Does it simply come down to one's path?  If you come to The End by way of fundimentalist interpretations of the Bible, then Tainter is lost, and seeking.  If you come to The End by way of Tainter, then the fundimentalists are lost, and seeking.

Just for the record...Tainter does not judge scanning behavior that way.  He would not say fundementalists are "lost."  Scanning behavior is not a bad thing.  

As for the rest...Tainter's work is based on what happened in other societies as they faced diminishing returns and collapse.  Obviously, the End Times preacher's is not, since if if the world had actually ended before like he's predicting, we wouldn't be here to argue about it.

Scanning behavior is, as Leanan has observed, what we're doing here - the corporate treadmill isn't working, the American Way Of Life isn't working, our Dads were able to support a family on one paycheck at the widget factory, and buy a house, and now it's all we can do working 2 jobs to pay the rent on a little shitbox studio. Dating isn't working. Child-raising isn't working. Finding friends isn't working - no more dropping by a friend's house to hang out, or going fishing together, now friends are anyone who doesn't actually give you the Stare Of Death in the halls at work and you actually eat lunch with, sometimes.

We're working harder and harder for less and less. In this situation, people start looking around...... "Hmm, I feel like I'm ramming my head into a wall here, maybe I should drop everything and join the Navy" Or join the Moonies. Or move back in with Mom. Scanning behavior - scanning through what other channels may offer, this channel appears to be the one where I'm a 2-dimensional cardboard cutout of a person, running harder and harder to stay in place, so let's start looking around, because almost anything is looking better. Control theorists call it "hunting", when a system is no longer at a state of equilibrium and starts oscillating, wavering around, in effect trying to hunt for, and find, a new state of equilibrium.

This is why damned few 1950s suburbanites dropped out of life and went off to live in the woods in a yurt. Things were good for them, their income allowed buying a house, supporting a wife and kids, and even a pension and savings. Yes, things were really like that then. These days, I think most of us are ready to go live in the woods in a yurt - there is nothing stable about modern downsized, H1B'd, outsourced, Patriot Acted, surveilled, American life.

Scanning behavior does not mean changing what one does toward another set goal, it means scanning, hunting, searching. It means a much larger range of what we see possible for ourselves, since what we're doing now isn't working. The Germans were heavy into scanning mode when their economy crashed in the 1930s, Hitler looked pretty damned good to starving and insecure people who'd normally never have done anything but laugh at a humorless little corporal from Austria.

We need to understand scanning behavior, because TPTB sure do. If the US economy does a real crash, some of us will indeed become Storm Troopers for the Empire, because it beats starving. Others of us will be yurts in the woods, or any number of other ways to get by. We will indeed see TheOilDrummers helping round up, or running from, other TheOilDrummers.

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Jason,   I'll try to answer some of your questions and, at the same time, I'll make some comments on the subject of EROEI for ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil. It will be the last time I'll do that as I think it is useless to insist on this anymore. You ask:  

1) "So why is it the orthodox peakers insist on ignoring the amazing progress down there? Why do you think?"  

Well, I think it is based on the bad records for USA's ethanol from corn.Moved by sound arguments, they have developed a personal rejection to the idea of ethanol AS A WHOLE. Then they have extended this to ethanol from sugar cane. Perhaps someone has some seen bad records about ethanol from USA grown sugarcane, too.   However, when we consider sugar cane and ethanol production under Brazilian conditions - well, everything becomes VERY different. I have consumed a lot of space in this List writing about this subject last year and I don't need to repeat myself. Then the honorable Tad Patzek published, in 2005, an undervalued EROEI for Brazilian ethanol from sugar cane and his paper seems to have been converted into a kind of Bible for some people. That is not good, because we can't be in a position of `believing' or `not believing' in ethanol.   So, Tom Robertson is right when he claims for better and more uniform methodology to calculate EROEIs. I'm very sure about the method we use in Brazil but I wait with great hope that Nate Hagens can bring us some new lights.  

