sikilmahfud

Up till now, our world is depending on natural gas and petroleum oil. Every important aspect in this world can’t be rid of these two things: transportation, cooking, even world’s politic and economy. For instance, Arab Emirates Union that’s very rich from their abundant “black gold” resources. With its abound oil sources, this country can build so many super sophisticated buildings.

However, scientists estimate, approximately in 2020’s our petroleum will be exhausted. Although many countries try to limit the use of these, it just delays for a little time. The effect will be very bad. Surely, Arab countries will be collapse, and so do countries which depend on Arab’s oil export. This is even possible that world war will be happen because so many countries struggle to get remaining oil source.

Many research are being done to solve this problem. Biofuel is the most interesting solution and it is easy to be developed. This isn’t a new thing, just not all countries apply it. Europe plan, in 2010 5.75% of their fuel for transportation are ethanol, that’s derived from wheats, beets, potatoes, or corns. And the use will be increased become 20% in 2020. The other country that use biofuel is Brazil, that is more advanced that Europe in biofuel use. A quarter of their transportation fuels in 2002 is ethanol.

From the name, biofuel means the fuel that’s derived from living creature. The common materials are the product from wet cesspool (like animal’s feces) to yield biogas, combustion of dry cesspool, or planter of the fast-growth plant like sugar cane, corn, and castor oil plant.

Certainly, not all of plant can be became biofuel ‘s material. There are two criteria. First, the plants must contain plenty of sugar, like sugar cane and beet, or contain high carbohydrate, like corn. Using yeast fermentation, sugar and carbohydrate are changed into alcohol ethyl. Second, plants that contain high vegetable oil like oil palm, castor oil plant, algae, and soybean. This vegetable oil will be heated so their viscosity will be decreased. Afterward, they will be in combustion process in diesel machine and processed chemically, and finally yield biodiesel fuel.

Biofuel that are in common developed now is still first generation (still using plant that’s consumed by human and animal). Actually, in the past our world has been used primitive biofuel, charcoal. The more modern first generation biofuel is biofuel which material is from cooking oil. There’s a peculiar machine that is used to separate cooking oil from water and other particles, so the cooking oil can be used as fuel. However, it’s annotated that it just used in limited scale because the quality of the product isn’t good enough.

The most popular first generation biofuel is biodiesel and bioalcohol. Biodiesel is common in Europe, and bioalcohol is commonly used in Brazil. Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil high-contained plant. Oil is composed with sodium hydroxide and methanol by chemical reaction and yields biodiesel (the chemical composition, methyl ethyl ether). While kinds of bioalcohol are ethanol, propanol, and butanol. Ethanol will be explained here, because it is the most common bioalcohol. Ethanol is made by sugar fermentation from wheat, beets, and the other plants that high-contained of sugar.

The main problem from biofuel is caused by the material that’s used to make biofuel. It is made by the plant which is consumed by human and animals, and it can cause severe poverty if we just rely on the mass production from the first generation biofuel. Hence, biofuel experts claim that they have been developing the second generation of biofuel, that’s not made by consumed plant, like biomass cesspool, wheat’s stem, corn’s stem, wood, and Mischantus. The expected products are biohydrogen, biomethanol, and wood diesel. Besides, scientists are doing experiment with organism that derived from DNA synthetic that can increase biofuel’s production.

The use of biofuel is very advantageous, besides it can solve the problem of oil lack, it also decrease global-warming threat, because CO2 that contained in the smoke is much greater than biofuel. Now, it’s difficult to apply biofuel massively, because there are so many poor and developed countries that relied on their agriculture production. Nevertheless, we’re much hoping that second generation biofuel success to develop, so biofuel is the most proper way to solve the world’s problem.