> No, I was talking about the temptation of mining existing biomass. I clearly missed a step then. So when you say: "I think the biggest argument against biof

> No, I was talking about the temptation of mining existing biomass. I clearly missed a step then. So when you say: "I think the biggest argument against biofuels is that if they achieved large scale use, it would encourage people to mine biomass from existing forests instead of growing it." So, I drew from that a conclusion that if biofuels were prevalent, you believe there's an incentive to mine forests to create biofuels, rather than the grow new biofuels. In my mind, that means going into wild forests, ripping trees and other biomass out of the ground, slicing it up and transporting it to some kind of a processing plant, where you'd separate out the useful bits and turn it in to biofuel. The incentive comes from the profits yielded from selling the biofuel after paying the costs of creating it. I don't disagree that there are challenges growing and harvesting of algae, but it is something that is done, at an industrial scale, already (largely for the harvesting of pigments). They don't produce CO2, but they do pump in a lot of fresh CO2 (and pump out O2) to ensure good yields. It's just not done for purposes of creating biofuel, because there's no demand to justify the costs involved. In a world you're envisioning where there is much more of an incentive to produce biofuels, it seems eminently reasonable those incentives would apply to algae as much as anything else. > Second, it rapidly reproduces, with a generation time much shorter than a growing season While there are challenges related to this, this does largely mitigate the turn around time advantage that existing wild forests might have. > The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy. Rapeseed is currently produced on an industrial basis in places where the HEAR derived from it already yields more profits than say, growing soybeans. It's not a popular crop, because the demand for edible canola products is much higher than the demand for biofuels, but if that demand were to shift... Where we agree is that I don't see biofuels being a viable strategy, at least for the foreseeable future. I just don't see a future where they become viable, but the incentive to mine existing forests for biofuels becomes significantly more significant than extant incentives to mine forests.