Biofuels for Dummies

Algae biofuel generation

If you stick your head in the alcove where our research staffers park their laptops, it's a safe bet that you'll soon hear a snort of derision from one of them. That usually means someone has found a clumsy job of rewording. You see, most content farms were deathly afraid of plagiarism, and immediately expelled anyone who merely copied something word for word. The "contributors" at eHow.com quickly learned, however, that a thesaurus is your best friend when you're trying to reword a Wikipedia article... and that's pretty much what a staffer caught Max Roman Dilthey doing in "How Does Biofuel Work?" at ItStillRuns.com.

To catch Dilthey spinning away, just compare his opening sentence,

"Biofuels are combustive fuels made from recently harvested plants."

with the first sentence of the Wikipedia page for biofuels:

"A biofuel is a fuel that is produced through contemporary biological processes..."

If "recently harvested plants" isn't a spun version of "contemporary biological processes," we'll eat our collective hat. Not only that, it's... at best clumsy, at worst downright dumb. Of course, Max doesn't get much better as he goes along. The grad student and cycling blogger churned out other bons mots along the way, including his claim that,

"...they burn when ignited, releasing energy that can be converted to... heat for a house."

We note that the use of biofuels for home heating is quite rare, since only biodiesel is suitable and it's even more expensive than heating oil. But... maybe. Dilthey continues by explaining the conversion of corn, cane, or agricultural waste to biofuels; carefully rewording a description of the process he read somewhere – it makes no difference where.
Unfortunately, he leaves out some of the more interesting applications of biofuels, particularly technology for converting farm-grown algae into ethanol. Shame on him. He also makes the bogus claim that.

"...for every gallon of oil used in processing and distributing biofuels, 12 to 20 gallons of biofuel can be produced."

That's a suspect claim, since the reference mentions only petroleum products used to run machines and ignores hydrocarbon-based fertilizers and pesticides. Many studies suggest that the ratio is far lower; on the order of 1:1 to 1:3. Finally, Max Roman completely botches his discussion of biodiesel, saying only that "The United Kingdom uses a different biofuel called biodiesel, which is generated from palm oil." That's, at best, selling biodiesel – which is available throughout North America and produced from waste oil collected from restaurants – quite short.

Sadly, Dilthey's post replaced an older version of the same article that we found to be more accurate and less hyperbolic. However, if Demand Media wanted to pay Max for Dumbass of the Day quality work, that's their prerogative. Idiots.

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