Book Description

Biofuels examines prospects for large-scale production of affordable, sustainable transportation fuels. Made from biomass or other alternatives to oil, such fuels would not add greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere or compete with food crops. Concise and authoritative, avoiding the hyperbole that surrounds so many energy technology proposals, Biofuels concentrates on essentials: • How technological innovation actually takes place, not only through research but in response to market forces and business decisions. • The dynamics of the global oil industry, which on the one hand supplies billions of people with relatively low-cost energy and on the other imperils many of these same people through climate change. • Prospects for “drop-in” alternatives to petroleum that can be burned in existing vehicles and equipment, avoiding the need to turn over a fleet that in the United States alone numbers some 250 million cars and trucks. • U.S. government policies for fostering innovation, in energy and more broadly, and the strengths of the Defense Department relative to other agencies in supporting technological advance and scale-up of alternative fuels.