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180 comments on DrumBeat: August 13, 2006

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TrueKaiser on August 13, 2006 - 12:11pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I really don't understand thinking like this -- that there won't be coffee and tea available? Come on. That's really silly.

no it's not that silly. Simply put will they use what little farmland they have left after loosing fossil fuel inputs to grow this stuff rather then food to feed their larger population? They can't rely on trade to get the food either since everyone around them is in the same position.

Even Kunstler falls into this ad absurdum line of thinking sometimes: plastics come from hydrocarbons and we're "running out" of oil therefore there won't be plastics for medical devices in the future. He says that the US won't be able to maintain it's nuclear arsenal because there won't be enough energy. Which is just stupid for about twenty reasons.

plastics are very much dependent on hydrocarbons. either we use them as the feedstock for the chemicals to make the plastics or we use them to power the farm equipment, natural gas to make the fertilizer to make the plants grow that we would make the plastics out of because doing it without these would not yield enough.

Stuff like this turns the whole argument into a cartoon. There are still at least a trillion barrels of oil available.

no one who know about this would argue that we are running out of oil even kunstler in his book makes this point. but what they do and you do not is account for the fact that we are running out of the high quality oil and the only oil that is left is the less useful lower quality's not only that this lower quality oil is also harder to extract and process. we will reach a point where oil is just not worth the cost of getting it before we ever run out of the stuff, long before.
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slaphappy on August 13, 2006 - 1:17pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

This whole  thing is extremely foolish.

It makes no sense whatsoever to produce fertilizer from natural gas, none. We don't neeed methane to produce fertilizer, we need hydrogen, and it just turns out that its cheaper to produce hydrogen from natural gas than from the thermal (or electrical) decomposition of water. That won't always be the case.

Farm equipment can actually run off of electricity easier than cars can. It isn't traveling long distances, and is generally so large that  amassive battery pack wouldn't be a big deal.

why all the doom and gloom? We use oil for this process because it's cheap, not because its needed.

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TrueKaiser on August 13, 2006 - 5:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
your mistaking money with energy. they are not the same.
you also need to look up something called the 'law of diminishing returns'
also just because it's possible to make fertilizer without natural gas, it is NOT possible to produce it as fast, as cheaply, or in such large amounts needed to continue to feed 6.5 billion people now and the 9 billion that will be alive by 2012. especially since the process is more complex to make it out of other thing then natural gas, this is why the old fashioned way of composting to make fertilizer can't do it in a fast enough fashion to beat our current way of doing it.

and while equipment can be made to run off electricity, it will end up costing more in the less obvious infrastructure to keep the electricity flowing which is NOT a trivial task.

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Nagorak on August 13, 2006 - 7:40pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
At the risk of sounding callous, the amount of people alive worldwide is irrelevant.  Areas that can't support themselves will end up having die-offs.  We're not going to change all our production over to food and stop growing coffee and tea.  Even as people are starving, we won't make that change.  The reason is because we're not just one homogenous country with a central worldwide government.  For this reason I think it's pointless to focus on whether there is enough crop land to feed everybody.  

As for farming, many of the best farming areas in the U.S. are also ideal locations either for wind or solar.  Now, there may be some question of how to store that power, whether with batteries or pumped storage, or maybe just having a long power cord trailing along behind the electric tractor?  In any case, with more decentralized power production in farming areas, we might be able to save on infrastructure upgrades and end up saving overall on the transition cost.  Not to mention, there's also biodiesel and everyone's favorite ethanol which might be able to find some use in farming.  

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Agric on August 13, 2006 - 11:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Artificial fertilisers double globally, likely to be more in USA, the available nitrogen to our food crops. If the USA had no artificial nitrogenous fertiliser crop yields would be at least 25% diminished until massive changes to agricultural methods could be implemented.

At the risk of being contentious, are you a recruiter for al Qaeda ;)

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eric blair on August 14, 2006 - 3:49am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
As for farming, many of the best farming areas in the U.S. are also ideal locations either for wind or solar.

  1. Farming IS capturing solar energy.
  2. wind and solar are not an either-or kind of thing.  Farming can go on under wind turbines.  PV solar and farming are hard to combine, unless you could get strips of PV panels to make a lattice over Ginsing.  
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slaphappy on August 17, 2006 - 8:02am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Be careful, notice what I said.

Current process is this...

  1. Dig up natural gas, pipe it around, and get it scrubbed down to something ready for use.
  2. Natural gas, convert to hydrogen.
  3. Catalyze hydrogen and nitrogen to produce ammonia.

It could just as easily work like this...

  1. Use electricity to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen.
  2. Catalyze hydrogen and nitrogen to produce ammonia.

Which process do you really think is simpler?

We don't need natural gas to produce fertilizer, we need energy, of just about any form. Electricity will do just fine. The end of natural gas isn't the end of fertilzer. This is a red herring.

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alistairC on August 14, 2006 - 4:40am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Aaaahhhh...

Makes a lot of sense! Indeed, tractor tyres are generally half-filled with water to improve traction... massive low-slung battery packs are not a problem!

And as a rural dweller, I won't necessarily miss the noise and diesel fumes very much...

Thanks for the policy idea! In France, agricultural diesel is tax-free i.e. less than half price. Replace that subsidy with an electric-tractor grant, a switch could happen very quickly.

Anyone know why it isn't happening already?

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