Now consider my position: I live in Brazil, I'm familiar with sugar cane and ethanol production since the very beginning of the pioneering effort in the seventies, I have accompanied all the evolution of this industry along 30 years.  I have being farming sugar cane myself for decades, evolving to organic cultivation in 1986 - twenty years from now. So I feel really very uncomfortable when I see any comparison that considers Brazilian ethanol in the same level of US corn ethanol.   Corn is an annual culture that demands a lot of oil for fertilizers andpesticides, a lot of oil for agricultural machines and, in USA, demands a high toll in subsidies to survive. Sugar cane is a semi-perennial culture, with MUCH less agrochemicals consumption than corn's, for conventional cane.

The process of getting sugar (saccharose) from cane stalks uses simply mechanical pressure and water, a cold process. There's no need to convert starch into simpler sugar by fermentation and high temperature, as for corn. All the mechanical, thermal and electrical energy needed to process sugar cane and convert it into alcohol and/or sugar comes entirely from bagasse combustion, in a process that produces surplus electrical energy sold to the grid and an excess of unused bagasse. It does not consume any fossil fuel for that.

Furthermore, no part of the whole agriculture and industrial processes receives ANY kind of subsidies. How can someone imagine that these so different conditions are alike? [comparing Brazilean sugar cane ethanol with U.S. corn ethanol]   You can find here a lot of mills/distilleries that are 50 or more years old,still farming their same plots of sugar cane with conventional technique and having not depleted their soils yet. The organic sugar cane industry is newer, about 20 years old, and it recycles its soils and builds up fertility every year.  

With no subsidies the industry thrives - 340 mills and distilleries, withadditional 60 under construction.  

2)"Do you know how many acres of sugar are now landed to handle Brazil's ethanol needs?"  

The total area dedicated to sugar cane in Brazil is now 6 million hectares(14.8 million acres). Of these, 5.4 million ha are devoted to sugar and ethanol.  The rest, to liquors and animal forage. Half of the 5.4 million hectares goes to ethanol, half to sugar. With 2.7 million hectares (0.85% of its agricultural land) Brazil covers its present ethanol needs and exports 2.5 billion liters.   14.5 billion liters are used to replace gasoline - 42% of all the neededgasoline has already been replaced by alcohol. Since its beginning, in the seventies, until 2005, this represented a saving of 105 billion dollars(corrected for 2005) in oil (gasoline equivalent) imports. In volume, it helped to keep 20% of the known Brazilian oil reserves untouched.   Brazil's self-sufficiency in oil, announced officially last Friday, has been made possible exactly because of the production and use of ethanol as gasoline replacement. 95% gasoline replacement is easy to achieve in 'four more years' (Oh, that phrase!), but it is planned to happen in accordance with Petrobras possibility of exporting the resulting large amounts of surplus gasoline. The idea is to mix ethanol and gasoline and to export E10 and E85 ready gasoline mixes, using a web of alcohol pipelines leading fuel from producing centers at Central and Southeast regions to specialized terminals in Atlantic harbors.  

3) "How many acres do they plan on planting in order to handle demand from a USA trying to wean itself from $12 gallon gasoline in 2010?"  

There's NO plan to handle ethanol demand from USA. At the present state of art, it would demand 15 % off all agricultural land of Brazil. Nonsense, too much monoculture. Plans under implementation now  include reaching only a 90% increase in cane production, with 80% land expansion by 2010. With the more productive (+ 30%) varieties that will be harvested after 2009 and the usual 3% a year improvement in industry yields, this expansion will be enough to cover all the internal needs and to have a 6 billion liters exporting capacity. Japan possibly will be the major client, seconded by USA.  

The American nation will have to solve its problem of oil and fuels dependence by itself and I do hope it can do that very soon, by reducing its consumption by at least 50% - or else the problem will be unmanageable. Other Central and South America countries could also contribute in part to help mitigate US fuels trouble. But, of course, it all depends of WHEN Peak Oil turns effective. Is there enough time left? Are there concrete initiatives contemplating mitigation and the all needed reduction of military expenses? Present scenarios are not encouraging.

Furthermore, population still increases and the globe heats up...  

4) "How long and expensive is it to build a sugar ethanol processing plant?"  

