Running the long-term numbers on biofuels
It's pretty easy to think that our transportation problems will be solved if we just switch to a hybrid or commute in a biodiesel Hummer. But the Partnership for a Sustainable Methow and Energy Bulletin published an article yesterday that has a dour prediction of our future, even if biofuels do become ubiquitous in the years ahead.
The article, by Dana Visalli, puts the world's daily energy use and production into context, and it's a fairly frightening context. For example, each gallon of fossil fuel takes 98 tons of "prehistoric, buried fossilized plant material". Each day, we burn as much hydrocarbon as the amount of carbon plants sequester in a year. Ethanol's energy return is somewhere between 1:1 and 1.3:1 (although some Brazilian sugarcane gets 8:1). Plus, humans already use about 40 percent of the annual photosynthetic productivity and the best cropland is already being used to grow food. Oh, and the population is growing. Visalli recommends consuming and driving less. Obvious solutions to an obvious problem.
[Source: Energy Bulletin]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Howard Lee Harkness 10:48PM (8/14/2006)
Guess what? We are going to be consuming less energy per capita fairly soon, whether or not we want to.
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Howard Lee Harkness 8:27AM (8/15/2006)
Imagine that you were an independent trucker. What if you could drive your rig onto a railcar, have it secured, and then make an LA-NY run while vegging out watching movies or whatever -- all for less cost than the diesel fuel that would be required for the same trip? Convenient, safe, and cost-effective! Would you want to do that? Seems to me that it would be a no-brainer.
Guess what? You can't. IT'S ILLEGAL. Decades ago, the rail companies, in a counter-productive fit of paranoia over trucking competition, successfully lobbied Congress to outlaw that very scenario.
In order to ship a trailer by rail, you have to purchase and provide the flatcar, do all of the loading and securing yourself, and you can't ship the whole truck, but only the trailer. That very effectively prevents all but the very largest trucking firms from using rail at all.
We could almost instantly reduce US dinofuel consumption by more than 5% just by repealing some insanely stupid laws. Not only that, but the rail companies would actually make more money!
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MikeW 11:08AM (8/15/2006)
I though the current human consumption of fossilized energy was about five years per day, still one per day still really sucks.
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