Biofuel topic as an emerging technology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Biofuel topic as an emerging technology - Essay Example The engineers have stated that they were able to achieve a much higher percentage of energy conversion than what could normal be obtained through natural photosynthesis. This is because the foam does not need to divert some of its energy to help maintain life. It can simply take all of the energy and convert it in larger quantities because of this sole reason. This discovery is amazing and could lead to less crops being destroyed in order to produce biofuels. It will be interesting to see what steps the engineers take to make this production more feasible for a larger scale operation. Body The transformation of unwanted plant material called "biomass" (wood chips, rice husks, grass) into usable fuel is a hot area of scientific research. A recent proposal by Purdue scientists tries to overcome one of the most fundamental problems with so-called biofuel: the high cost of transporting the starting material. If you’re going to take a substance such as wood chips or straw and conve rt it into a usable fuel, you quickly find that it takes a large amount of the biomass in order to make just a small amount of fuel. The scientific description is that biomass has a low energy density. So, trying to transport the huge amount of necessary biomass to a central processing plant becomes prohibitively expensive; you use more fuel transporting the wood chips than you obtain from the fuel transformation process. The Department of Chemical Engineering at Purdue has recently published two scientific articles which attack this problem on a very logical level. Instead of transporting the crude biomass in a bulk, a small portion of the material is used as a hydrogen source which transforms the remaining biomass into a liquid fuel. This intermediate fuel is much higher in energy density and is much less expensive to transport to a central plant for final processing. imagine that you are an orange juice company, looking to reduce your transportation costs. If, instead of transpo rting crates of orange fruits to your factory, you instead transported a crude pulp/juice mixture (produced on site in the orange fields), you could save a lot of money on fuel costs. You reduce the amount of material that you have to ship, and the material that you do transport is more enriched in the part of the orange that you’re interested in. This new method as applied to biofuel is nicknamed "H2Bioil", and uses solar power to split water in the biomass into hydrogen and oxygen. The business of trying to find alternate ways for biofuel production is a profitable one. Thousands of companies are currently racing one another to come up with alternatives to our current biofuel options. Companies are trying to create this fuel through chemical processes that extract sugars from the algae. Perhaps this will lead to more tests being conducted on how to generate energy from different kinds minus using chemicals to get it done. It's important that people realize not only what bio fuels are, but also realize their limitations in terms of the scope of what they can accomplish. A biofuel is any chemical derived from natural foodstocks such as corn or maize which can be burned to provide useful energy. With exposure to the right processing conditions and