The impact of biofuels on the future of (any industry except airlines) Essay

The impact of biofuels on the future of (any industry except airlines) - Essay Example On the other hand, the energy requirements of transportation are exponentially increasing. The world population growing by 1% every year, and it has been estimated the consumption of oil by transportation sector will rise by 30% until 2050. As a result, the world is aggressively looking out for alternative sources of fuel that can replace oil for and never get depleted. One such renewable source of energy for transport sector is bio-fuels. However, although they are a sustainable source of energy and cause less pollution than traditional sources of fuels, they have been accused for causing loss of fertile lands reserved for agriculture, increase in food prices due to redirecting food crops towards fuel production, and large scale deforestation This report examines the existing state of development of bio-fuels with vis-a-vis the transport sector’s aspiration of sourcing only 13% of its energy from petroleum by 2050, and assesses the impact of bio-fuels on the future of vehicular transport. The largest contributors to energy requirements of the world are fossil fuels. Of these, the transportation sector heavily relies on petroleum. Petroleum in turn consists of oil and natural gas, out of which oil provides over 95% of the total transportation energy requirements (Bredenberg, 2012). However, oil sources are limited, while consumption is exponentially increasing. As per market report, the petroleum companies of the world extracted about 85 million barrels of oil, which equal to 13.5 billion litres (Lamb, 2009; Metric Conversions, 2012). It had been estimated that oil production rate will become stagnant in 2018, after which it will start declining. Although advanced technology has resulted in reduced wastage from individual oil wells and extraction from reserves earlier deemed unrecoverable, the most important concern remains that oil is a non-renewable resource of energy and its production would