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Ethanol also has water issues:
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/13906471.htm
Water might turn out to be a bigger problem than oil.
Of course, if we had enough energy, we could build desalination plants...
But shipping cost money and energy. :-/
Exactly. The idea behind building ethanol plants in North Dakota is to put them where the corn is.
That depends on where you grow the corn: In the irrigated Sacramento Valley and San Joaquin Valley of California much corn is grown with humongous quantities of highly subsidized water, obscene quantities of fertilizer, and enough pesticides to kill off a medium-size ethnic group. The yields are fantabulous.
By way of contrast, in God's Own Country, i.e. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, parts of Nebraska and some other places we get plenty of rainfall to grow corn without irrigation, though the quantities of artificial fertilizer and pesticides are huge, and the erosion of soil is not a negligible issue.
Like Sweden, Minnesota has abundant water. Indeed, a Swede will feel right at home in Minnesota, except that most of the Swedes I know speak better English than many of us do. Shucks, we even have Finnlander jokes and Norweigian jokes, just like in 'da Old Country. Yah, you bet.
As far as the Great Plains go: I say, give it back to the bison and the Native Americans--and quit draining the Oglalla Aquifer.
That is the deal killer for ethanol made from corn or just about any crop used to make ethanol. It won't free us from fossil fuel usage, it just hides said usage behind a politically good facade.
I guess with the public, out of sight is out of mind.
http://unplanning.blogspot.com/2006/02/plans-that-stink-to-hog-heaven.html
I think we are seeing fertilizer production already moving toward where the NG is.
Yes, NG fertilizer production in US has become uneconomic, odds are that all US fertiliser plants using NG will shut down.
Cheap transportation has perhaps temporarily distorted normal economics, that has swung back a bit and will swing further.
There will be further 'adjustments' along these lines.
It's not really a complicated problem - just one that the ethanol plants need to address. They could make some of their money back selling recaptured process water for irrigation, or else just return it to their own process.
Now there's a topic I haven't heard much about in a long, long time, except maybe with regard to the Middle East.
The Saudis and their neighbors have the biggest ones in the world. Even with high-efficiency, multi-effect evaporators, vapor recompression, etc, they are highly energy intensive. To some extent, the Saudis are in effect drinking a certain portion of their oil and gas. I wonder how well the increased population of Saudi Arabia and some other countries in the area could be sustained without desalination.
Back in the Sixties the Johnson administration had gradiose ideas of making the Southwest deserts bloom through the use of huge dedicated nuclear-powered desalination plants. It doesn't look like the concept got very far, and given our current energy situation, I think we can kiss that one goodbye, at least in the near term.
Indeed, water resources is going to be a worsening problem in parts of the US, and we're not going to easily solve it through expending energy from our shrinking supplies.
There have been some wild schemes for building pipelines from the Great Lakes, but I suspect you can only do so much of that sort of thing before you seriously start impacting the hydrology in the Great Lakes area.
But they are all petroleum-powered, so far as I know. Israel's new Ashkelon desalination plant has its own natural gas power station.
There used to be proposals to tow icebergs down the the Middle East and sell them for fresh water.
-Ptone
Back in the 70's there were some schemes developed to supply SA with alternate sources of water that went to the extremes of sending tugs up to greenland and towing back an iceburg. In Riyadh the average humidity is 8%. You feel like you need a drink every 15 minutes of walking outside. If you leave a piece of bread out on the kitchen table, its rock hard in 10 minutes. Outside August temps are 127-130 in the SHADE! 104ºF at 12 midnight. In the Sun, temps reach 150-160ºF near ground surface. I've left a cassette tape in my car parked in the sun and come back to find a melted globb of plastic.
There are no rivers running all year anywhere in S.A. except for a short fat inky looking one downstream of the Riyadh sewage treatment plant, which quickly disappears into the sand.
Occasionally it will rain and the drops dry up on the way down and never hit the ground. Watch out for the lightning though.
Much of SA's water is drilled and pumped from undergound "fossil water" aquifers, meaning it entered the aquifers thousands of years ago and needless to say, just like the oil, once it's pumped out its never replenished.
We think we've got problems. All we have to do is downsize our cars. Try matching a camel on MPG-H20.
It is obviously a very inhospitable environment in which for humans to live.
The indigenous nomadic tribes seemed to have been able to make a go of it, but their population was but a small fraction of the population of modern-day Saudi Arabia. It seems that the very existence of modern Saudi Arabia is totally dependent upon consuming large amounts of oil, a certain fraction of which they drink, via oil-fired desalination plants.
These exemplary entities, such as Dubai, seem to be artificially propped up through a massive influx of fossil fuel. Am I being over dramatic, but does anyone else out there think that Dubai closely resembles a nicer version of the planet Tatuine (sp?) of Star Wars? It makes Las Vegas seem absolutely natural.
I feel too old to move anywhere, but if I had to, I think I'd pick one of the Scandanavian countries, as they seem to have mastered the art of living cooperatively instead of competitively. Or maybe I'm misinformed. The climate, though, is another story. Cold weather doesn't help curtail one's alcohol consumption.
We do not have an uncompetitive culture, for instance IKEA comes from Sweden and Nokia from Finland, both of them learned their skills on the domestic market. There is no socialist paradise in any country although Norway probably comes closest and Swedish health care is a good example of a lumbering command economy that produces a lot of aimless work and consumes vast ammounts of money.
I think the cold winter is a key factor. Collect a lot of firewood and have consensus in your house or you will die cold and miserable, repeat this for hundreds of generations and it affects the culture.
I was surprized at the work they would let me get involved with whenever I offered to try something new and different from my usual work. I think perhaps the Americans engineers specialize too much in that regard. I would never have been allowed to do 75% of the stuff I did, if I was with a US company, due to the specialist mentality they usually have. I learned much more than I would have otherwise and did so in a very short time. Perhaps, when you have a relatively small population and live in remote areas in harsh conditions, everyone develops a level of self sufficiency that is quite advanced, regardless of the collective good political atmosphere. The combination seems to be a good one.
There is much room for innovation with water conservation. Singapore may be on the cutting edge with its water reclamation plant (i.e., "from toilet to tap"). What, you didn't realize that your bottle of Evian was once T-Rex piss? Singapore is just making the hydrologic cycle a bit more concise. ; )
I am reminded of a benefit of trade / globalisation: agricultural production is determined by the least available of its requirements, be that water, fertilisers or minerals, labour, etc. The movement of these resources mutually increases production for deficient areas. The principle is a general one, and we have exploited it to our benefit.
Now imagine it in reverse.
"That is what Tainter meant by the cost of complexity. As resources decline, the solution often cause more problems, until it's just not worth it any more.
Ethanol also has water issues:
BISMARCK, N.D. - Ethanol plants need more than corn: If all the proposed factories in North Dakota were built, they would use more than 1 billion gallons of water.
Drought in future years could curtail North Dakota's burgeoning ethanol industry or at least limit potential plant sites, particularly in the Red River Valley, officials say.
Ethanol plants are big water users. The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based American Coalition for Ethanol says it takes at least 3 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of ethanol fuel.
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/13906471.htm
Water might turn out to be a bigger problem than oil.
Of course, if we had enough energy, we could build desalination plants