258 comments on DrumBeat: April 4, 2008
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258 comments on DrumBeat: April 4, 2008
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Maybe a decade ago, I heard an agronomist?/economist? on German radio discussing the fact that wheat exports are actually water exports. I can no longer remember the figure, but it was amazing - for some reason, I remember 7 in relation to one - my haziest best recollection is, 700 hundred tons of water for 1 ton of wheat, but it could also have been 7000 tons of water to 1 ton of wheat.
Which shows just how idiotic Saudi wheat growing truly is - for those that think ethanol is mind numbingly stupid.
If the moisture content of stored wheat is more than about 15% it molds. The figures you mention may represent the amount of water transpired by the growing wheat plant, but certainly aren't the amount exported along with the wheat. That water would have fallen as precipitation on dryland wheatfields anyway, or would have been evapotranspired elsewhere if not used to irrigate wheat. So saying that exporting wheat is actually exporting water is misleading.
What if you're pumping "fossil water" out of an aquifer to irrigate the wheat?
Good point! I've recently read two books about the dust bowl days of the 1930s and have become convinced that the dust bowl came to an end only because water from the Oglalla aquifer began to be applied to Southern Plains wheatfields on a large scale beginning in the '40s. At the rate the Oglalla is being depleted, dust bowl conditions are bound to return. My post didn't take into consideration irrigation water from aquifers being depleted faster than they can recharge. My own irrigation water comes from a largely snowmelt fed river. But even water from diminishing aquifers used to grow wheat isn't literally exported. I do get your point tho, and agree.
A relatively small amount of wheat or corn is irrigated.
Exporting corn is exporting energy as long as corn's price stays below it's energy content. Currently corn's energy content is in the area of $9-10/bushel when compared to LPG at retail. I know this is true because I heat with both.
When corn is exported the United States has to replace the lost energy content with more expensive energy imports which is stupid.
Corn exports should stop. It is in the self interest of the U.S..
Those who import corn usually use it as animal feed which is another big energy loser. Corn is more valuable for it's energy content that for animal feed at current prices. Corn is called a coarse grain because it is not suitable for human food except in the most desperate circumstances and then only relatively small amounts are needed.
Well, let's see; we can export a bushel of corn for $5.95, and import 2.8 gallons of gasoline at $7.56, and miss out on the opportunity to export 17 lbs of distillers grains ($1.70)
Net Loss: $1.61 + $1.70 = $3.31/bushel; Or, we can get our heads' out of our rearends, provide for our OWN people, and cut our exports of cattle feed to Communist Asian Countries by 60%.
$3.31 Lost for every bushel of cattle feed (corn) exported. This should be a "No-Brainer."
Your math may be spot on, so please don't tear me a new one, but are you saying that 1 bushel of corn produces the energy equivalent of 2.8 gallons of gasoline, or did I miss the point entirely?
Yes, and apparently he has found a way to stuff that bushel of corn in a gas tank with no processing. Beautiful!!
tstreet,
I think you've got me on that one. I suppose I would have to subtract a bit for the processing.
Let's whack off $0.25/gal ($0.75 total,) and call it even; okay?
$3.31 - $0.75 = $2.56 shot all to hell with every bushel exported. Still Silly.
Ethanol is not sustainable in any way, shape, or form. Robert Rapier has debunked you so often that I think he's given up. Yet you continue to spout "the big lie" over and over again, always looking for some new angle to push your agenda.
What is sustainable these days ? Agriculture ? Oil Drilling ?
According to some, the only thing that is sustainable is a world without humankind on it. Since I tend to like humans, being one of them, I consider this way of thinking to be terrifying.
I tend to think that local ethanol production beats foreign oil imports any day of the week. It doesn't drown us in debt and we don't have to spend $150 billion+ per year occupying the farm belt and securing the tanker lanes ;).
In the end, though, I think V2G is the way to go. Liquid fuels are too dangerous -- politically, environmentally, and ecologically. So a nod to RR on that count.
Solar+Wind+Nuclear with storage. To me, it's a no brainer. But some people seem to think the world can't run on anything other than dead microbes fermented in the ground millions of years.
It's 19th century thinking at best. At worst, it's a recipe for disaster.
Sorry, but this is entirely false. Not every civilization that has existed has raped and pillaged the world around them.
It is a choice we make.
Cheers
Then be careful who you indict -- a civilization or all of humankind.
You don't have to say, "how far can I drive my car on corn?" which is as nonsensical as it sounds. Just look for an easy substitute based on established off-the shelf technology. To figure out whether exporting corn is a bad deal, say: I can easily heat my house with the corn, and how much natural gas would that save that I could then easily use to run a car? Corn furnaces and natural gas cars are easy to get and don't require additional processing of either energy input.
BadgerB,
Actually, Jeff Broin, CEO of Poet (refiners of 1.1 Billion gallons of ethanol/yr,) states that his company can turn out 435 gallons of ethanol from 150 bushels of corn.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/10/cellulosic-ethanol-running-cars-o...
That would be about 2.9 gallons per bushel.
Add this to DOE's estimate that, on average, you only lose one half of one percent efficiency when running E10 vs. Gasoline, and I felt I was on pretty safe ground.
55% of the energy and only a one half of one % hit on mileage? The ballsiness of these administration guys to lie never ceases to amaze me. My personal experience as an obsessive Prius driver is that 10% ethanol is a 5% hit on my mileage, which, funny enough, is exactly what the law of conservation of energy would indicate.
The dry fate can be avoided it seems:
http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/
You need to actually spend time watching how the water flows and add organic material to the land. Not exactly the present method of doing business.
The point was, it is easier to export a ton of wheat than to try to make up the amount of water needed in growing that wheat where water is lacking.
Of course, without going into picky details, Germany does not use irrigation at all to grow wheat - and certainly not in the region where I live.
I posted this article back in January:
Saudi Arabia scraps wheat growing to save water
1 cubic meter of water is roughly equal to 1 tonne (1000 kilograms, not the same as the US "ton") so that is about 1300-1500 tonnes of water per tonne of wheat.
1 cubic meter = 1000 liters at 2.2 pounds (or 1 kg) per liter divided by 2,200 pounds per tonne. All numbers rounded where necessary for simplicity's sake but the decimal fraction wouldn't change much.
Point for your next trivia night:
A tonne is, by definition, the weight of a cubic metre of water.
Likewise a kilogram is, by definition, the weight of a litre (10cm cube)of water. 1000 litres in a cubic metre, hence 1000 kilograms in a tonne.
...but GreyZone probably knows this already and just didn't want to get into a long and "fascinating" discussion of the metric system.
I really hate to go into the details of the metric system, but I'm going to.
The original definition of the gram was the mass of 1 cc of water at 0°C. However, while that temperature is easy to achieve, the mass of water is pretty unstable at that temperature (having the habit of freezing and thawing and all), so in 1798 it was redefined to be the mass of 1 cc of water at 4°C. Anyway, because it is really hard to purify water to get it pure enough that it weighs 1 gram/cc the powers that be decided to officially define the kilogram as the mass of a 39.17 mm right cylinder of 90% platinum 10% iridium. The mass of this cylinder is very slightly greater than the mass of 1 cc of super-pure water with a specified ratio of oxygen isotopes in the water molecules. The prototype kilogram is stored under 2 bell jars in a vault in France.
As a side note, the density of water at 25°C is 997 kg/m^3, which is a bit lower than 1 tonne/m^3.
Making 700 tons of water realistic, in a German context. Obviously, Saudi Arabia, being both desert and much further south, is going to have a higher need of water to grow wheat.