised biofuels production are endless, but it's difficult to see them from the perspective of the dying era of cheap and abundant fossil fuels with it's top-down, centralised, capital-intensive approach, especially with energy production and supply: "How do you make money out of this small-scale stuff? It's bad for business!"

In fact it's very good for business -- local business, and that's good for everyone.

"Small-scale capitalism works out fine, but as scale increases the departure from real capitalism becomes more pronounced---profits are privatized, but costs are socialized. The attendant repair and maintenance are left to succeeding generations if possible, if not, to present low and middle income taxpayers," says Tvoivozhd, the Wise Old Man of the Homestead mailing list. Indeed so.

Coming off fossil-fuels doesn't have to be cataclysmic. More likely the real disasters will come from global warming rather than oil deprivation. The quaint idea that "life without oil" will inevitably mean a massive human "die-off" and for the survivors a return to the allegedly brutal and short lives of the Middle Ages etc etc just because of oil deprivation as some people claim is just nonsense, there's no more substance to it than the idea that there's not enough land to grow "enough" biofuels. We have everything we need to live rich and fruitful lives in a sustainable future in peace and harmony with the rest of the biosphere.

Don't expect to read more about such views of energy issues in The Wall Street Journal any time soon. What you might read there is that meanwhile 35 years have gone by since these issues first became apparent, fuel economy in the US is worse now than it was 20 years ago, and 35 unnecessary years' worth of greenhouse gases have been pumped into an ailing atmosphere.

Don't wait for governments or anyone else to solve these problems with the same kind of thinking that caused the problems in the first place. Do it yourself -- tend to your own waste of energy and of other scarce resources, shrink your eco-footprint, join a local network, start a network yourself. Make your own biofuel!

Cutting fuel costs

How to reduce the amount of transportation fuel you use, by Darryl McMahon of Econogics: "It's your planet. If you won't look after it, who will?"
http://www.econogics.com/en/savefuel.htm

Here's a start on what you can do to make a difference:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg54266.html

The US uses 3 times as much and Canada 4 times as much energy in their buildings as Sweden does, even allowing for climate corrections. "There is no conflict between comfort and energy saving in buildings. If you understand how the human body works and design your environment to suit Real People, large energy savings will be made..." See Hakan Falk's Energy Saving Now -- extensive resources on energy efficiency, biofuels, alternative energy technologies and more:
http://energysavingnow.com/

Cutting down waste -- where to start:
http://sustainablelists.org/pipermail/biofuel_sustainablelists.org/
2005-October/005691.html

Food miles

"We bought a basket of 20 fresh foods from the major retailers on one day last month and tracked the food miles it had clocked up. We found apples from America; pears from Argentina; fish from the Indian ocean; lettuce from Spain; tomatoes from Saudi Arabia; broccoli from Spain; baby carrots from South Africa; salad potatoes from Israel; sugar snap peas from Guatemala; asparagus from Peru, garden peas from South Africa; red wine from Chile; Brussels sprouts from Australia; prawns from Indonesia; chicken from Thailand; red peppers from Holland; grapes from Chile; strawberries from Spain and beef from Britain. Our total basket had travelled 100,943 miles." -- Miles and miles and miles: How far has your basket of food travelled? Guardian UK, Special reports, Saturday May 10, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,951962,00.html

"In 1997 we imported 126 million litres of liquid milk into the UK and exported 270 million litres of milk out of the UK. We imported 23,000 tonnes of milk powder into the UK and exported 153,000 tonnes out of the UK. We imported 115,000 tonnes of butter, and exported 67,000 tonnes of butter." -- Food Miles - Still on the Road to Ruin? -- Statistics and analysis; a review of local alternatives and recommendations for action. SUSTAIN: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming, 1999
http://www.sustainweb.org/publications/downloads/foodmiles_ruin.pdf

