Re: biocoal

Unfortunately, if your renewable fuels come directly from existing crop stocks, the price of that particular crop is driven up. If that crop is a food crop (like corn), food prices are driven up. If that crop is lumber, lumber prices are driven up. All of this is bad for the average Joe (or the starving child in Africa).

If you are going to produce a biofuel, it needs to come from waste or processing byproducts that would normally be discarded or land-filled. Otherwise, the unintended effects of biofuel production create hardship for the people who least can afford it.

Another case where "sustainability" and full economic impacts are ignored. If you are trying to innovate and create/harvest new energy sources, you need to consider the entire cycle. Any kind of extraction of energy from the environment has an impact, the question is can the impact be successfully managed? This is not just a problem for man. Most successful cycles in nature operate on negative feedback, which tends to bring systems into a sustainable equilibrium.

Never Mind..... The engineer in me is getting tired....

Scott