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11 comments on The Bullroarer - Sunday 10 August 2008
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11 comments on The Bullroarer - Sunday 10 August 2008
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GAIA Host Collective
Courier Mail - Plantations to yield clean green fuel
'A hectare of the trees can produce 5500 litres of biodiesel a year – enough to run 100 cars for a year.'
Correct me if I am wrong, but 5500L/100 cars = 55L per car. So unless you are only going to drive for 1 week a year, I don't see these biofuels being particularly helpful in replacing oil, at least not for a car dependent society.
Its amazing how little proof reading (or fact checking) journalists and editors do really (I might note than when compiling stories I don't vet them - I just collect what I can in the time available and post it as a representative sample of what the press are saying).
I wonder how much petrol the average vehicle gets through - I'd say my family car gets refilled about once every 3 weeks - so 5500L would last me about 5 years (or 5 people with similar consumption 1 year).
Biofuels will never be a replacement for oil, but I figure they will be useful in rural areas at least.
The cities will have to go electric and more efficient in their use of energy.
According to the ABS, in 2004,
- there were 13.5 million vehicles
- of which 79% were private passenger vehicles, or 10.7 million
- these passenger vehicles burned through 14,882 million litres of petrol
- which is 1,390lt per passenger vehicle annually
- however, there were in 2001 about 7.4 million households in Australia, so that we had 1.4 vehicles per household
- thus about 2,000lt of fuel burned per household
- therefore, 55lt of biofuel, if it were exactly as efficient as petrol and diesel, would last the average household about a week and a half.
- A hectare providing 5,500lt would keep 2.75 households going.
Thus, we would need 20 million hectares of this magical biofuel. That is, basically 1 hectare per Australian resident. This would be 200,000km2, which is most of the area of the state of Victoria. Australia's area of 7.686 million km2 is only 6% arable land, or 460,000km2, so we'd be using half our arable land for biofuels.
Which seems a bit ambitious. Plus the people we export food to might get upset; in FY2001-2 we produced 42 million tonnes of grains, sufficient to feed 126 million people. So that trying to keep on truckin' but with biofuels would make about 50 million people go hungry.
Journos are so bloody lazy.
I live on a couple of acres of cleared land, which according to your figures Kiashu, I could fuel our own car plus a couple of other peoples. That might not be a bad idea in the years ahead.
Anyone out there who grows their own biofuels?
The figures assume that the "5,500lt per hectare" are correct. The rest of the article was nonsense, so we should be sceptical of those figures, too. After all, we're not told if the stuff requires any processing, ie is the 5,500lt gross or net?
You are wise to be skeptical
From my favourite site on all things "energy crop" related
New Crop Resource Online Program
Lets be optimistic and round that up to 10,000kg ... at 25% recovered oil thats 2500 kg which assuming a density not dissimilar to water is a volume of 2500L (its density would have to be half that of water to get the volumes described in the Courier article.
NOTE that this is the extreme upper end of the yield for the species which appears to vary by a factor of ten.
If you do refer to this site, note that for some strange reason (perhpas intelligable to US citizens) wieghts marked as MT mean Metric Tonnes and not Million or Mega Tonnes.