E-Portfolio 4

E-portfolio 4

My group topic for roundtable discussion was to identify a technology or a set of technology which certain groups(e.g companies, governments or citizen groups) have either fully resisted or opposed only partially adopted in recent years and why do we think such technologies should be adopted or not to be. Bits of discussion was done and my group decided to talk about biofuels.Some reading was done over the internet.

The first article was taken from The Straits Times, Jan 8 2009. It talks about the first flight in US to use biofuel. Although biofuels were used in the flight, conventional fuels were used at the same time. The reason being was that the first flight was meant to be a demonstration flight to prove that biofuels could be used in airplanes. It also talks about the possibility of one day planes would used biofuels to fly. But in order to that to happen, there must be a large scale production of the biofuels such as using second-generation biofuels. This website is a good example as to briefly explain why there is still not much push into replacing traditional fuel with biofuels.

The second article was from a British website ,http://biofuel.org.uk/. General information about first generation of biofuel can be found from this website. Although not much information about the advantages and disadvantages of using biofuels were mentioned, the process of making of biofuels was mentioned. Thus this website does not provide much information needed to support the use of biofuels.

The third article is relevant as it does answer some of the issues of using biofuels as an alternative energy. It tries to balance between the use of biofuel based on their pros and cons. It gives the reader an idea on what kind of questions to ask about the use of biofuels and it can be relevant to the topic question.