The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: March 22, 2007

138 comments on DrumBeat: March 22, 2007

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GliderGuider on March 22, 2007 - 3:09pm

Heinberg's article struck me as crucially important as well. If we are in fact going to be facing an across-the-board fossil fuel crisis in the near future, we'd best be ready to make some hard decisions on adaptation, curtailment and substitution. We probably won't but it would be nice if we had good data just in case someone decided to do something sensible.

On that note, if all FF's start to decline, the pressure on biofuels is going to become enormous. Just for shits and grins, the other day I did a calculation: if we took all the world's vegetable food crops and turned them into fuel, how much oil equivalent would we end up with? Here's the quote from the biofuels article on my web site:

How much oil-equivalent biofuel could we actually make if we turned all the world's major grain and oilseed crops into automobile fuel, leaving none whatever for food? In other words, what are humanity's relative energy requirements for food and transportation? Would their scales of use allow us to easily and effectively substitute a portion of our food energy use for transportation fuel?

To answer this question I considered ethanol from corn, wheat, rice, sugar cane and sugar beets, and biodiesel from soybeans and rapeseed (canola), plus palm&sunflower oils. In each case I converted the entire world crop into fuel, discounted the ethanol by 1/3 for its lower energy content, and converted the annual production in litres to the oil-industry standard measure of millions of barrels of oil equivalent per day. Here are the results:

Ethanol

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

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

Biodiesel

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

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

Palm&Sunflower oils:
World crop (Million tonnes): 42
Litres per tonne: 900
MBOE/day: 0.7

The total from turning virtually all of our food into fuel is 12.8 MBOE/day - only 15% of the current world oil consumption of 84 million barrels per day. To make matters worse, it takes a lot more energy to make biofuels than it does to simply pump oil from the ground and refine it. A rough estimate is that it takes at least twice as much. Accounting for this necessary energy outlay reduces the available net energy of our biofuels to less than 8% of the world's oil consumption.

This is one of the reasons why using crop-sourced biofuels for transportation is such a horrifically bad idea. We strip mine our top soil, we deplete our water tables, we starve everyone and we still have only an 8% solution. We all - individuals, countries and our whole civilization - need to be very, very cautious in promoting the use of biofuels, lest our thirst for transportation fuel overrun our common sense. And we must always remember to crunch the numbers.

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Don in Colorado on March 22, 2007 - 4:13pm

Wow.

Interesting piece of work, Glider.

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toilforoil on March 22, 2007 - 4:23pm

Once we get the tree huggers and duck lovers out of the way, we should be able to increase that total to 10%.

Mmmm.

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jokuhl on March 22, 2007 - 5:30pm

Fill'er up, please..
I'll have the Fois Gras with Maple Syrup glaze..

"Music to drown by. Now I know I'm in First Class"
- Tommy .. Titanic

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Engineer-Poet on March 23, 2007 - 12:53am

Well done! Amazing what nonsense can be dispelled with some scribbling on the back of an envelope.

Now the job is to get that news out there, so the propagandists get sneers and jeers when they try to push these lies onto the public. The sooner we can eliminate the credibility of the non-options, the sooner we can get policy aligned with the things we have to do.

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TenThousandMileMargin on March 23, 2007 - 8:57am

I suspect the enthusiam for biofuels has more to do with the fortunes which could be made than the potential for a solution. It may only end up being 1% of our fuel supply - but wouldn't you like to get your hands on the revenue from that one percent?
You could say the same about CTL - it may not sense from a global perspective, but a million barrels a day multiplied by $50 a barrel is nothing to sneeze at. Who will be the first CTL billionaire?

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Engineer-Poet on March 23, 2007 - 8:03pm

You could probably make a lot more money from building the energy systems to make biofuels into viable replacements instead of niche products with petroleum, but the visionaries behind these seem to be keeping quiet. I probably would too, in their position; the less attention you attract, the further you can get before the people whose interests would be threatened start to attack you.

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expat on March 23, 2007 - 2:00am

Though not in any sense a disagreement, I would like to point out that rapeseed oil can be poured directly into a diesel motor, at least when it is warm enough outside. This isn't exactly happening where I live in Germany (yet), but a lot of the small tractors here which are decades old won't have any problem, at least in the summer. And yes, there are a number of places which can press the oil locally. As a matter of fact, there is a dealer on the B3 parallel to the A5 Autobahn who can sell you a thousand liters to store at home, since such 'refined' oil is safe to handle - he uses the same plastic/metal enclosed containers that are common for wine or milk. (If we buy a diesel, I have thought about buying one or two to keep around the house in the garage.)

In other words, at least in terms diesel substitutes on farms, it is possible to imagine a fairly simple system, thus increasing the amount of energy available within a somewhat closed system.

I realize that this point doesn't apply to an agricultural production system which is no longer local, as in the U.S., but there is reason to believe that efficiency can be improved by removing the 'refining' step of biodiesel (at least for rapeseed) - especially when you look at some of the interesting work being done to modify a diesel's fuel system to allow it to burn straight plant oil efficiently, even in winter.

Obviously, this only replaces oil in a limited context, but considering the amount of energy currently used to get refined oil products to a farm, this is likely not a trivial gain. Equally obviously, this scenario only allows for farming to continue using mechanical means - it doesn't help with food distribution much, unless you have a decent electricified rail/barge network in place to move bulk amounts of grains.

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