Demand for oil crops "a steamroller about to hit us"

[GliderGuider]

Demand for oil crops forecast to increase

The predicted demand from the biofuel market for oil and starch crops from 2010 was likened to "a steamroller about to hit us", a farmers' meeting was told.

Speaking in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, James Woolway, managing director of Opico, said that 17 million tonnes of oilseed rape - equivalent to a third of world production - would be needed to produce the 7.7 billion litres of biodiesel needed to meet the 5.75 per cent inclusion rate imposed on EU member states.

Up to a third of next year's US maize crop could end up feeding its bioethanol industry, the demand for which has already doubled the maize price in the past 12 months. Mr Woolway said: "Given this scenario, oilseed rape has got to increase in value and will merit a fresh look at how crop yields can be increased from the national average of just over three tonnes per hectare."

And away we go. The world wants lots and lots and lots and lots of nice sustainable crop-sourced biofuels. And what the world wants is what the world will be told it's getting. We can hand-wave the sustainability part, I'm sure. A third of the world's canola crop to feed into EU motors? Somebody's been sucking on an exhaust pipe.

[elehhhhna]

1. Maybe this will cause HFCS's OUT of all our food.

That would be a good thing.

Isn't corn the least=efficient biofuel source, though?

[phantom power]

2. What's going to happen is...

1) Fuel companies will out-bid poorer food customers. Yet another new class of people will fall victim to starvation in the name of filling the E85 Hummers purchased by rich Americans.

2) In order to supply the demand, yet more crop-land will be created out of former jungle, wilderness, grassland, etc, to try and grow these new fuel crops.

[Boxturtle]

3. Yes, but it is the most efficient at getting votes in the midwest.

Pursuing biofuels is going to have the unfortunate result of rapidly increasing prices for food.

[soothsayer]

4. and beer!

[Warpy]

5. Hemp is a great oil crop

and would provide things like a cheaper and more renewable source for paper pulp, clothing, and a whole host of other items.

Thank the DEA if that steamroller crushes us.

[NNadir]

6. There you go!

Problem solved!

:eyes:

[GliderGuider]

7. It's all in how you use it

While hemp is a fantastic crop for all kinds of products, including oil, and your DEA is a bunch of recto-cranially inverted bozos, here's something to keep in mind.

There is no starch or oil bearing crop on the planet capable of plugging the demand gap caused by a permanent 2% decline in oil production. Not without devastating planetary food supplies, fresh water supplies and soil fertility. Such fuel sources are by definition unsustainable in the context of the volumes required for transportation.

What we're seeing now is the realization that the boundary of the region of unsustainability is much, much closer than had been assumed by biofuel advocates. We will shortly be pushed well beyond that boundary. This is due to the uncritical acceptance of the idea pf biofuels by people who have the levers of legislative and market power, but no understanding whatever of the concepts of sustainability or net energy.

I want to see hemp gain wider acceptance too, but be careful what degree of success you wish upon it, or it may become just another part of the problem.

[DCKit]

9. OK, be that way.

So we set up thermal reformation factories at our sewage plants and turn poop into black gold with the added benefit of saving the rivers, lakes and oceans at the same time. POOP + H2O + Heat + pressure = oil + carbon at an efficiency of 85%. The technology exists for everything we need to do, it's the political will that is lacking.

[GliderGuider]

10. There are all kinds of things we ought to be doing, and this is one of them.

What I'm saying here is not "don't do it", but rather be aware of the limits of any of these processes, both in terms of output and side effects. Also, keep in mind the context into which they are being introduced - the context of an enormous system critical to our survival that will soon start running short of fuel. That context makes the over-use of such processes to the point of unsustainability virtually irresistible.

[whistle]

14. Hemp plant is the best

<snip>
FUEL
Hemp biomass as a source of fuel is the most under-exploited use of hemp, due to the fact that is economically unfeasible at this time. Hemp stalks can be used in the generation of energy through a process called 'chemurgy" which is a cross between chemicals and energy. The hemp stalk can be converted to a charcoal-like substance through a process called pyrolysis, and used for power generation and to produce industrial feed stocks. Auto giant Henry Ford was a pioneer in the pyrolysis process, and operated a biomass pyrolytic plant at Iron Mountain in Northern Michigan.

