West Sacramento Gets Biofuel Production Plant
Primafuel, a company in the business of producing zero-carbon fuels, will build a 60 million gallon biodesel manufacturing plant in West Sacramento at the North Terminal facility. Funds for the plant come from a $164,000 grant from the California Air Resources Board.
The World Economic Forum recently named Primafuel a 2008 Technology Pioneer for innovative approach to biofuels production and distribution infrastructure.
Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive
Source: SN&R
Comments
This is a tragic mistake. The primary source of biodiesel is oil palms, which, along with other crops, are being planted at the expense of rainforest. Demand for biodiesel, created artificially by European carbon offset funds, is today the single biggest driver in ongoing tropical deforestation - primarily for bioethanol crops in the Americas, primarily for biodiesel in Asia, and a lot of both in Africa.
The notion that biodiesel is "carbon neutral" is unfounded. The amount of CO2 released during the destruction of rainforest canopy as well as the drying out of rainforest wetland can never be recovered through harvesting and burning biofuel crops where forest once stood. An equally or more important factor driving global warming, the thermal impact of losing reflective cloud cover which forms over equatorial forests, but doesn't form over biofuel plantations.
Other factors that should be considered are the heartbreaking effects biofuel plantations are having on wilderness and wildlife - the destruction of Orangutan habitat in Borneo is one of many eggregious examples. And the labor conditions on these plantations is deplorable - turning populations into field hands so we can drive around is not economic progress.
We would be far better off developing and burning the oil sands of Athabasca and the Orinoco Basin, a combined area of only 75,000 square miles. There are 2.0 TRILLION barrels of recoverable oil in those regions - and if we ripped out the remaining 3.0 million square miles of rainforest to grow biofuel, even at 5,000 BBLs per square mile per year, it would not begin to replace our demand for petroleum.
Sacramento's politicians and the public employee unions who influence them ought to be ashamed of themselves - but that's nothing new.
Posted by: Ed Ring | January 10, 2008 7:04 PM
Hi,
I represent Primafuel, and I wanted to make a small correction: the size of the California Air Resources Board grant is $640,000. Primafuel, a technology-neutral biofuels company, is committed to examining the entire fuel supply chain in our quest for low-carbon fuels.
Thanks,
Posted by: Doug Heckman | January 10, 2008 8:47 PM