Bio fuels: Are they really our saviours?

Bio-fuels are constantly in news these days. Newspapers and magazines are filled with articles relating to new discoveries in the field of bio/alternative fuels, governments increasing the funds and subsidiaries for projects on environment friendly fuels. The use of bio-fuels certainly seems to paint a rosy picture now. But are they really what they seem? That is the question many are voicing today.

Theoretically bio fuels can be prepared from any biological carbon source, the most common being photosynthetic plants. The modern use of bio fuels can be dated back to the Second World War when the severe demand for oil forced Germany to start using alcohol, fermented from potatoes, along with regular fossil fuels to power its vehicles. That gave the first impetus to bio-fuels as the alternative fuel to petrol and diesel. But after the war, the price of oil eased and the concept of bio-fuels faded away from limelight. The Energy crisis of 1970’s saw renewed interest in Bio-fuels but did not last long. But bio-fuels have been given special attention since the dawn of the new millennium as experts predict that fossil fuels would dry up by the end of the century.

Multinational companies and developed countries started investing heavily in developing bio-fuel believing that it would be the redefining technology of the future.

This resulted in a situation similar to the Gold Rush of 19^th century and there was a feverish search for new bio fuels. With investors rushing in to fund projects this led to a series of unwise and hasty decisions. With massive help from the tag ‘eco-friendly’ bio fuels are given a free hand. But some major concerns remain unaddressed. The chief among them is the Food vs. Fuel Debate. If growing bio fuel crops becomes lucrative because of better subsidiaries and support price from government, then the chances are high that any average farmer would start cultivating bio fuel and that production of food crops would fall resulting in increase in their prices. This would lead to inflation and large scale mal-nutrition, especially in the Third World countries.

The second challenge is that cultivating in large tracts of land would result in loss of habitat of animals and plants. This would put huge pressure on the already fragile ecosystem and bio diversity of the planet. And the third most pressing problem is the whole question of how effective bio fuels are, in controlling carbon emissions. Because it is yet to be conclusively proved that the entire process of growing, processing and burning of these fuels is more carbon efficient than conventional sources like fossil fuels.

No doubt, the world needs alternative fuels fast to meet its burgeoning energy needs. But it would not be prudent to consider bio fuels our saviours before addressing the major challenges and questions raised by their use.

FINDING THE GOD PARTICLE!!!

Physicists from all over the world are racing to prove the existence of a particle that's surmised to be at the heart of the matter. Literally. Two months ago, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiment at CERN dominated the news headlines across the world, but today, that ‘honour’ has been taken over by Sub Prime Crisis.

The LHC is a 27 Km long tunnel built 150 meters underground on the French-Swiss border. Its purpose is to smash sub atomic particles at the speed of light and detect a certain Higgs Boson particle. Scientists from close to 20 countries, including our own, were involved in a multibillion dollar race to find the Higgs Boson particle. Dubbed the ‘God Particle’ by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, Higgs is a controversial particle which is believed to bestow mass to all particles. The particle plays a key role in Standard Model of Physics, the theory on which physicists base their entire understanding of matter of the Universe. And proving the existence or absence of this particle would have vast implications, as the particle is the only explanation scientists have for the existence of Mass. The purpose of LHC is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.

Now, at the beginning of my post I referred to the experiment as a “Multibillion Dollar Race”. That’s because the experiment costs could be compared with the annual GDP of many third world countries! Another reason is that the race is akin to the ‘Space Race’ of the Cold War period when the two superpowers were involved in a fierce battle to explore the frontiers of Space. But in this post Cold war era, bi-polar world has been replaced by a multi-polar world and Space exploration has been largely replaced by exploration into the hidden secrets of atoms and its nature. Now, almost every country seems to want a piece of the pie and are racing to find the ways and means of cracking the atomic code. With the launch of LHC at CERN in Europe, USA has gone public with its Fermilab in Chicago and China has unveiled its plan to build a 35 Km long Collider.

Many feel that science has lost its sheen and that the world with all its technical advancements has stopped focusing on science and looks more into economic prosperity, but if you ask me the true potential of science is yet to be unlocked. We live in a civilization shaped by physics. The laptop computer on which I'm writing uses microprocessors that would not exist had we not discovered quantum physics and the quirky behavior of electrons. World Wide Web was invented, at CERN, by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. IPods, wouldn't exist but for something called "giant magneto-resistance."

Although the LHC seems to have run into trouble now, (Helium gas has leaked into the ultra vacuumed tunnels) it is expected to be back in operation by the next April, so the world could look forward to a summer when many secrets of the sub microscopic proportionality would be revealed. But 100 years of particle physics has taught us that even the LHC is only a small step towards unraveling the secrets of nature.