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March 29, 2006
Oil for food
My organic farmer friend, Evan, sent me this link: http://www.alternet.org/story/34073, which offers some interesting statistics. The comment from AndyF is a little sarcastic (why can't we all just get along?) but it does touch on a central element of the community I am working to define in my blog ramblings.
Our current economy, including our food economy, is powered by petroleum. This fact of life does serve some good purposes. For instance, it allows distant farmers to provide gainful employment to produce food that U.S. consumers want to buy. I believe the days when we can enjoy Chilean fruit (or even California fruit) at the low prices we see today are numbered. But we might as well accept the fruits that the system offers, while they are affordable.
In the meantime, we need to organize our communities to transition to local food, as I believe we will have to move back to local food economies in the not too distant future.
Posted by aquacura.com at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2006
Cycle back to biofuels
The last couple of months have seen several biodiesel operations start up in central PA. I saw an item from PA DEP that as many as 11 such operations would be in place during 2006. I believe all of the biodiesel producers in central PA are blending soybean oil with diesel to produce a 15:85 (soybean oil:diesel) blend. This blend would seem to imply something around 15% better mileage for the petroleum part of the fuel, which will do something positive in stretching out petroleum supplies. All good.
A few entries back I guessed that we might be able to produce enough biofuel (biodiesel and ethanol) to support something like half of our current liquid fuel use. I might have been too optimistic, if comments of Bob Schildgen (who does a Mr. Green article in Sierra Magazine) are accurate.
In answering a reader's question about biodiesel, Schildgen asserts that all of the waste oil and grease from all of our restaurants would support about 2 percent of our current liquid fuel use. He also offers a statistic of 50 gallons of soybean oil per acre as a reasonable yield from U.S. agricultural land. He then states that, if all of the land in the lower 48 (I think he is referring to all land, not just arable land) were planted in soybeans, we would still find ourselves 20 billion gallons short of the 110 billion gallons of liquid fuel that we Americans use in a year. So reduce the planted area to the arable land that we can afford to give over to fuel production (remembering that we have to eat, too) and you get, let's see...carry the one...a whole lot less liquid fuel than we use today.
I'm going to modify my 1/2 guess to something like 1/10. An order of magnitude. Ninety percent less. Then go back to my reasoning of a couple of months ago:
The military gets first dybs. It's probably safe to say that petroleum fuel will continue to be directed toward the military, and the civilian sector will have to find ways to live with steadily decreasing petroleum liquid fuel supplies.
Airlines and surface transport will need to have priority access to the civilian sector liquid fuel.
Which leaves us civilians with enough fuel to support...what? I'm going to guess maybe 1/10 of the fuel we use today.
Posted by aquacura.com at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)