First of all biofuel is a fuel produced from green plants with high oil content such as soybeans, palms, algae etc that can produce an oil for the conversion to biofuel.
But why is the world is not producing much biofuels? There are so many reasons for this, which I grouped them in to three. These are economical reasons, land for food reasons and political reasons.
- Economical Reasons: to set up a biofuel manufacturing unit requires a lot of financial out put. Most of the money goes on the cost involved with energy especially with centrifugation. For large scale setup the total cost could reach up to two hundred million USD. But this does not mean all the cost come from only centrifugation. There are also other huge costs that involves with the cultivation of oil crops such as soybeans to produce biofuel.
- Land for food reasons: production of biofuel from vegetable oil crops require a very huge land, a land which is very valuable for food crop production. The world population have increased and so do the need of a land to produce enough food. Most of the third world countries do not have enough food to feed their people. But there is a bright side on this gloom. For simplicity let us divide the oil producing green plants in to two the first are oil crops and the second are microalgae. The oil content of the oil crops such as soybeans and palms is very low as compared to that of microalgae, and very huge hectares of land is required to produce biodiesel from oil crops than from microalgae. If biodiesel is produced from microalgae the area of the land needed will reduce by up to 80% as compared to the area of land needed to produce biodiesel from even the top producers of oil crops such as soybeans.
- Political Reasons: biodiesel production from microalgae have very huge potential because microalgae have high oil content, they require lesser area of land, they can grow very easily and they are environmentally friendly. But their are forces behind that do not want the success of biodiesel production from microalgae and even from the oil crops. These forces have a huge financial and political ability to suppress the development of biodiesel production. These forces are the giant oil drilling companies. They persuade politicians, policy makers and financial groups not to grant research budgets to the biodiesel production sector. The oil giants suppress the biodiesel sector for fear of losing their profit.
