Human beings began the use of biomass for energy when our ancestors have learned about fire and how to use it particularly in cooking food. Biomass is any natural thing that has been grown or has lived, excluding fossil fuels such as coal, oil, natural gas and many more. Biomass can be in the form of wood, straw, biological wastes, waste paper, organic wastes from food processing, livestock farming and so many others. Biomass can be utilized to produce energy. These can be burned, agitated and absorbed to provide energy. All of these contain solar energy which combined into their carbon chemistry while they were still living. And that energy can be liberated for human beings’ use without adding up to the carbon dioxide burden (global warming problem) on our planet as long as we continuously plant, breed, and grow sources of biological mass or biomass.
Moreover, biomass can be grown as a crop for fuel use. If it has to be grown, it needs to be able to grow fast with little watering or fertilizer requirement and it has to be of high calorific value. However, it is not a wise idea to rely from these sources to produce biomass for fuel use because most lands are used for food productions. An increase in biomass production will mean decrease in food production. There has to be some other sources where we can obtain biological mass. Biomass can come in the form of biological wastes. Since the whole world produces so many wastes which we even finding it hard to properly dispose off, why not use it for fuel use to make it useful.
Nowadays, people are being trained to separate their wastes into biodegradable and non-biodegradable. Biomass can be segregated at source by the public by disseminating information through several mediums such as advertisements in televisions, announcements in newspapers and the like. Garbage collections have now a separate collection for biological wastes, including food wastes. Food wastes have the highest heat produce when burnt or digested, and they comprise between 15% and 25% of all household (domestic) waste by weight.
Unlike using fossil fuels to produce energy, biomass is a much less harmful to mankind and to our precious earth. Even if biomass fuels are readily available, people all over the world are hesitant to use it especially that most of it came from the biological wastes of the whole world. They feel that it is not safe for mankind and the earth. They may have adverse effects on our environment but if we will compare it with massive use of fossil fuels, the adverse effects of using biomass fuel are much less than that of using fossil fuels.
Bioethanol fuel is supposed to be the great alternative to fossil fuel bases gas and diesel. Many are praising its benefits and talk about all the good properties it has. This is true, but before making something out to be so wonderful it is also important to look at the other side of things and then compare them both. Only by weighing both the pros and cons will you be able to determine if bioethanol is all that it’s cracked up to be.
The biggest advantage to bioethanol is that it is made with resources that are renewable. This means that the supply is never-ending and once used more of the same resources can be harvested. This is so easy to do because biotethanol is made from recently dead biological materials or in other words, plants. There are tow kinds of crop types that are suitable for processing into ethyl alcohol which is nothing other than ethanol. It is referred to as bioethanol because it is based on biological materials and is a cleaner source of energy.
The crops that can be used as sources of bioethanol are all easy to grow inexpensive to buy and cultivate and are readily available in almost every country because of the diversity of plants that can be used for this purpose. The crops have to have high amounts of starch, sugar or vegetable oil. Commonly used plants are rapeseeds, peanuts, sugar cane, sugar beet, sweet sorghum, jatropha, oil palm, soybeans and corn. More recently plants with cellulose have shown promising results and bioethanol has already been made with switchgrass, but this is still in the testing phase.
Greenhouse gases and environmental pollution are other big problems linked to the use of fossil fuel gas and diesel used in vehicles or heating systems. Here bioethanol also has a big benefit. It reduces the amount of damaging greenhouse gases that the vehicle emissions contain. There is also less pollution and bioethanol fuels also degrade quickly and completely. This means that if it ends up on the land or water it will completely degrade and leave behind no traces that could ruin an ecosystem, something that has often happened if fossil fuel based gas or diesel spills or leaks out.
An engine that uses bioethanol actually needs around fifty percent more of the fuel than a standard fossil fuel combusting engine. This is first seen as a negative aspect, but once again bioethanol prevails. Even though more is burned, the bioethanol engines have increased power and get more distance for the amount which means they are more fuel efficient. Basically, a larger tank is required for bioethanol fuel but you will still get more mileage per gallon and will waste less energy overall.
