Not until no fossil fuels are used during production and during transportation of the biodiesel to the point of sale to consumers.. You have to grow the soybeans, which means hand plowing, horse plowing, or plowing by internal combustion. Even if you don’t plow or till the fields, you still have to plant and harvest, and if the operation is mechanized, it’s probably powered by fossil fuels. Then you have to move the feedstock to the processor. Then you have to move the fuel to the point of sale. And what about fertilizers? Are any derived from petroleum or produced through burning of fossil fuels?

Granted, it’s true that the C in the CO2 emitted during combustion of the hydrocarbons made from soybeans was extracted from the atmosphere during out lifetimes. But a problem, as you noted elsewhere, is that production uses a lot of land and water. There’s also the hard economic reality of converting arable land from production for food to production for biodiesel. This will drive up the price of soybeans for human consumption, too, and while you can hide the price increase with governmental subsidies, you can’t make the fact of the cost increase disappear by subsidization. But if you do subsidize the growers, thus hiding the cost of food and fuel in tax bills, you still distort the economics of production and consumption of fuels such that fuel consumption will be higher than without the subsidy, a perverse result given that the original motive was to reduce CO2 emissions.

So, soybean to biodiesel seems harebrained, at best, just like corn to ethanol for internal combustion (which, thanks in part to do-gooding environmentalists, has become a crony capitalism racket.) The algae scheme is intriguing, but is it subsidized? Will it scale well? Will it consume resources otherwise used to grow food, thus driving up the price of food?

I think it would be far better to treat causes, not symptoms. So, abolish government subsidization of roads and highways, esp. the multilane divided ones with limited access that became popular during Hitler’s regime. These subsidies are responsible for the vast growth of fossil fuel consumption, virtually all of it since the rise of national socialism, fascism, and Keynesianism; they’ve also made a mess of the landscape and undermined the economics of passenger railroads, too. Unfortunately, road and highway construction are favorite makework schemes for the political parties, esp. leftwing and centrist ones, that tend most to support subsidies for green tech.

So the people who support the green tech craze are the same ones who helped to manufacture the problem for which green tech is now being offered as a solution. But at least the affair is politically exciting and commercially profitable.

http://www.brighterenergy.org/15699/news/transport/two-year-plan-to-build-75-biofuel-filling-stations-in-california/

Very interested to know if this is practical and can scale with having serious issue of other kinds.