Hemp as an auto fuel is another potential use. Almost any biomass material can be converted to create methanol or ethanol, and these fuels burn cleanly with less carbon monoxide and higher octane. In fact, the diesel engine was invented to burn fuel from agricultural waste yet ended up burning unrefined petroleum. Hempseed oil can also be refined to produce a type of hemp biofuel. Woody Harrelson just toured with a diesel bus run on hemp biofuel, and a hempcar is touring this summer, demonstrating the environmental benefits of biofuels.
<more>

http://www.thehia.org/faqs/faq7.htm

[DCKit]

8. Efficient biofuels with benefits

Hemp for oil and everything else - clothes, fiberboard, rope, paper, etc... - and sugar beets for ethanol with waste for animal feed. It's a whole lot easier to convert simple sugars into ethanol than the complex carbohydrates and cellulose in corn. Unfortunately, the sugar beet lobby (if there is one) isn't owned by the richest and largest farming corporations in the world or we'd be there already.

If it weren't all about taking care of big business, corn never would have even been considered.

[GliderGuider]

12. Sugar beets

the world sugar beet crop is about 250 million tonnes per year.
Ethanol from 1 tonne: 108 litres.
Ethanol from converting entire crop: 27 billion litres or 7 billion gallons
Allowing for lower energy content, this becomes about 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
That's 0.4% of the world's oil consumption. We use a LOT of oil.

IMO the math sucks.

[Igel]

11. That's a lot of canola. n/t

[phantom power]

13. I think this entire century is a steamroller about to hit us.

[GliderGuider]

15. Yeah, now we're just doing the math on distance, speed and weight.

[GliderGuider]

17. Out of curiosity, what would we get if we turned ALL our food into fuel?

I got curious - how much oil-equivalent biofuel could we make if we turned all the world's major grain and oilseed crops into fuel?

I looked at ethanol from corn, wheat, rice and sugar beets.
I looked at biodiesel from soybeans and rapeseed (canola).

In each case I converted the entire world's crop into fuel, discounted the ethanol by 1/3 for its lower energy content, and converted to millions of barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Corn:
World crop (Million tonnes): 700
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 3.2

Wheat:
World crop (Million tonnes): 600
Litres per tonne: 370
MBOE/day: 2.5

Rice:
World crop (Million tonnes): 600
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 2.7

Sugar Beets:
World crop (Million tonnes): 250
Litres per tonne: 108
MBOE/day: 0.3

Soybeans:
World crop (Million tonnes): 270
Litres per tonne: 140
MBOE/day: 0.5

Rapeseed:
World crop (Million tonnes): 55
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 0.4

The total from turning most of our food into fuel: 9.6 MBOE/day. This is about 12.5% of the current world oil consumption.

This is why crop-sourced biofuels are a bad idea in the context of transportation fuels.

[jpak]

18. Another ridiculous canard

No one ever claimed that biofuels could replace petroleum - no one...

Energy for transport in the Post Petroleum (no)Future will be based on a variety of "fuels" - human power (bicycles and "feets"), animule power (carts & buggies), electricity, biofuels and hydrogen.

...all from renewable sources...

...and the alternative(s) is/are?????

[GliderGuider]

19. I'm just pointing out the issues of scale.

And yes, there are in fact a lot of people out there thinking that biofuels will save us.

My point is that crop-based biofuels have no ability to replace ANY globally significant portion of petroleum, especially as supply and demand begin to diverge. A 2% loss of petroleum supply (one very gentle, early post-peak year's worth of decline) could chew up 15% of the world's food if we let it.

We need to recognize that the integration of biofuels into the global transportation system needs to be done very, very cautiously, and only makes sense in quite limited applications. This has nothing to do with net energy, even, though that constrains the situation even more. It's one of those scale problems that tends to get handwaved (or ignored) a lot.

If all our food could replace only 12.5% of our oil use (say 20% of our transportation requirements), how many feet, bicycles and batteries would it take to replace the other 80%? The only rational answer is that the system as it stands is not sustainable from any perspective, and that a combination of conservation, demand destruction, system realignment, system collapse and "customer reduction" is the only solution set that will bring it back into balance.

[NNadir]

20. Well, when you point out issues of scale, you interfere with religious faith.

There are lots of examples of this.

If you do calculations it will be even worse. Some people really, really, really, really can't handle numbers beyond the size of the check on the trust fund payments.

I do think that some biofuels, especially biodiesel, could address certain types of problems, particularly with lubricants. But yeah, you're right. The contention that biofuels could replace petroleum even marginally is absurd on its face. That absurdity will not prevent repetition of the argument however.