"Produce arriving by truck traveled an average distance of 1,518 miles to reach Chicago in 1998, a 22 percent increase over the 1,245 miles traveled in 1981." -- Food, Fuel, and Freeways: An Iowa perspective on how far food travels, fuel usage, and greenhouse gas emissions, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, June 2001
http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/ppp/index.htm

"Since 1978, the annual amount of food moved by heavy goods vehicles in the UK has increased by 23 percent with the average distance for each trip also up by 50 percent." -- Food Miles and Sustainability, Mae-Wan Ho and Rhea Gala, Institute of Science in Society, 21/09/05
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FMAS.php

"Policies are needed to minimize food import/export, to promote instead, national/regional food-sufficiency, and to reverse the concentration of food supply chains in favour of local shops and cooperatives run directly by farmers and consumers. In addition, there should be government subsidies and incentives for reducing carbon dioxide emissions on farms, and for farms and local communities to become energy self-sufficient in low or zero-emission renewables." -- Food Miles and Sustainability, Mae-Wan Ho and Rhea Gala, Institute of Science in Society, 21/09/05
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FMAS.php

"Bringing the food supply closer to home is one of the most effective and powerful strategies we can use to create positive changes in our health, in the environment, in our society, and on this planet." -- Bill Duesing, Old Solar Farm, raising certified organic vegetables,and Solar Farm Education, working on urban agriculture projects.
http://www.growbiointensive.org/

Car facts

From Grist Magazine
http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/counter/counter011900.stm

70 million motor vehicles were on the world's roads in 1950.
630 million motor vehicles were on the world's roads in 1994.
1 billion motor vehicles are expected to be on the world's roads by 2025, if the current growth rate continues.
50 million new cars roll off the assembly line each year -- 137,000 a day.
27 tons of waste are produced in the manufacture of the average new car.
11 million cars are junked annually in the US.
12,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted by the average car each year.
5% of a car's fuel can be wasted by underinflated tires.
2 billion gallons of gasoline could be saved annually if 65 million car owners kept their tires properly inflated.
85% of auto fuel is consumed just to overcome inertia and start the wheels turning.
2.5 times more emissions are generated by SUVs (Sports Untility Vehicles) and light trucks than by standard cars.
33,000 natural gas vehicles were in use in the US in 1993.
75,000 natural gas vehicles were in use in the US in 1998.

-- by Josh Sevin
Sources: World Resources Institute; Environmental Working Group; 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth; Amicus Journal; L.A. Times; U.S. Department of Transportation; Earth Communications Office; Amicus Journal; Wall Street Journal.

(Auto Free Ottawa)
Facts & Stats On Cars, from the Recycling Council of Ontario -- learn just how earth-unfriendly cars really are, the complete horror-story:
http://www.rco.on.ca/factsheet/fs_b02.html

Visit the Car Free Day Web site by @Car Free Day Consortium:
http://www.ecoplan.org/carfreeday/cf_index.htm

Average BTU consumed per passenger mile by mode of travel:

SUV: 4,591
Air: 4,123
Bus: 3,729
Car: 3,672
Train: 2,138

Source: US Bureau of Transportation Statistics
http://199.79.179.77/publications/nts/index.html

According to a 2004 US Transportation Research Board report, public transportation:

Reduces CO2 emissions by more than 7.4 million tons per year in the U.S.
Produces 95% less CO, at least 92% fewer VOCs, and nearly half as much CO2 and NOx for every passenger mile traveled than private vehicles

Jet fuel: 3000+ ppm Sulfur
Off-road diesel (US): 500+ ppm Sulfur
Regular on-road diesel (US): 15-500 ppm Sulfur
Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel: less than 15 ppm Sulfur
[Biodiesel: no sulfur]

-- From: Tim Castleman, Fuel and Fiber Company
http://fuelandfiber.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

Join the Biofuel mailing list

The Biofuel mailing list run by Journey to Forever is the biggest, busiest and fastest-growing alternative fuels mailing list on the Internet. An information-sharing resource for anyone who is making their own fuel or has an interest in biofuels. All aspects of biofuels and their use are covered -- biodiesel, ethanol, other alternative fuels, related technologies and issues, and energy issues in general. The list has a large and diverse global membership and has been at the forefront of small-scale biofuels development for more than five years.

