In regards to biofuels, I have gone on record for years that once we fully consider the impacts of ethanol—not just from corn, although corn ethanol is the worst of the ethanol options—it will become socially unacceptable to deal in ethanol at all. Biodiesel is a different story. 

Biodiesel from palm oil should be a "no". But biodiesel from recycled waste oils and virgin canola and soy is okay—the biodiesel does not displace the food value of canola and oil, it uses oil after it is separated from the protein in the beans, so the food value can still go to the food market. Part of the reason for this difference is that we know how to sustainably harvest canola and soy using minimum tillage and multiple crop rotation practices.

However, we still do not know how to harvest corn at commercial scale using minimum impact methods.

All things considered, you really want to skip the alternative "alcohols" or sugar-based fuels and stick with oil. There are many reasons, including the above. Another is that oil-based fuels can incorporate large recycled content, while you don’t put recycled content in alcohol-based fuels. Vegetable-based oils can be blended with mineral-based oils at any point in the supply chain. Not true for alcohol/sugar-based biofuels.

More importantly, the diesel engine and power train remains a better platform for plug-in electric hybrid technology development than the gasoline engine platform. So we should be thinking oil, clean diesel, and diesel engine platforms for innovation.

In the longer term, I think production of biodiesel from algae is likely to prove the big breakthrough—and I put that within 5 years, not 20. Algae-biodiesel reactors will be built at diesel-oriented oil refineries. The biodiesel reactor uses waste heat and CO2 from the diesel refinery in the algae-to-biodiesel production process, and the biodiesel is run through the refinery’s hydro cracker to ensure that it will perform in cold climates just like petroleum-based biodiesel. Then we can put 50% biodiesel blends in EXISTING TRUCKS, let alone new diesel electric hybrids—conventional gasoline combustion engines can tolerate no more than 7.7%, gross, ethanol.  

The best existing diesel-electric hybrid (made by Opel/Vauxhall) uses the diesel engine only to recharge the batteries—not for direct power—and has a range over 740 km and much lower GHGs than the newest prototype gasoline hybrid.

It makes NO sense to dedicate resources to develop gasoline additives. We should be thinking about how to shift the gasoline market to clean diesel and diesel electric hybrid engines and power train technology.

One key to getting there is to get the sulphur content in diesel fuels down to 10 parts per million from the existing regulated 15 parts per million. This makes inexpensive catalytic converters and fine particulate traps workable on diesel-powered vehicles, so that we get air pollution reductions at the same time we get GHG reductions at relatively low incremental fuel and vehicle costs.

The issue for cellulose-based ethanol is the diesel fuel that has to be consumed to move the cellulose feed stocks to processing plants. Another difference between biodiesel and ethanol is that biodiesel plants can be designed to hit economies of scale at relatively small plant sizes. So we can locate the plants close to the feedstock supplies. Ethanol production usually requires very high production volumes to hit economies of scale. So we have to ship biomass feed stocks large distances to the plants.  

Having said that, I think there might be one (only one) BC-based ethanol production technology that could hit good numbers with small- scale plants. Whether or not I am correct about the one BC example, small scale economies is what we have to be looking out for in all biomass-based fuel alternatives. It simply costs way too much (in $s and fuel) to ship waste wood, which is only 50% carbon at best, long distances to make transportation fuels.

Probably one of the largest problems is that some decision-makers still do not know the difference between ethanol (what I call "alcohol" or "sugar-based" fuels, to real scientists’ disdain) and biodiesel ("Oil"). I tried to encourage then-NR Minister Lunn to differentiate between the two some years ago. In that regard, I think I failed.