My biodiesel Bug
Some bumps in the road to saving the planet.
IT SEEMED, AT THE TIME, like such a good thing for the planet. In the winter of 2005, I turned in my red, gas-hungry Jeep Wrangler for a near-new, diesel-burning Volkswagen Beetle. Inspired by a number of pioneering friends, I would fill my little green slug Bug with a nontoxic, sweet- smelling fuel made from vegetable matter called biodiesel.
Unlike cars that run on straight, unprocessed vegetable oil, my BioBug required no mechanical conversion. Diesel fuel can be made out of any kind of grease: petroleum, lard, soybean oil, even, as one New Zealand powerboat racer proved two years ago, liposuctioned fat from human hindquarters. With a weatherproof shed and two 55-gallon drums, I turned my driveway into a home fueling station. And there, in full view of my greener-than-thou neighbors, I smugly filled my tank.
I never expected to save much money. Unless you brew it yourself with methane and lye, biodiesel is expensive. (This spring, it topped $5 a gallon.) I considered the cost worth the payoff. Biodiesel smells not like French fries but clean and nutty; if you spill a little on your skin, no worries -- unlike gas, it won't poison you. Diesel engines emit more smog-forming nitrogen oxides than do their gasoline equivalents, but on balance, biodiesel burns cleaner than petroleum diesel or gasoline. Plus, the biodiesel crops take carbon dioxide from the air as they grow and release the same amount back into the atmosphere when they burn. Biofuels are thus said to be "carbon-neutral" fuels.
Which doesn't mean, I soon learned, that they are perfect.
Just before this summer of $70 fill-ups began, a story broke that had a lot of biofuel enthusiasts quaking in their Earth Shoes. Biofuels, we were informed, were robbing the world of its food. Crop prices were soaring; hungry people were rioting in the streets of Haiti; fertilizer runoff streaming down the Mississippi had doubled the size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico -- all because farmers were racing to cash in on the bonanza by planting biofuel feedstock.
At first, I blamed corn. Corn-based ethanol, which benefits from congressional mandates and a generous production tax credit, takes almost as much energy to produce as it yields. An article in the journal Science last winter claimed that all the carbon dioxide emitted during its production makes corn-based ethanol more polluting than gasoline. Biodiesel made from soy or palm oil may hasten climate change too: Amazonian rain forests have been leveled to grow those crops to satisfy biofuel-crazy Europe.
