Seven Generational Ruminations

This is the latest of a series of announcements related to biofuels that have been taking place in the country in the last year, and specially after the launch of a biodiesel law by Argentine government and the US president George Bush’s visit to the region (in which he signed an agreement to promote a market for ethanol with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva).

...Leaving the most radical speeches behind, we thought worth mentioning some excerpts from a document by Engineer Enrique Mario Martinez, president of the Argentine National Institute for Industrial Technology (a well known investigation institution), who highlights issues like the low yield of corn-based biodiesel, the different impacts in the environment between biodiesel and bioethanol, and the big oil companies interests in biodiesel mixed with petrol.

One of the drawbacks Martinez -and many professionals- questions is corn biodiesel, since the amount of energy required to plant, fertilize, harvest and process the grains until their final fuel form is almost the same or less than the energy obtained in biodiesel.