Between 1906 and 2005 , intermediate global temperatures rose 1.0 to 1.7 degree Fahrenheit in both the Northern and southerly hemispheres , agree to a 2010 report by the Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ) . That may not seem like a significant climate shift , but once the ball-shaped thaw movement has started , it ’s unmanageable – if not impossible – to reverse .
Some climate experts prognosticate that the polar ice detonator will recede by 40 percent by 2050 . As the ice melts , it creates a feedback effect . Essentially , sunlight that would have been reflected by the ice is now absorbed by the oceans , accelerate the thaw process exponentially . As temperatures rise , more water vapor will enter the atmosphere , ensnare even more heat in the global glasshouse .
Carbon dioxide , the chief by-product of fossil fuel burning , is a potent greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere indefinitely . In the U.S. , the burn of ember for electricity ticker more than 2.4 billion metrical scores of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every twelvemonth , allot to the Energy Information Administration . And that ’s just electrical energy . What about car ? The average American rider car spits out 11,450 pounds ( 5,194 kilograms ) of carbon paper dioxide every year . There are 246 million car in the U.S.
To switch off down on carbon dioxide discharge , governments , car maker and public utility company companies have been seriously pursuing alternative energy generator . Among the leading contenders are biofuels – renewable , clean - sting fuels made from plant- and animal - base source materials like maize , soybeans , discarded veggie fossil oil or creature fat .
We hear a lot about biofuels and fossil fuel in the news , but sometimes the two terms can get entangle in our mind . Are fossil fuels really made from fogy ? Can a regular car fill up on biofuels ? Are there any clean - burning fossil fuels , like natural gas ? Keep reading to authorize up some of the confusion over biofuels and fossil fuels .
Biofuel Facts
A biofuel is any fuel source that ’s made from biological materials . The two most common kinds of biofuels mighty now are both gasoline option : ethyl alcohol and biodiesel .
Ethanolis ethyl alcoholic beverage ( C2H5OH ) . It ’s also know as texture alcohol because it ’s often made from the distillate of grain crop like maize or soybeans . Corn is the generator material for 90 percent of the ethyl alcohol grow in the U.S. , but any flora material – collectively called biomass – can be used to make ethanol : leaves , woodchips , wild grasses , even trees . Brazil , the creation ’s second - big fermentation alcohol manufacturer , makes its biofuel from sugarcane .
When used in cable car and trucks , ethanol is usually mixed with a piddling gasolene to improve fuel thriftiness . The result fuel is called E85 , denoting 85 per centum fermentation alcohol and 15 percent gaseous state . In 2007 , there were 5.5 million Flex Fuel Vehicles on the road in the U.S. that could run on E85 fuel . Unfortunately , there were only 1,208 E85 filling stations – less than 1 percent of the total filling station in America .
What if you ’re lucky enough to live near one of these grain alcohol stations ? Does that mean you ’ll get amazing fuel saving with zero emission ? Not quite . A gal of E85 ethanol contains 80,000 BTU of vitality compared with 124,800 BTU for the same amount of gasoline . That intend you would have to bribe 1.56 gallon of E85 for every congius of regular petrol . But it ’s chintzy , right ? Again , not quite . Technically , a gallon of E85 costs 19.9 percent less than petrol , but since you ’ll have to fill up more often , E85 terminate up costing you more .
But the honorable news is that E85 is importantly friendlier to the environs . Not only is E85 unclouded - burning – it produces 39 percent less carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) than regular gas – but it ’s really carbon inert . In other speech , the amount of CO2 emitted by the combustion of ethyl alcohol equals the amount of CO2 that the corn flora absorbed during its life . The U.S. currently produce 9.2 billion gallon of ethanol a year and consumes 9.6 billion congius .
Biodiesel is a biofuel made from plant- or brute - based blubber and can die hard in a regular diesel railway locomotive . In fact , Rudolf Diesel ’s original prototype engine ran on peanut crude oil . Biodiesel employ a chemical cognitive operation called transesterification to covert fats like vegetable oil and rendered animal fats into a clean - burning , biodegradable fuel .
Biodiesel packs nearly the same energy depicted object as regular diesel , but burns much , much cleaner . Pure biodiesel ( aka B100 ) produces 75 percent few emissions than unconstipated diesel . buy biodiesel is as cheap as gas , but if you’re able to obtain a donated author – like recycled fryer crude oil from a eating place – it ’s potentially liberal !
One downside to dodo fuels is that tilth that could be used for food product is instead used to spring up fuel . Another has to do with availability . For example , there are only 663 biodiesel pick stations in the U.S. and the country currently make only 700 million gallons a year . By line , there are more than 160,000 gasoline filling stations in the U.S. That ’s because fossil fuels – though detrimental to the environment – are bountiful and meretricious . Read more about the pros and cons of fossil fuel on the next page .
Fossil Fuel Facts
Fossil fuels are carbon paper - based zip sources like ember , oil and natural gas . The story of fossil fuels begins 300 to 400 million years ago – long before dinosaur roamed the Earth – when much of the planet was cover in thickly vegetated swamps and prehistorical seas . Over the millennia , the rotted remain of dead plant and sea creatures piled up on seafloors and swamp beds .
Eventually , these ancient wetland dried up and were covered with boneheaded aqueous layers of backbone , soil and rocks . In some cases , newfangled seas reappeared above them . The beat out down insistence of all of these sequential stratum altered the chemic composition of the plant and animal remains , creating thick sedimentation of carbon paper - rich ember , vegetable oil and innate gas . When fogy fuels are burned through burning , they discharge their atomic number 6 as heating system ( free energy ) and any impurities as emissions .
Fossil fuels are called nonrenewable energy sources , since it takes hundreds of million of years for the Earth to produce unexampled deposit of coal , oil and lifelike gas . According to the World Coal Institute , there is enough coal in the ground to last us 130 more age , while there are only enough fossil oil and natural throttle reserves to last another 42 and 60 year respectively . In line , biofuels are considered renewable energy source since corn , soya bean and other biomass can be develop indefinitely .
In the United States , 93 percent of the energy we take get along from fossil fuels . We burn them in the bod of gasoline and diesel fuel for motorcar , home heating plant oil , raw gas for cooking and high temperature , and coal for electrical energy . Americans consume fossil fuel at a remarkable rate :
Fossil fuels have a bun in the oven a compass of health and environmental risks of fossil fuels , but we use them hard because they are inexpensive and abundant . The U.S. is the world ’s large producer of coal , with mines in 26 of the 50 states . That ’s why over half the electricity in America is produce at ember - burn power plant . Oil is another comparatively cheap and plentiful trade good . If we desire to supervene upon the current nonrenewable gasoline supplying with a renewable biofuel likeethanol , American farmers would have to set by 675 million acres , or 71 percent of the country ’s full cropland , to produce Indian corn only for fuel .