[phantom power]

21. I think I will bookmark this. I bet it will be useful in future threads.

[GliderGuider]

28. I've added this information to the biofuels page on my web site

http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Biofuels.html

[GliderGuider]

23. In my haste I left out ethanol from sugar cane.

Sugar Cane:
World crop (Million tonnes): 1324
Litres per tonne: 100
MBOE/day: 2.5

This brings the total to 11.3 MBOE/day, or a whopping 14% of the world's petroleum consumption.

My deepest apologies for ignoring the biofuel that has made Brazil petroleum-independent...

[jpak]

16. The Sky Is Falling!!!!111...the Sky Is Falling!!!111...(not)

There are two varieties of oilseed rape - one for livestock feed (that is mildly toxic to humans) and CANOLA - the low (toxic) erucic acid variety raised for canola oil.

The former is used for biodiesel - not the latter.

Most of the EU rape-oil crop is used for livestock feed (and/or as a winter cover crop).

Furthermore, the protein rich by-product from rape-oil extraction is high quality livestock feed - it doesn't magically disappear when the oil is extracted for biodiesel.

No babies will starve in the street because of this...

nice try though!!!!1111

[DCKit]

22. Give it up already!!!!

You folks are (intentionally) ignoring that ethanol and biodiesel are NOT the only options. Wind, wave and solar power are each proven technologies too and electricity can be used to "make" hydrogen fuel as well. Let's not act like THEM and insist that the glass is half full and that the mere thought of alternatives will lead to the end of our way of life. Besides, the coal council says we have more coal under those mountains in WV and KY to last for centuries, we just have to tear them down to get at it.

[jpak]

24. Welcome to DU

and research my posts in this forum - I agree with you on the other alternatives...

:hi:

[GliderGuider]

25. Ah, the lure of the electric car.

More numbers, I'm afraid.

Electric vehicles are about four times as energy efficient as petroleum-driven ones. So if you could replace the heat energy of 1/4 of the petroleum used for transportation with electricity, you could keep right on motoring.

Let's see. 80 million barrels per day of oil, 65% of which is used for transportation - that's right on 50 million bbl/day.
Now electrical transportation is 4 times as efficient, so you need to replace the energy of only 50/4=12.5 mbpd of oil.
Oil holds 1700 kWh/bbl, so you need to replace about 22000 million kWh per day.
At 24 hours per day, that's a bit under 1 TW of additional generating capacity.
That's not so bad, because the world has about four times that amount installed already. So if we just expand the worlds generating capability by 25% we can run all our transportation as well.

Here's where the fun begins. The world's electrical supply is about 15% nuclear, 15% hydro, and 70% fossil (coal and NG). About 2% comes from renewables. As the proportion from NG starts to shrink, it will be made up mostly by coal, as will any additional capacity requirement. Like that 25% extra for the cars. Renewables will generally lose out to coal due to economics for at least the next 15 years, which are the critical ones.

Oh, there's also the CAPEX for fleet replacement to consider, but that's another thread.

Scale, scale, scale.

[4dsc]

26. electric cars need oil to build

Does it take more or less oil to make an electric car versus a regular automobile?? Either way it take oil..

[GliderGuider]

27. But we can do it with biofuels instead. Right?

Jesus, what a mess.

[conning]

29. We are assuming

that all of our planet's land (and water) is available for human use. If we were able to view the matter from a planetary perspective, we would understand that the planet needs significant amounts of land in order to regulate its climate.

This human-centered (anthropocentric) bias is central to the modern mind. How can we address that bias?

[GliderGuider]

30. Overall, we cannot address that bias.

The anthropocentric bias is central to our self-consciousness, and as a result may be regarded as primarily genetic in origin. This leads into discussions of altruism, Dawkins' "selfish gene", inclusive fitness and man/nature dualism. While the anthropocentric (or perhaps more importantly, egocentric) worldview can be modified to some extent on an individual level, there is no chance that humanity will change its perspective en masse. As species members we will wait for the impacts to become personal then do whatever we can to protect ourselves, our families and our tribes. The rest of the world over the horizon will be expected to look after itself as it always has.

[hunter]

31. Nature will solve that little problem.

We won't like the solution much, but we had the opportunity to live in peace with our environment, but we screwed up, as always.

I think dead wind generators are going to be our civilization's version of Easter Island's big stone heads.

[GliderGuider]

32. A shiver ran down my spine when I read that.

I think dead wind generators are going to be our civilization's version of Easter Island's big stone heads.

That makes a properly post-apocalyptic vision in the mind's eye.

[phantom power]

33. And all we hear are the rusty breezes

pushin around a weathervane Jesus
--The Tragically Hip