BIODIESEL, Try it youll like it.

Thats what makes it so shocking. Not that we are prepared to go to war for oil, but to go to war in order to carry on wasting oil.

Spendi's speak
"Well enough about me, what do you think of the point Ive just made?"

If US oil consumption is 20,000,000 barrels a day and there are 280 million people in the US and they each live to the ripe old age of 80 (say) then what is the projected oil demand produced by one successful fertilisation of a human egg ignoring 3% growth rates.

210 barrels,21barrels,2,100 barrels.(Tick your choice.)

fm wrote-



I thought I had answered your last point fm.

I told you that you (and we) are addicted to oil within a few days of my A2K career beginning.In fact I said that you had it worse than any heroin junkie.I've been telling people that for many a long year and you should see some of their faces.They think the only "addicts" are druggies.It's an obvious fact.

Things must be desperate for the phrase to get into the State of the Union.

If you grow crops to make gas is there enough fertile land left to feed you and to keep up your food exports.

Still,2025 is a fair way off and the buck will have passed through more hands by then.

What did it, in my opinion, was the fairly recent development of efficient fermentation processes involving cheaper crops than corn and more ubiquitous biomas products. The Brazilians have achieved impressive success with this.

We have more than enough arible land for both.

We did the engineering for a garbage to ethanol system on a Phelps Dodge property in New York back in the 80's when The last peak was smoothing out.I am certainly gratified that the associated R$D expensing formulas would be maintained. That way thered be more available cash for some biomass projects

biodiesel from rape and mustard ,
biodiesel from algaes

ethanol from switchgrass, corn, willow prairies etc. There are bioenzymes that can facilitate these reactions and Bill Venter is busy out there searching the planet for these enzymes in random DNA sequences from oceanic collection. Hes gonna profit mightily from developing proper enzymes for the facilitating reactions.

Weve taken a lot of land out of production and maybe ag, as a "Highest use" activity will stop the rampant urbanization of our countrysides

This is all very well but how much is the investment going to be and who is going to make that investment when no sooner do the first one day's supply (20,000,000 barrels I heard)come pulsing out of the taps and the Saudi Oil Top Man just says "open the taps".And the American gas user is faced with a price differential between Saudi petrol and crop petrol of,say,2 cents.

Goodnight investment is my assessment of that.

Mugs wanted.

Oh- I forget.

We tell the Saudi Top Man that it is against international law to open the taps.

Darwinism only works in classrooms.

It is called competition and it works to our benefit.

In addition to what George said, new technologies are coming down the pipeline that can produce ethanol out of cellulose. When they get ready for mass production, we can make ethanol from the chaff and still make bread from the wheat. This would counter the two major objections that critics raise against biofuels. The first objection is that biofuels would create a big conflict between fuel production and food production. This conflict evaporates when different parts of the same plant can be allocated to different purposes. The second frequent objection is that biofuels depend on tractors driving over fields, burning fuel in the process, so the overall energy balance may be negative. But to the extent that the tractor is moving through the field for food production anyway, energy production does not increase fuel consumption on the margin. This effect moves the energy budget much farther into surplus.

I havnt read the whole thread yet folks but will get to it.

My Thought on alternative fuels are to use waste products. Sugar cane bagasse (the stems etc left over ofter processing) cotton seed oil. Hulls and husks fron grain production.

wheat chaff would require extra fuel to collect as it is not usually removed from the paddock. It also has a role to play in soil stability. perhaps your production systems are different.

Australia has hundreds if not thousands of plants that have oils in variouse qualities and quantities. (600 varieties of eucalypt.) These plants can be grown in situations that normally would not support crops. (arid, semi arid, low nutrient)

I must admit that I am out of my depth with the technical stuff but will put my 2 cent wort in when i see fit.

It isn't a flyer for me.
All the figures need recrunching for every feasible price of oil.If oil from crops works from a banker's point of view at $70 a barrel,which I doubt, doesn't mean it will work at $50 and if it doesn't work at $50 no banker will invest the many billions needed so long as OPEC could undercut crop oil by a stroke of a pen and a turn of the tap.Thus foreign policy is more important to the debate than technical aspects of the process.

