Are people happy to pay more for renewable fuels?

Ask a stupid question, get an obvious answer :O

Water John wrote: »

Steady, you put out the teaser that your working in the alt fuel area. That looks like the route to go and not biofuels.
Biofuels largely pretend to be ecofriendly but require a lot of inputs.

Without giving away 'state' secrets perhaps you could elaborate on your field.

If you ask people to pay less for some thing, the majority will always agree without analysing the full implications. Just the converse of your opener.

As you say biofuels require a lot of inputs. 1st generation biofuels used food crops to produce biofuels while 2nd gen uses non food crops. In both cases the plant biomass is usually chemically pretreated the seperate the cellulose from lignin. Then enzymes called cellulases break down the cellulose into simple sugars which can be metabollically broken down into ethanol by bacterial glycolysis.

This works and the process is just about streamlined, but there are problems with cost and the waste involved. Liginin, a woody hetergeneous polymer is resistant to degradation and hard to make anything useful with. Secondly, ethanol isn't the best sort of fuel to produce.

What our team are working on is a series of enzymes, found in various bacteria which can A: convert lignin, the 2nd most abundant biological material on earth to alkanes and convert long chain fatty acids to alkanes.

Alkanes are long carbon chain molecules such as petrol. In other words if we crack this we can produce something very similar to petrol from any sort of fatty acid. We can even engineer bacteria to produce fatty acids and then convert it to something like petrol which will be secreted

Long story short, some teams are keen on making ethanol from certain plants while others are working on using bacteria to make something closer to petrol from any sort of plant, wood or biomass. The latter would be far cheaper and more effective.

It's not a state secret unless I name the enzymes involved apparantly.

Grayson wrote: »

Only people with more money are happy to pay extra for something. And then only if it's prestigious or better quality.

True. Unfortunately biofuel addition to fuel is cumpulsory.

Riya Loose Forearm wrote: »

Just like the levies on wind power was to facilitate R&D. Many years on and they still can't make the operation self financing; and we still pay the levies.
Also, I have seen no Dept. Of Finance statement that the proportion of excise duty on fuel equal to the biofuel content was being redirected towards biofuel R&D.

Firstly the first statement is like saying why haven't they cured certain diseases many years on. The amount of money dedicated to a lot of diseases is many orders of magnitude greater than biofuel research, and biofuel production is extremely complex. Every step ranging from production of fuel to extraction is complicated. The process is there it just needs to be more cost effective.

And you'd have to ask the dept of finance about the taxes in Ireland. I suspect it's to do with the import of biofuels. It would make sense to produce them in Ireland.

Donal55 wrote: »

It could make sense to go nuclear but this country doesn't do sense. Just look at Regina and the interconnector farce.
Renewable levies are just additional taxes as far as I'm concerned.

Well nuclear power wouldn't provide transport fuel. Unless you're running a Delorean

Riya Loose Forearm wrote: »

What???

It has no comparison with curing disease whatsoever.

You stated clearly that the tax on the biofuel element went to R&D on biofuels. Now you know nothing about it. Excellent. You couldn't make this stuff up. Oh wait... you just did.

Are you joking? Biochemical research is the keystone to both.

Yes I work for an American government state dept. Tax on biofuels in the states goes partly on R and D. I am genuinely clueless as to the Irish government's justification to tax. No need to get so angry about it.