Fact: Our household is saving $600 a year and 4,000 pounds of C02 because we now drive a diesel car that gets 49 MPG.

Fact: Replacing food-crop-land or clear-cutting forests to grow ethanol or bio-diesel crops is NOT a good transportation solution.

Fiction: Bio-fuels by default compete with our food supply and therefore bio-fuels mean more expensive and more scarce food.

Fact: Bio-diesel from soybeans and ethanol from corn is clearly not a solution. An acre of soy/corn can create only 50 gallons of bio-diesel/ethanol per year. These forms of bio-diesel are the first-wave of bio-fuels, but the next chapter is already happening. Jatropha, however, can produce 600+ gallons per acre, and can be grown on dry land that isn't suitable for food crops. Even better, algae is a bio-fuel source has the most promise, and it's more than a theory. An acre of algae-ponds can produce 10,000+gallons per year. Industrial-scale production of algae-based bio-diesel is underway with several US and international companies, and the economics of this alternative are strong. Algae-production displaces NO crop-land because the algae-ponds can use human/agricultural waste-water in land-areas that are not suitable for crops.

Learn more on algae at:
http://www.solazyme.com/
http://www.greenfuelonline.com/
http://www.greenshift.com/
http://www.solixbiofuels.com/
http://www.cehmm.org/

Fiction: Bio-fuel production takes too much land to be viable.

Fact: A land mass representing 1% (yes, one percent*) of the land currently devoted to US food production could produce enough bio-diesel for ALL US transportation needs. A 12-inch deep algae pond the size of one acre can produce 10,000 gallons of bio-diesel per year. An acre of soybeans can produce 50 gallons of bio-diesel per year. To replace all US transportation fuel would reguire only 10 million acres of algae-ponds, 15,000 square miles, compared to over 1 BILLION acres that are currently devoted to crop production and grazing.

Fiction: Diesel exhaust is dirty compared to gasoline. If we all drove diesels we'd have worse smog.

Fact: (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel) "Diesel-powered cars generally have a better fuel economy than equivalent gasoline engines and produce less greenhouse gas pollution. Their greater economy is due to the higher energy per-litre content of diesel fuel, reduced maintenance costs due to fewer parts and longer engine life, and the intrinsic efficiency of the diesel engine. While petrodiesel's 15% higher density results in 15% higher greenhouse gas emissions per litre compared to gasoline, the 20–40% better fuel economy achieved by modern diesel-engined automobiles offsets the higher-per-liter emissions of greenhouse gases, and produces 10-20 percent fewer GHG emissions than comparable gasoline vehicles. Biodiesel-powered diesel engines offer substantially improved emission reductions compared to petro-diesel or gasoline-powered engines, while retaining most of the fuel economy advantages over conventional gasoline-powered automobiles."

Fiction: Diesels are too sluggish and slow to be attractive to people.

Fact: The turbo-diesel "common rail" and Pump-Duese" technology brought to market in the past 15 years provides high-performance, pulling-power and acceleration. Test drive a VW TDI or a Dodge Cummins truck and you will never think of Diesels as slugs again.

Fiction: That's all great, but there's nothing I can do to make algae-bio-diesel a reality in our world.

Fact: IF consumers demand algae-diesel, the market will create it. In many European countries more than half the cars on the road are diesels, because there is demand for it. Corporations that consider running their fleets on bio-diesel can insist that it be supplied by algae instead of food-crops. Consumer and political action groups can demand incentives for local algae-production using municipal sewage-treatment plants as the water supply. The first-step: buy a diesel vehicle and join/start a buyers-coop with the goal of finding a source of algae-based bio-diesel.

www.oilgae.com is an organization devoted to creating research initiatives and political climates conducive to algae-bio-diesel production, and a great place to learn more about this exciting arena.

*Data source for crop-land statistics relative to Algae:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html