<Rough notes for a Monday morning The Oil Drum Peak Oil and the Environment Part 3 - Day 1>

117 comments on Monday open thread

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xuewen on May 8, 2006 - 6:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
This is an upside if you reduce the calories from the diets of fat people who eat too much. Not so good if the calories are reduced from those diets who are already marginal.

In which regions are these oils produced? Whose diets and ecosystems is this ramped-up production going to affect?

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Stryker on May 8, 2006 - 11:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
These oils are produced in America.

Ramped up production will benefit the diets and the ecosystems of Americans.

Savvy?

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fallout on May 9, 2006 - 7:53am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Palm oil is not produced in America, Stryker, because oil palms are tropical plants, Arecaceaes. The African Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis) is native to west Africa, occurring between Angola and Gambia, while the American Oil Palm (Elaeis oleifera) is native to tropical Central America and South America.  Freezing temperatures kill both dead.

Please do try to avoid being an overly enthusiastic and uninformed shill for every bio feedstock that comes down the pipe.

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Mad Maxout on May 9, 2006 - 6:15pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
OK, you got me with being a bit Americano-centric with the upside post. In Brasil, the people are rather poor (except for the drivers) so diverting sugar could cause a problem. That's likely true in other sugarcane producing places. We Americans oversugar our foods with high-fructose corn syrup, so our diverting HFCS is a good thing. But Splenda needs sucrose from sugarcane as the feedstock. Fortunately, Splenda is 600 times sweeter than sugar, so diverting sugar to Splenda is a minimal load.

With palm oil, that comes from poor places too, so inadequate calories for food can be a problem there like Brasil. All in all, biofuel of all types hits a limit way before the quantity that allows driving SUVs on long-range commutes.

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117 comments on Monday open thread

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