Comment from a member: "I just want to say how important what you all are doing here is (I'm just an interested bystander). Closed-system fuel production, on a local or small regional scale, tied to local resources, using accessible technologies, and dependent on entrepreneurial innovation combined with open-source information exchange--it's AWESOME. Keep up the good work everyone, before the planet fries."

Another comment: "Some of the brightest biofuel brains in the world."

And another: "Your list contains some of the best information I have found on the Internet. The archives are great and that is where I spend most of my time acquiring knowledge. This information I believe vitally important NOW and am very happy it is here. Our future may just depend upon it. Now that is important."

Subscribe:
The Biofuel list welcomes anyone with a bona-fide interest in the subject. You're welcome to take part or to "lurk" in the background, just as you wish. The list does not welcome "SPAM" or "trolls". If you wish to subscribe, please send an email to the list administrators with a brief explanation (or not-so-brief, as you wish) of who you are, where in the world you live, what your interest is in biofuels and why you wish to join the list, and/or whatever other information you think is relevant.

Please note that the Biofuel list is not a newsletter service and not a "website", it is an interactive email discussion group posting from 20 to 50 messages a day or more. If that will "swamp your mailbox", please read this message:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg21651.html
Once they've joined the list, members can also select the "Daily Digest" option to receive one or more composite messages containing all the day's messages.

Biofuel list administrators' address: listadmin@journeytoforever.org

Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives -- 50,000 entries from discussions by biofuellers all over the world, a treasure trove of information on all aspects of biofuels:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/

The Biofuel list really helps biofuellers. A typical example: list member Jack Kenworthy of the Cape Eleuthera Island School in the Bahamas joined the list in November 2002 as a novice. List members helped him learn how to make biodiesel from scratch, helped him solve problems he encountered, then helped him design and build a processor. Nine months after joining he wrote to the list: "Hey All -- just thought I would let you know that I just received my results from the ASTM tests [the US ASTM D-6751 biodiesel standard] and we passed all categories. Just another good example of a homebrewer in a remote setting (Bahamas) making spec-grade biofuel! Thanks! -- Jack"

"In the four short months that I've been reading and learning from the Biofuel list, I have come to value greatly the breadth and depth of knowledge of its members, not to mention its moderator. For this I thank you all. I just successfully completed my first test batch, have begun gathering bits with which to build my processor, and I stand quite bouyed with the promise of a home-brewed, non-petrol future for my beloved Volkswagen. Cheers to you, JtF!"
-- Sean Michael Dargan, Singer/Songwriter/Biodieseler
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/smdargan2

"With your help I made my dream possible. I received my MSc in Environmental Engineering, and my diploma is titled: "Process development for biodiesel production from waste edible oils and quality control of the produced alternative fuel." My achievement however which I am really proud of is that I received three awards and two grants at the national level (Greece), and I am waiting for another one. Thank you, you are all in my heart."
-- Stelios Terzakis, Biofuel list, 24 Aug 2005

Biofuels
En español -- Biocombustibles, biodiesel
Biofuels Library
Biofuels supplies and suppliers

Biodiesel
Make your own biodiesel
Mike Pelly's recipe
Two-stage biodiesel process
FOOLPROOF biodiesel process
Biodiesel processors
Biodiesel in Hong Kong
Nitrogen Oxide emissions
Glycerine
Biodiesel resources on the Web
Do diesels have a future?
Vegetable oil yields and characteristics
Washing
Biodiesel and your vehicle
Food or fuel?
Straight vegetable oil as diesel fuel

Ethanol
Ethanol resources on the Web
Is ethanol energy-efficient?

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