soybean based Bio Diesel is very polluting

[amborin]

creating toxic waste harmful to birds, wildlife, and our water ways

from the ny times:

Pollution Is Called a Byproduct of a ‘Clean’ Fuel

By BRENDA GOODMAn Published: March 11, 2008
MOUNDVILLE, Ala. — After residents of the Riverbend Farms subdivision noticed that an oily, fetid substance had begun fouling the Black Warrior River, which runs through their backyards, Mark Storey, a retired petroleum plant worker, hopped into his boat to follow it upstream to its source.

Nelson Brooke, the executive director of Black Warrior Riverkeeper, walked along an area of the river near Moundville, Ala. Oil and grease from a biodiesel plant had been released.
It turned out to be an old chemical factory that had been converted into Alabama’s first biodiesel plant, a refinery that intended to turn soybean oil into earth-friendly fuel.
“I’m all for the plant,” Mr. Storey said. “But I was really amazed that a plant like that would produce anything that could get into the river without taking the necessary precautions.”

But the oily sheen on the water returned again and again, and a laboratory analysis of a sample taken in March 2007 revealed that the ribbon of oil and grease being released by the plant — it resembled Italian salad dressing — was 450 times higher than permit levels typically allow, and that it had drifted at least two miles downstream.
The spills, at the Alabama Biodiesel Corporation plant outside this city about 17 miles from Tuscaloosa, are similar to others that have come from biofuel plants in the Midwest. The discharges, which can be hazardous to birds and fish, have many people scratching their heads over the seeming incongruity of pollution from an industry that sells products with the promise of blue skies and clear streams.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Barbara Lynch, who supervises environmental compliance inspectors for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “This is big business. There’s a lot of money involved.”
Iowa leads the nation in biofuel production, with 42 ethanol and biodiesel refineries in production and 18 more plants under construction, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. In the summer of 2006, a Cargill biodiesel plant in Iowa Falls improperly disposed of 135,000 gallons of liquid oil and grease, which ran into a stream killing hundreds of fish.

According to the National Biodiesel Board, a trade group, biodiesel is nontoxic, biodegradable and suitable for sensitive environments, but scientists say that position understates its potential environmental impact.

“They’re really considered nontoxic, as you would expect,” said Bruce P. Hollebone, a researcher with Environment Canada in Ottawa and one of the world’s leading experts on the environmental impact of vegetable oil and glycerin spills. “You can eat the stuff, after all,” Mr. Hollebone said. “But as with most organic materials, oil and glycerin deplete the oxygen content of water very quickly, and that will suffocate fish and other organisms. And for birds, a vegetable oil spill is just as deadly as a crude oil spill.”


etc....

[Sal Minella]

1. This message brought to us by Exxon/Competitive Enterprise Institute???

Wind is really bad, too. Wind will blow your hat off.

[amborin]

3. own stock in biodiesel corporations?

sounds like it

otherwise, why make a nasty crack?

sounds as if you don't give a rats about bio diversity/other species

[Sal Minella]

6. Oh how very very wrong you are.

===========================
sounds as if you don't give a rats about bio diversity/other species
===========================

I would like to see an explanation of how "grease" is produced by a soybean pressing oil plant.

Maybe there's a chemist in the D.U. population who can tell me?

Wind and solar and the developing battery technology are where the best answers are at present, I think. I am definitely no fan of the biofuels lobbies (ADM at the head of the "hated" list) -- but I am even less enthusiastic about having another Exxon Valdez incident, or sacrificing a thousand American soldiers per year to keep oil prices cranked up to keep the oligarchs happy.

[amborin]

7. good to hear, and agree on wind and solar

[madrchsod]

2. makes perfect sense to .burn our food in our cars

bio fuels make sense to fuel our food production not our cars....

[amborin]

4. Archer Daniel Midlands and the Big Corn Lobby Profit

Bet on Ethanol, With a Convert at the Helm

Kristen Schmid Schurter for The New York Times

Patricia A. Woertz, the chief executive of Archer Daniels Midland, promotes corn-based ethanol’s potential.


By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: October 8, 2006

An Ethanol-Driven Boom

Kristen Schmid Schurter for The New York Times
Gale Cook of Tuscola, Ill., unloads corn at the headquarters of Archer Daniels Midland, the biggest ethanol producer in the United States.
DECATUR, Ill.

BACK in 1999, when she was the head of refining at Chevron, Patricia A. Woertz told a group of energy officials that it was “time to stop mixing agricultural policy with fuels policy.”
In that same speech, at a fuels conference in Washington, Ms. Woertz also publicly expressed worry about the “unintended consequences” of a federal mandate requiring the use of corn-based ethanol in gasoline.

Today Ms. Woertz is standing on the other side of the gasoline debate, wholeheartedly supporting the growth of ethanol, the fuel the oil industry loves to hate but has had to learn to live with. In May, she took over as the chief executive of Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agricultural company that also happens to be the biggest ethanol producer in the country.

A.D.M. spent nearly three decades pushing relentlessly for the use of ethanol in gasoline, lobbying Congress and the White House and rousing farmers. But only in the last few years, amid record-high oil prices and government mandates to use ethanol, has this clear, colorless fuel finally begun to catch on, transforming it from a dream into almost a religion in the Midwestern states that produce corn. Ethanol — another term for ethyl alcohol — has been a boon to A.D.M.’s fortunes, helping it to achieve record earnings last year of $1.3 billion on sales of $36.6 billion. While the company does not break down the sources of its profit, analysts say ethanol could make up 40 percent of A.D.M.’s net income in fiscal 2007, about double what it meant to the company last year.

With that bigger profit potential has come greater volatility in A.D.M.’s stock, which lately has mirrored more closely the rise and fall of energy prices. That has caused some analysts to caution its investors to go slow on the company. “For the bulk of the company’s history, the vast majority of their profits came from crushing products like corn to feed the world,” said Eric Katzman, an analyst at Deutsche Bank. But a greater proportion of A.D.M.’s earnings will come from biofuels in the future, he said, as a large portion of the $2.4 billion the company plans to invest in the next two years is energy related.

So far, that capital is devoted to sustaining corn as the preferred crop for producing ethanol. While ethanol can be made more cheaply from sugar cane, as it is in Brazil, lobbying by A.D.M. and farm-state politicians has helped corn win out as the crop of choice for ethanol in the United States. It did not hurt that the powerful American sugar lobby helped to erect trade barriers keeping out cheaper imported sugar and cheaper imported ethanol.

MOST politicians originally saw ethanol as a way to help farmers to make more money from their corn crop. Now it is being seen by policy makers, including President Bush, as a partial antidote to the nation’s reliance on foreign oil. To achieve that vision of energy independence will require much more ethanol, and many agricultural experts have begun to worry about the food-for-fuel trade-off of using so much corn — more than 60 percent of which is used to feed livestock, an important American export — to produce fuel. And corn is one of the most energy-intensive and water-intensive crops to grow anywhere. But A.D.M. has been slow thus far to be a party to research that might sway ethanol production away from corn and into crops that require less water and fossil-fuel based fertilizers; one such crop is switchgrass, a tall prairie grass that is highly drought resistant. Some outside experts call A.D.M.’s strategy shortsighted

etc....

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. This was posted before

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=138113&mesg_id=138113


I think we have a bit of confusion/misrepresentation here.

This is a "spill" of a large volume of "oil." That's a problem. It would be more of a problem if it was crude oil; but it's still a problem.

It's not the fuel that's to blame, it's the people who are running the plant.