Of all the alternative fuels being developed the best option may well be biodiesel. The advantages that it offers are significant but the biggest is the fact that it can be used without the requirement to build a whole bunch of infrastructure or get everybody to buy a new car with a new type of engine. Biodiesel can be sold right at the regular gas station and it can’t be used in a standard diesel engine with no effect on performance. With all of the advantages that biodiesel offers it should be the obvious choice for our energy needs. However for a number of reasons this hasn’t happened.

Biodiesel is made using vegetable or animal fats instead of petroleum oil. Other than that it works just like any other diesel. You can put it into any vehicle with a diesel engine and it will run just fine. The only snag encountered so far is that it doesn’t work well at low temperatures. This can usually be solved by mixing some antifreeze with the biodiesel. The advantages of biodiesel are many, it produces no green house gasses when it is burned, it is a renewable resource and it allows us to meet our energy needs without having to import oil.

The major downside of biodiesel and the thing that has prevented it from being used more widely is getting enough of it. Early biodiesel was made using the waste oil from restaurants and meat production. This was an efficient means of obtaining the oil at a low cost but it is hardly a practical solution for large scale production. The goal of using only waste oil to meet our energy needs is clearly not going to happen. That means another source of the oil needs to be found. This is where the problems start to occur.

The biggest problem with producing enough oil to allow biodiesel to meet our energy needs is that we would have to grow plants specifically for the purpose. That means we would have to take farm land out of food production and use it to grow vegetables for fuel. This is going to cause a dramatic increase in food prices which is something nobody wants. The other option would be to raise animals and use their fat as a fuel source but this is even more problematic and would raise so many objections that it is an option not really worth considering.

The other problem that growing vegetables to make biodiesel is that it is not particularly energy efficient. That is you would have to use almost as much energy as you get out of the biodiesel in order to produce. Growing and harvesting crops uses a lot of fuel and that makes it an inefficient way to meet our energy needs. Unless the supply problem can be solved biodiesel looks likely to end up as another good idea that just didn’t work.