Today in Biofuels Opinion: “The president and cap-and-trade supporters in Congress seem inclined to respond with subsidies for pet technologies.”

The Economist:  “Both the president and cap-and-trade’s supporters in Congress seem inclined to respond with subsidies for pet technologies that might help those hardest hit, or with mandates to cut emissions in particular ways…The main effect of these schemes would be to raise the costs of cutting emissions. Much of the money doled out by the government would inevitably be wasted, adding to the overall bill for fighting climate change. Worse, such measures would risk distorting the carbon market, steering private capital as well as public money away from the cheapest technologies and towards those that have caught the eye of the politicians.”

Lance Lobban, University of Oklahoma: “The best fuels are the ones that closely duplicate gasoline, diesel and jet fuel so automakers aren’t forced to adapt to new fuels. That would add expense and slow adoption of new fuels.  We have to design processes to convert biomass so the product works with the current system. An initial step we’re investigating is pryolsis, which converts the solid biomass to liquids through a high-temperature, non-combustion process that breaks large, solid molecules into smaller liquid ones without breaking them up too far.”

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