It depends on the scale. In general, a mill/distillery is built to both produce sugar and alcohol. A medium size mill/distillery, producing 80 million liters of ethanol from 1 million tons of sugar cane stalks (yearly) would cost 50 million dollars and would take 2 to 3 years to be built. And would demand 12 thousand hectares of medium technology conventional cane. The major part of the mills/distilleries that will start operation in 2006 and 2007 are larger, projected to process from 4 to 7 million tons of cane stalks yearly, an investment of 150 to 200 million dollars.  

I hope this could be of some help help.   Milton Maciel in Brazil

~~~~~~~ EnergyResources Moderator Comment ~~~~~~~~(...)"Take ethanol production in Brazil, for example. Sure they are getting a lot of energy from sugar cane--particularly as they learn to use every part of the plant.However, you hear little about how the nutrients that go into growing all that sugar cane will be replaced--particularly when they essentially "mine" their soils by using just about every part of the plant but its shadow.

   --------------------------------------------
[Milton responds to Tom Robertson re: 'mining the soil':

"My dear Tom,I have shown at least twice, here in our List, the issue of nutrients for sugar cane in Brazil. There is not such a thing as `mining our soils by using every part of the plant but its shadow' (clever phrase!)This is not happening for the moment: only stalks are taken from the culture field. All straw and tops stay there with the shadow.

There isn't still any ethanol distillery working in large scale with cellullosic ethanol. Their idea is, effectively, to bring straw from the field and burn it at the boilers, so they can produce more ethanol from the preserved bagasse. This could increase ethanol yield by 80%.

Here I agree with you: that would be stupid, depriving soil from consistent protection and nutrition that is now fed back to soil by the straw and tops(what they call `trash'). It would increase erosion rates and increase [demand for]mineral nutrient consumption for replenishment, while depriving soil from the all important organic matter that is now returned.

In the large and small areas where we farm sugar cane organically, we already have a much higher yield in stalks and saccharose contents (more than 60% as compared to conventional), exactly because we keep all possible `trash' and never burn the fields before harvesting. Furthermore, instead of having a semi-perennial culture with 6-7 years cycle, we are getting perennial areas, with more than 18 years without any plant renewing. This result is far better than that we could get if cellullosic ethanol could be already feasible - which it is not.

From one ton of stalks, we get at the field and at the mill:.150 ton of sugar;.140 ton of bagasse;.140 ton of `trash'.  All the rest is water.

The sugar in solution in cane juice is processed into crystal sugar and/or ethanol. The bagasse fraction is used as the sole energy source for the industrial process. And `trash' is kept in the field, sometimes burned, sometimes not.

Sugar (saccharose) and alcohol (ethanol) are only carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, taken by the plant from water and air. Nutrients in solution of processed juice or molasses return to soil as vinasse.  So, Tom, there isn't that `mining' of soils here.

Even the bad guys (who are majority), that farm chemically, make the needed reposition of the main nutrients, using their chemical fertilizers and, when available, also vinasse and bagasse ashes. They also take good care of their soils relative to erosion, so they can farm sugar cane for decades and decades always in the same plots, with just a 15% yearly rotation with leguminous [plants] in the areas they are forced to renew.

The only mining that happens is the normal mining of nutrients that is always required for ANY agricultural activity - the mining of phosphate rock, lime and some other macro and micronutrients ores, taken elsewhere, transported, processed into fertilizer and transported once again to the farms. Never mind if you're cultivating corn, soybean, oranges, pasture or sugar cane. Sugar cane, indeed, is the least nutrient consuming of all large crops in Brazil.  But agriculture is this way: you mine from A and farm at B. The less we are dependent of this, the more we recycle nutrients, then the more we approach the Organic way of agriculture.

And this makes any biofuel viable, even poor corn ethanol could gain some momentum. Only SOME, as miracles are much more difficult to happen!

...Milton Maciel in Brazil

But that makes EROEI =1.3 (claimed for corn ethanol) much more attractive than I had understood it to be. It means that each 100,000 BTU invested produces 230,000 BTU. (That is, (230,000-100,000)/100,000 = 1.3)

Is the standard terminology to include "Energy invested" in both the numerator and the denominator?