Don’t worry, just a little bump - $70 is just around the corner. Short traders just keep making those margin calls, mortgage the house if you have to. Fortunes await you! PO is for pansies and doomers. At $70 short some more ..... it is going back to $22 .... the world is awash with oil ........ reality has nothing to do with it, its all in those charts!!!!!!!!!!
The prupose of my last post was to stop the reidiration of already debunked aspects. I'm not your internet slave. Do the searching yourself.
On another note: you (and many of the other advocates of biodisel), are not taking in account the environment effects of this. Biodisel is not "green" energy. The areas in which are proposed to grow this palm oil is the rainforest. There are some VERY harmful effects to mass cutting of the rainforest (look it up).
If by some miracle, this takes off on a large scale, I see desertification to all of the cleared land in less than 10 years.
Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 5:16 pm Post subject: Alt fuels
Making a coherent argument should not be that difficult. You can't expect me to refute every argument on the entire internet. You seem to be making sweeping statements, defending them with vague references.
Biodiesel is not the same as TDP (as CWT's technology is known) which produces a product chemically almost identical to petro diesel. For lack of a better term one might call it "green" diesel or "renewable" diesel. TDP also does not rely on palm oil, or any other edible oil. As I said, a factual argument is always helpful.
Explain, if you would, how converting waste into a useful product is bad for the environment. The way I see it, it is win-win-win.
Also of note: the process uses water (steam) so wet wastes can be fed to the system directly. In many other processes you have to dry the waste first, often using as much energy as you end up recovering.
Read a quote from the "life after the oil crash" site...
Quote:
"What About Biofuels Such
as Ethanol and Biodiesel?"
Biofuels such as biodiesel, ethanol, methanol etc. are great, but only in small doses. Biofuels are all grown with massive fossil fuel inputs (pesticides and fertilizers) and suffer from horribly low, sometimes negative, EROEIs. The production of ethanol, for instance, requires six units of energy to produce just one. That means it consumes more energy than it produces and thus will only serve to compound our energy deficit.
In addition, there is the problem of where to grow the stuff, as we are rapidly running out of arable land on which to grow food, let alone fuel. This is no small problem as the amount of land it takes to grow even a small amount of biofuel is quite staggering. As journalist Lee Dye points out in a July 2004 article entitled "Old Policies Make Shift From Foreign Oil Tough:"
. . . relying on corn for our future energy needs would
devastate the nation's food production. It takes 11 acres to
grow enough corn to fuel one automobile with ethanol for
10,000 miles, or about a year's driving, Pimentel says. That's
the amount of land needed to feed seven persons for the
same period of time.
And if we decided to power all of our automobiles with
ethanol, we would need to cover 97 percent of our land with
corn, he adds.
Biodiesel is considerably better than ethanol, but with an EROEI of three, it still doesn't compare to oil, which has had an EROEI of about 30
While any significant attempt to switch to biofuels will work out great for giant agribusiness companies (political campaign contributors) such as Archer Daniels Midland, ConAgra, and Monsanto, it won't do much to solve a permanent energy crisis for you.
The ghoulish reality is that if we wanted to replace even a small part of our oil supply with farm grown biofuels, we would need to turn most of Africa into a giant biofuel farm.
Obviously many Africans - who are already starving - would not take kindly to us appropriating the land they use to grow their food to grow our fuel. As author George Monbiot points out, such an endeavor would be a humanitarian disaster. Any attempt to turn Africa into a large-scale biofuel farm will likely result in a continental-sized insurgency that would make the current disaster in Iraq look like a cakewalk.
Assuming the conversion of Africa into a large scale biofuel farm is even economically, technically, and militarily viable, and putting the humanitarian concerns of such a project aside for a moment, we would simply be replacing our "dependence on foreign oil" with "dependence on foreign grown biodiesel."
Some folks are doing research into alternatives to soybeans such as biodiesel producing pools of algae. As with every other project that promises to "replace all petroleum fuels," the project has yet to produce a single drop of commercially available fuel. This hasn't prevented many of its most vocal proponents from insisting that algae grown biodiesel can solve our energy problems.
The fact that so many people in the green/environmental movement refuse to acknowledge the fundamental inability of fuels like biodiesel to replace more than a tiny portion of our petroleum consumption underscores why a complete collapse of the petroleum powered world may now be unavoidable. As Dr. Ted Trainer explains in a recent article on the thermodynamic limitations of biomass fuels:
This is why I do not believe consumer-capitalist society can
save itself. Not even its "intellectual" classes or green
leadership give any sign that this society has the wit or the
will to even think about the basic situation we are in. As the
above figures make clear, the situation cannot be solved
without huge reduction in the volume of production and
consumption going on.
