The challenge of bioenergies: An overview

What is it about?

The aim of this review was to gather in a same text a great deal of information from different areas of expertise, all related to renewable energies and to biofuels in particular. In their great majority the, data were taken from peer-reviewed articles and the picture that is released is faithful to the expert believe of the moment.

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Why is it important?

The picture presented shows us that (i) humanity engaged itself in the non-sustainable use of energy with the promise of dramatic climatic consequences, (ii) the biofuel initiative will not be sufficient to contain green house gas without aggressive carbon credit politics, (iii) a consensus must be found to decide and maintain a sustainable proportion of land for wild life reservoirs to assist the carbon credit politics and to buffer human activities, (iv) market logics does not have appropriate motivations to meet climate concerns and need governance regulation, active control and politic responsibility to change the actual trend, (v) regulations concerning personal vehicle use, public transport in city centers and decentralization of human activities would have significant effect on global climate change and population health, (vi) biofuels from higher plants and wastes will hardly solve more than 10% of fuel consumption, (vii) CO2 sequestration by algae and their biofuel will significantly contribute to renewable energy production, (viii) biomass should be increasingly substituted coal for synthetic gas (syngas) production, (ix) car optimization not only concerning the propulsion but also concerning their pay load and other features is requested, (x) hybrid car combining electricity and thermic engine are the best solution on the short term, (xi) hydrogen paradigm will not take off before the second half of this century, (xii) renewable energy portfolio depends on the resource opportunities of each geographical regions and specific solutions has to be searched, (xiii) energy production from renewable resource should be part of the electric grid for opportunity scale, (xiv) unprecedented policy actions are needed worldwide to promote the use and inclusion of green technologies in everyday life, and (xv) the world is finite and human population will follow the predator-pray model implying size oscillation until extinction if nothing is done to change the present day trend.

Perspectives