BrevardBioDiesel Blog

While biodiesel is cleaner on an air pollutants basis than traditional diesel, that is not the case for what we are now using, ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD). Your data is out of date. When you compare ULSD and biodiesel, there is not a benefit on the traditional air pollutants side.

On climate, you are stuck in the traditional assessment of biofuels through lifecycle GHG analysis. While one gallon of biodiesel might be better than petroleum based diesel, when we institute a policy to require large amounts of biodiesel, the market takes over and bad things can (and do) happen. The market sees a value to producing crops for feedstocks. Farmers either pull crops out of production and replace with a with a biofuel feedstock or dedicate crops that were going to food or feed towards biofuel feedstock. The grain market though is very in-elastic and something has to fill the voids that the farmers meeting the demand have created. This means that we have to get more out of the land we already have or create new crop land. While some increased efficiency is possible, land conversion is inevitable with large biofuel mandates. Lifecycle analyses do not take into account this land conversion. When you cut down trees or convert grasslands to croplands you release GHG's and you loose the lands ability to sequester GHG's in the future. If you factor this land conversion in, biofuels including biodiesel will likely be bad for the climate. If you want to see what can happen when you mandate biodiesel use, check out biofuelwatch.org, a blog that looks at the impact the EU's biodiesel mandate is having around the world, especially in SE Asia.