The Biggest Bio-fuel Plants

By 2010 in United Kingdom it is expected that the petrol and diesel used for transport fuel to be at least 5% bio-fuel. The present law is 2.5 percent. By this law UK expects to make transport fuels more environmentally friendly.

The increased demand of bio-fuels from the world's richer nations is being partly blamed for the skyrocketing food prices. Farmland that was once used to grow crops to feed people is now growing fuel for cars.

The world's biggest bio-fuel plants, including those in the pipeline, by production are listed below:

1) Dynoil LLC is developing a new bio-diesel refinery nears Houston, Texas, USA- and it might be the world's largest. Though the development timeline is not clear, once completed, the refinery will process roughly 100,000 barrels of vegetable oil each day. It is estimated it will produce 1.5 billion gallons of biodiesel fuel each year.

2) SE Energy's proposed plant in Chesapake, Virginia, USA. Projected production capacity 320 million gallons per year.

3) Dominion Energy Services, LLC has broken ground for a $ 400 million integrated biodiesel and ethanol refinery in innistail, Alberta, Canada, it will consists of a combined 300 million gallons per year production facility( 100 million gallon ethanol, a 100 million gallon canola crush facility and a 100 million biodiesel) on commencement in the third quarter of 2008, and will use about 1 million tonnes of wheat and 900,000 tonnes of canola a year for raw residue.

Bio-Fuel & Food Crisis

Bio-fuel is blamed for driving the cost of food high up out of reach of the worldwide poor, making worse the crisis for food. United kingdom and United States are increasingly using bio-fuel as a measure to decrease the impact of petrol and diesel on environment. The farmland that was once used to grow crops to feed people is now growing feed for vehicles.

In general bio-fuel are not the problem, the problem lies in food base bio-fuels. It has been proven that algae and switchgrass produce many times more oil than corn, soy and any other food base. We lack refineries and infrastructures for these non-food based fuels.

There are many plants that are basing its infrastructure in feedstocks that minimize or completely remove any impact to the food chain. For instance some plants feedstocks will be based on the use of Jatropha Curcas for bio-diesel production which is a non-food crop and grows in arid regions in which food crops do not grow well. In addition, in the future algal oil will be a largely used feedstock which is also a non-food crop.

Thus, prior to blaming all bio-fuel plants for the cause of increasing food price, it should be research what feedstocks that plants are using.