We are a world leader in education.  We spend more money per student and yield the worst results. 

That creates a challenge.  With a population that makes decisions based on emotions because of a lack of understanding science, we spend billions of borrowed dollars looking for answers that may not have an economic return.

Bill Yenne, in his book The World's Worst Aircraft wrote, "Like any great technological leap with a timetable set by politicians, (it) takes longer than expected to evolve"  It fails anytime it is "really more a political venture than an economically justifiable commercial one."

The challenge with Bio Fuels is physics.

The first problem is, "What is a BTU?"  BTU stands for British Thermal Unit.  It is a unit of heat equal to the amount of heat required to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit at one atmosphere.  All energy can be measured in BTUs.  Air conditioners are rated in 'tons of cooling'.  One ton of cooling is 12,000 BTUs.

The potential energy in fuels can be measured in BTUs.

Diesel has 138,000 BTUs of energy per gallon;

gas 125,000 BTUs,

natural gas 90,000 BTUs,

bio-fuel 80,000 BTUs

and a car battery has 3,500 BTUs.

Now the potential energy of different fuels can be compared.  In the real world, the comparison always ends up with the amount of energy that can be purchased per dollar.  That's why big trucks use diesel, more energy per gallon and more energy per dollar.

That means that replacing diesel with natural gas would mean that the natural gas would need to sell for 35% less than diesel to yield the same energy per dollar. For Bio-fuel it’s 42% less.

It also explains the challenge with electric cars.  It requires 40 car batteries to yield the same energy as a gallon of diesel.

Add to that the stated objective of Cap and Trade to regulate carbon emissions as measured by CO2.  All internal combustion creates CO2.

Now the big problem.  The U.S. imports 3.6 billion gallons of oil a year. The BOE (Barrel of oil equivalent) is 58 Million BTU per barrel. That means that we import 208 Quadrillion BTU’s of energy.  It would require 2.6 Quadrillion gallons of bio-fuel to replace the import of oil.  That's enough bio-fuel to fill 4.3 million Olympic swimming pools.

Someday, bio-fuel may have a place in the energy stream.  But that day is a long, long way off.