Oil from coal failed on this point I think.

It isn't a question of whether the process works or not.Of course it works.It is the price at the consumer that matters and nothing can beat pumping oil from crops from millions of years of sunlight straight out of the ground.Compared to that this years sunlight is trivial.

I feel emotions are engaged here attempting to disguise themselves as intellectual convictions and technicalities.

It is the addiction to 20,000,000 barrels a day which engages these emotions in the same way that a heroin fix engages the emotions of a junkie.
When Mr Bush used the word "addiction" he called you all junkies.And junkies commit crimes to pay for their habit.

Why don't you take personal responsibility and cut out unneccesary use of energy or at least have the good grace to admit that you are a partial cause of wars.

1) Who is `you' in your sentence, Spendius?

2) The Washington rhetoric about `addiction to oil' sounds powerful, but it's really just that -- rhetoric. We are not addicted to oil any more than we were addicted to firewood 300 years ago, or to food up until this day. But when a social reformer promotes an agenda, it always helps to inflict guilt on the reform skeptics. Sorry -- but as Lola so nicely put it once to me, "I'm not into guilt".

oil is a finite supply. Coal gasification didnt work because the economics werent there at the time. That was then, this is now.

Corn is a bad choice now because we no longer just harvest the cobs and dry the stems. We grind the entire mass into feed. Its an interesting cycle. Ive been involved with biodiesel only, but ethanol production , using the stems and pieces , and prepped with specific enzymes to free the carbs and sugars that will make the "wine" for ultimate distillation, leave a final residue that is actually increased in protein, so whether we feed the cattle or ourselves with the main crop, we can create a secondary cattle and poultry food from the ethanol processed chaff.

Even the Sauid cannot control the worlds appetite for fuels. They can turn their taps on higher (but not so much anymore) and that will merely hasten the arrival of the day when the taps are no longer flowing.
After that , the other nations that have abumdant arable land , coal and shorelines will once again become the "firewood" capitols of the planet

after we produce the ethanol? is that what you are saying.

Thomas wrote-



I include us as well.We are addicted to oil.We would have a collective nervous breakdown if it was shut off or seriously slowed down.That's why it won't happen until it has to happen.

Had the people of 300 years ago not had their firewood they would have simply been cold in winter and,I suppose,some would have died.With oil shut off we get something else entirely.We are so highly geared.Our society would cease to exist.
Obviously,without food,all societies would cease to exist.There isn't the slightest point of comparison between oil and food as a vital commodity.Food has always been such everywhere.Oil is a new fad in the last tick of the second finger of human history.A real Faustian gamble.

Anyway-Mr Bush said it so I'm in good company.

yeh, ethanol is made from the carbs and sugars. The remains are increased in protein just by elimination of the carbs.
Thats what they used to do with beer mash. The beer was made from the mash and the resultant spent mash ws dried and sold as cattle food.

Thomas wrote,laying bare his chest heroically-



Well-Thomas,Lola is a lady and the more intelligent of them have an unfortunate tendency to eschew guilt as is well known from Greek myths onwards.
Such self indulgence is laudable in some respects (that's English understatement) but it does require responsible men to provide the circumstances in which it is best excercised.

Ladies such as Lola and Ms Martineau,Mr Darwin's brother's sometime squeeze,are a bit prone to blurting out such pearls of wisdom as the one you have aligned yourself with.This has little or nothing to do with whether they are actually pearls of wisdom rather than self justifications and that is assuming there is an absence of guilt right across the board in these ladies which I very much doubt.
But it sounds good I must admit.I wouldn't mind catching Lola in a guiltless flapdoodle session myself.

Lola knows nothing about bio-deisel other than how to use it up fast.

got my quarterly electricity bill the other day. It says we have created 2.78 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas for the quarter. 4 person house no electric heating.

I feel guilty.

I go round turning off lights, the kids think I'm cheap (I am but so what!)