The current craze surrounding biodiesel is a good example of what Dr. Trainer is talking about. While folks who have converted their personal vehicles to run on vegetable oil should certainly be given credit for their noble attempts at reducing our reliance on petroleum, the long-term viability of their efforts is questionable at best. Once our system of food production collapses due to the effects of Peak Oil, vegetable oil will likely become far too precious/expensive a commodity to be burned as transportation fuel for anybody but the super-rich. As James Kunstler points out in an April 2005 update to his blog "Cluster Fark Nation", many biodiesel enthusiasts are dangerously clueless as to this reality:
Over in Vermont last week, I ran into a gang of biodiesel
enthusiasts. They were earnest, forward-looking guys who
would like to do some good for their country. But their
expectations struck me as fairly crazy, and in a way typical
of the bad thinking at all levels of our society these days.
For instance, I asked if it had ever occurred to them that
biodiesel crops would have to compete for farmland that
would be needed otherwise to grow feed crops for working
animals. No, it hadn't. (And it seemed like a far-out
suggestion to them.) Their expectation seemed to be that
the future would run a lot like the present, that bio-diesel
was just another ingenious, innovative, high-tech module
that we can "drop into" our existing system in place of the
previous, obsolete module of regular oil.
Kunstler goes on to explain that when policies or living/working arrangements are set up around such unexamined expectations, the result is usually a dangerous deepening of our reliance on cheap energy and "easy motoring."
That, in a nutshell, basically explains the scalabilty of all bio-fuels. I in no way am saying it won't help. But as expressed earlier in this thread:
Quote:
To start the debate, I think it comes down to EROEI, scalability, energy density, and time. We are going from a stock to a flow of energy. While biofuels have great potential and I support their development, they will only replace or supplement existing liquids fuels on a small scale.
Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 7:22 pm Post subject: Alt fuels
Thanks for your quotes. None of this is relevant, though.
TDP is not ethanol and neither is it biodiesel. In a nutshell it is a process for converting organic waste into diesel (alkanes, i.e. chemically distinct from biodiesel, an ester, but similar to petro diesel).
Using waste means no need for an "energy crop". No need to find farmland to grow the crop. Just use a feedstock that is in no short supply anywhere: waste. Al the arguments about competing for farmland are thus irrelevant.
Since wastes are generated on a terrific and growing scale, I don't see why this is limited to a small scale. Since wastes are already collected and transported to central disposal facilities, collection is not a problem either.
I still don't see a fact backing the small scale conclusion.
Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 7:48 pm Post subject: Re: Alt fuels
Optimist wrote:
Explain, if you would, how converting waste into a useful product is bad for the environment. The way I see it, it is win-win-win.
Because basic ecology says otherwise. In nature, there is no such thing as "waste." There are no free lunches. You take away the organic matter that gives the soil fertility and you must replace it with inorganic fertilizers just like we have been doing to almost all farm land across the world.
How many fields are plowed today that expose a healthy soil full of organic matter, worms, and insects where the birds flock? Most are devoid of the natural humus of soil chemistry. Intensive bio-fuel production will reap the same results. Soil degradation world-wide. _________________ A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
Live in Arizona? Check out: http://sustainablearizona.org and read my blog.
Last edited by MonteQuest on Mon Jun 20, 2005 8:39 pm; edited 1 time in total
While biofuels have great potential and I support their development, they will only replace or supplement existing liquids fuels on a small scale.
That's a rather sweeping statement. Care to back that up with some facts or statistics? Allow me to state the opposite, and back it up with some numbers.
Quite simple, for the same reason that we could not, and can not, grow enough rubber trees to meet the demand for tires. We are switching from a stock of energy to a flow of energy. It is innane thinking to believe that we can "produce" energy at the same rate and quality that we can "extract" it from a stockpile that took millions of years to accumulate. There will be "bad years" and weather related losses with biomass production. With oil, all we ever had to do was open the spigot.
And with 3 billion more people destined to occupy the planet over the next 50 years, the competition for arable land, water, and fertilizers for food production will make for some interesting choices.
Biofuels will be nothing more than an individual and local solution, but a good one at that. _________________ A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
Live in Arizona? Check out: http://sustainablearizona.org and read my blog.
Why on earth is this thread a sticky at the top? It appears to be just another run of the mill threads on Biofuels. What makes it worthy of surviving at the top of the forum? Unsticky it and let it survive on it's own merits if there is enough interest in maintaining the debate.
Why on earth is this thread a sticky at the top? It appears to be just another run of the mill threads on Biofuels. What makes it worthy of surviving at the top of the forum? Unsticky it and let it survive on it's own merits if there is enough interest in maintaining the debate.
Because it was suggested by Lorenzo and and ordered so by Aaron.
Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 6:44 am Post subject: Re: Alt fuels
MonteQuest wrote:
Because basic ecology says otherwise. In nature, there is no such thing as "waste." There are no free lunches. You take away the organic matter that gives the soil fertility and you must replace it with inorganic fertilizers just like we have been doing to almost all farm land across the world.
How many fields are plowed today that expose a healthy soil full of organic matter, worms, and insects where the birds flock? Most are devoid of the natural humus of soil chemistry. Intensive bio-fuel production will reap the same results. Soil degradation world-wide.
Funny how you keep asserting things like this even though I have repeatedly proven your uneducated allegations wrong time after time. Nature is well capable of producing plenty of “waste” along with natural fertilizer for “sustainable” agriculture & forestry and you continuing to pretend otherwise is ridiculous considering you obviously know nothing about this subject.
