One of the most common questions we hear at Dogpatch Biofuels is “what’s the difference between renewable diesel and regular diesel?” The two are chemically identical, but the practical difference comes down to carbon storage. One of the basic building blocks of life on earth, all plant and animal life is composed to some degree of carbon, which after death is eventually released back into the environment. Eventually is a relative concept however, because the time frame of carbon release has massive implications for our planetary health. Dead biomass can be reintegrated into the environment in many different ways, most commonly in the short carbon cycle, such as dead animals being eaten by other animals, or plant life decomposing and becoming fertilizer for new forests or grasslands. But nature also has ways of storing carbon in longer term ways, such as biochar being integrated in soils, carbon mineralized into rocks, or, most importantly for this discussion, fossilized animal life turning into oil far beneath the earth’s surface.
Before human intervention, nature achieved balance of the short and long carbon cycles, allowing for enough carbon releasing in the short term to sustain new life, but storing enough carbon over longer time frames to keep our air and atmosphere at healthy levels. In the last two hundred years, humans disrupted this process after learning that combusting fossil fuels can provide enormous amounts of energy, but at the cost of emissions that jeopardize the composition of the atmosphere, leading to global warming. The difference between the short and long carbon cycles is the key difference between petroleum diesel and renewable diesel. While renewable diesel still releases carbon dioxide, that carbon is coming from biomass in the short carbon cycle, meaning it would have been released into the atmosphere in the near future regardless. It’s not a perfect solution to our climate crisis, but it’s a huge step forward from using petroleum fuels, the number one cause of global warming. The production of new vehicles is also a large source of emissions, meaning there’s huge value in greener versions of preexisting fuels that prolong the lifespan of existing vehicles. At Dogpatch Biofuels, we’re proud to sell exclusively non-petroleum fuels, so we hope to see you at the station soon to join the renewable revolution, all while supporting a woman-owned, San Francisco local business!
We would like to credit Robert Hoglund, who writes at marginalcarbon.com, for the image used and for his succinct descriptions of carbon storage cycles.
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