A fatal flaw for the biorefinery concept, discussed a bit in Boutique Fuels, is that to produce significant quantities of fuel would require huge amounts of space, and that space is premium space that has more important tasks to do.

There are other flaws. Chief among them is that the processes are inefficient. That can be improved.

“Critics of corn ethanol like to say the process isn’t very efficient,” Mr. Brown said. “Part of that is because your products aren’t just fuel.” Finding other high-value applications, he added, lets producers “justly say, this is not a waste stream; it adds to the profitability of the plant.“

Back in Peoria, Mr. Vaughn is also looking at making products from distillers’ dry grain, including another biofuel. The grain is more than 10 percent oil, and one ton of it can yield 30 gallons of biodiesel.

Interest in the biorefinery model is not limited to research scientists and start-up companies. Archer Daniels Midland is expanding some of its wet mill plants, which already churn out ethanol and a variety of other corn-based materials like high-fructose corn syrup, amino acids and sorbitol, to make industrial products. It has begun making propylene glycol, a widely used compound, from glycerol.

There are other coproducts from other biofuel processes. The general idea of cracking biomass into several streams of products, including liquid fuels, like a petroleum refinery does now, is an obvious future goal. But it still falls far short of good sense.

“As petroleum prices increase and we try to become more independent with regard to energy and petroleum in general,” said Mark Matlock, senior vice president for research at the company, which is based in Decatur, Ill., “there are other opportunities that come up for industrial chemicals as well as fuels.”

But despite the many uses for byproducts, the biorefinery model is more difficult than it may seem. “The dream is the multiproduct biorefinery,” said Jim McMillan, manager of biorefining process research and development at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. “The challenge is that the market for the fuels is like two orders of magnitude bigger than for even a fairly big chemical” that could be produced alongside the fuel.

A chemical that has no market is waste, even though it is was made on purpose from a less pure waste stream. And it is doubtful that the original waste stream was in fact waste. Those materials have little market value, but that is because we don't have a good grasp of the carbon cycle in nature, and the role those materials play in everything from soil health to atmospheric health.

I doubt that the biofuels industry will grow large enough to make much difference for soil and atmospheric health. It won't even make much difference for fuel consumption. So, there is no immanent threat from this behavior. It just underscores the futility of the whole endeavor.

Looking on the brighter side, though the fuels industry will be a failure, will never scale up to a useful size, the chemical industry may benefit. Biorefineries that produce our chemical needs from biomass make more sense. The amounts of material needed are smaller and the products are more valuable.