Ebook: Biofuels: Securing the Planet’s Future Energy Needs

Biofuel is a renewable energy source produced from natural (biobased) materials, which can be used as a substitute for petroleum fuels. The benefits of biofuels over traditional fuels include greater energy security, reduced environmental impact, foreign exchange savings, and socioeconomic issues related to the rural sector. Furthermore, biofuel technology is relevant to both developing and industrialized countries. For these reasons, the share of biofuels in the automotive fuel market is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade.

The most common biofuels, such as ethanol from corn, wheat or sugar beet and biodiesel from oil seeds, are produced from classic food crops that require high-quality agricultural land for growth. However, bioethanol is a petrol additive/substitute that can be produced from plentiful, domestic, cellulosic biomass resources such as herbaceous and woody plants, agricultural and forestry residues, and a large portion of municipal and industrial solid waste streams. Production of bioethanol from biomass is one way to reduce both the consumption of crude oil and environmental pollution. There is also a growing interest in the use of vegetable oils for making biodiesel, which is less polluting than conventional petroleum diesel fuel.

Biofuels: Securing the Planet’s Future Energy Needs discusses the production of transportation fuels from biomass (such as wood, straw and even household waste) by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. The book is an important text for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in energy engineering, as well as professional fuel engineers.

---

I bought this book on biofuels trusting Springer, which is indeed one of the great publishing companies, and researching the author, who has a lot of papers on biofuels. Generally I'm not satisfied for the following reasons:This may be a hardcover book, but the binding is not good. The pages are glued to the spine instead of being stitched and then glued to the spine. This of course detracts from the life of the book. This kind of binding is unacceptable for a book at such high price aiming to scientists and engineers.On the technical part, the book contains a lot of information on biofuels. However, the information seems to be unorganised and the sad thing is that a lot of excerpts are repeated throughout the text. For example, the last paragraph on page 164 is essentially repeated in the following paragraph (p.165). The same holds for the last two paragraphs on page 160. The repetition even extends to figures: Figs 3.1 and 8.2 (world production of ethanol and biodiesel, 1980-2007) are identical.These repetitions should have been avoided and replaced by figures which would help explain other procedures which are unfortunatelly only verbally described in the text, such as the photochemical stage of photosynthesis described on page 47.As a result the book appears to have been written rather hastily and lacks cohesion and flow. The reader should be skilled to fill-in any gaps.If the purpose of the book was to present a collection of papers on biofuels, the aforementioned features could(?) be acceptable. However, the book addresses engineers and scientists and such features could have been avoided by a more careful editing of the book.Considering the price, the book should have been improved further prior to its release. The only reason for the 2 stars is the information which can be obtained but at the cost of the reader's perspiration.