Search
Close this search box.

The biofuel boom was doomed from the start

https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/the-biofuel-boom-was-doomed-from-the-start/

The biofuel boom was doomed from the start
Is this article about energy?

That’s the verdict of OilPrice.com. Climate catastrophists seem more interested in other supposed panaceas these days.
– – –
Why haven’t biofuels taken off? For years they have been touted as the fuel of the future, with high-profile commercial aircraft making headlines for pioneering all-biofuel international flights and promising a greener future for air travel.

The first transatlantic flight powered solely by biofuel, a Gulfstream G450 owned by Honeywell International Inc., took place nearly a decade ago, in 2011, and was lauded as a harbinger of green jet fuel for all.

At that time, Honeywell Vice President Jim Rekoske told the world, “We’re ready to go to commercial scale and commercial use.”

But now, nine years later, the biofuel revolution that we were promised, both in the air and on our highways, is nowhere to be seen.

As of 2020, biofuels account for a piddling amount of the global jet fuel mix, clocking in at less than .1 percent in 2018 according to data from the International Energy Agency. Even though biofuel consumption is still rising, the acceleration is comically slow.

“In the U.S., the federal Energy Information Administration projects that the consumption of all biofuels will rise from 7.3 percent of total fuel consumption in 2019 to just 9 percent in 2040,” reports Bloomberg Green, and that’s only if oil prices fail to recover. “Even if petroleum prices skyrocket, biofuel consumption is predicted to increase to just 13.5% by 2050.”

Despite all of their promise and the flood of headlines declaring that biofuels were going to be a big part of how we get around going forward, global investors just haven’t gotten behind biofuels.

“Global investment in biofuel production capacity, meanwhile, plunged from $22.9 billion in 2007 to $500 million in 2019,” Bloomberg Green reports using data from BloombergNEF. “That has significant implications for decarbonizing transportation, which is key to keeping global average temperature rise to 1.5C to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.”

Continued here.

Share: