Biofuels may be ushering in new development opportunities

Recently, news on the European Union's levy of aviation carbon taxes has continued to ferment. This news in the aviation industry has caused widespread concern in the society, including those concerned about the development of the global energy industry. Some scholars believe that biofuels may be ushering in new opportunities for development.

In 1896, after more than 10 years of trial and error, Dr. Rudolph Diesel, a German heat engine engineer, developed a pressure ignition internal combustion engine, a diesel engine, and applied it to locomotives, ships, and heavy-duty vehicles. This is the first engine in human history to use peanut oil as a fuel-driven engine. The used fuel has inadvertently become the world's oldest biodiesel.

On June 29, 2011, a Royal Dutch Airlines Boeing 737-800 passenger aircraft with 171 passengers departed from Amsterdam and landed successfully at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. Royal Dutch Airlines thus became the first airline in the world to use biofuels for commercial flights.

Biodiesel fever is booming across the globe, and it seems to confirm Dr. Diesel’s prediction in a speech: “Using vegetable oil as engine fuel may seem pointless today, but one day vegetable oil will become the same as oil and coal tar products. important."

Biofuels have many obvious advantages over traditional energy sources in environmental protection. The United States was the first country to study biodiesel. The 600,000 km driving experiment conducted in Huangshi Park did not have any coking phenomenon, and the air pollutant emission was reduced by more than 80%. Compared with traditional aviation kerosene, aviation biofuels can help the environment reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60% to 80% over the life cycle. Perhaps, as a result, some scholars believe that biofuels are ushering in a new round of opportunities for development in the context of rising demand for greenhouse gas emissions and the EU's taxation of aviation carbon taxes.

From the standpoint of capacity and output, global biofuel development is indeed in a rising period. In Germany, biodiesel production capacity has reached 10 million tons per year, and rapeseed accounts for 90% of biodiesel raw materials. The cultivation area of ​​rapeseed in Germany rose from 100,000 hectares in the 1980s to the current 1.7 million hectares, equivalent to a quarter of the total rapeseed planting area in EU member states. The United States mainly develops soybean oil-based biodiesel with a total capacity of approximately 1.3 million tons, making it the second largest biodiesel producer in the world. In Brazil, biofuel production doubled between 2001 and 2011. Today, Brazil sells 5% of biodiesel.

In China, the planting area of ​​tree species of woody oil has exceeded 4 million hectares, 154 seeds with oil content above 40%, and the current output can reach 5 million tons. At the same time, China still has 57 million hectares of suitable barren mountain wasteland, saline-alkali land and desertification land where biomass energy tree species can be planted. The potential for the development of biomass energy is huge.