You are pretending everything grown needs to be returned to the earth or supplemented with oil and that’s just not the case period…….clear?
Take the doomer blinders off long enough to bring yourself into reality instead of staying stuck so far in the past for a change. It will do ya some much needed good. _________________ "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil" ............ Former Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani,
Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 7:24 am Post subject: Re: Alt fuels
BiGG wrote:
MonteQuest wrote:
Because basic ecology says otherwise. In nature, there is no such thing as "waste." There are no free lunches. You take away the organic matter that gives the soil fertility and you must replace it with inorganic fertilizers just like we have been doing to almost all farm land across the world.
How many fields are plowed today that expose a healthy soil full of organic matter, worms, and insects where the birds flock? Most are devoid of the natural humus of soil chemistry. Intensive bio-fuel production will reap the same results. Soil degradation world-wide.
Funny how you keep asserting things like this even though I have repeatedly proven your uneducated allegations wrong time after time. Nature is well capable of producing plenty of “waste” along with natural fertilizer for “sustainable” agriculture & forestry and you continuing to pretend otherwise is ridiculous considering you obviously know nothing about this subject.
That's funny...I guess my 212 acre farm in Missouri is one of the few farms that is not burnt out is due to sheer luck. And I guess the National Park Service, U. S. Forest Service, and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service were foolish to use my "ecologist" training to teach these concepts for the last 30 years. And since I graduated at the top of my class in biology, I guess they need to re-evaluate their testing.
And your background and expertise Mr. ad hominem? _________________ A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
Live in Arizona? Check out: http://sustainablearizona.org and read my blog.
Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 8:35 am Post subject: Re: Alt fuels
MonteQuest wrote:
That's funny...I guess my 212 acre farm in Missouri is one of the few farms that is not burnt out is due to sheer luck. And I guess the National Park Service, U. S. Forest Service, and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service were foolish to use my "ecologist" training to teach these concepts for the last 30 years. And since I graduated at the top of my class in biology, I guess they need to re-evaluate their testing.
And your background and expertise Mr. ad hominem?
There is very little land that is “burnt out” and what is can easily be rejuvenated with a few cover crops & some cow crap for the most part. My neighbor just happens to be one of the foremost PhDs in the world on this subject so you can believe me when I say your biology degree doesn’t impress me in the least here. You can surly bet an acclaimed scientist spending his illustrious career in this field from Michigan State University has an opinion that goes much further with me then a construction supervisor claiming to be a star biologist such as yourself.
Farms using crop rotation & natural fertilizer like those now using ethanol byproduct amongst other things, cow crap and plowed-under cover crops have no need for oil based anything in the fertilizer department and I would think somebody claiming to be biology’s star pupil would know that.
You claim there isn’t anything from forestry & agriculture that can be used for fuel without adding oil into the equation and you are simply wrong (again) period. I have listed the link here many times showing the sustainable minimum billion ton annual WASTE report from the USDA/DOE that shows just how much you don’t know what you are talking about. _________________ "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil" ............ Former Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani,
Joined: May 30, 2005 Posts: 22 Location: Grosse Pointe
Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 10:09 am Post subject: Re: Alt fuels
BiGG wrote:
There is very little land that is “burnt out” and what is can easily be rejuvenated with a few cover crops & some cow crap for the most part. My neighbor just happens to be one of the foremost PhDs in the world on this subject so you can believe me when I say your biology degree doesn’t impress me in the least here.
Yes, but does your neighbor agree with your views and disagree with Monte's? If so, could you have him join the discussion and support your position that sustaining farmland demands little more than "a few cover crops & some cow crap"? I always thought that farming was, you know, hard work.
I am coming into this debate at as late stage (not just this thread, but the dozens of others that have covered roughly the same territory), so I appreciated your link, but of course, it goes without saying that the report is as much a sales pitch as it is an objective study. The authors of the report will be the primary beneficiaries of any investment in biofuel research and development.
Even given that bias, they're predicting that biomass will cover only one third of our transportation fuel needs. It's impossible to envision the American Suburban Dream cruising along with the gas tank close to "E".
Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 10:39 am Post subject: Re: Alt fuels
JB2 wrote:
Even given that bias, they're predicting that biomass will cover only one third of our transportation fuel needs. It's impossible to envision the American Suburban Dream cruising along with the gas tank close to "E".
You are making the common mistake of assuming that a 1 for 1 replacement of oil is required with biofuels. For example, 200 billion gallons of gasoline must be replaced with 200 billion gallons of biofuels. This is a false assumption and no such requirement is needed from biofuels.
With lighter vehicles produced over the next 20 years, we will be phasing out these ridiculous 5,000 lb SUVs and pickup trucks for every dipshit with a small penis. Just cutting the average weight and horsepower would improve fuel efficiency by 50%. Add to that the gains made with hybrid systems and easily average fuel could be 50 mpg instead of the current 20 mpg, thus reducing fuel requirements proportionally.
If you include advancements of Plug-in Hybrids, then gasoline or biofuels become completely optional for the vast majority of commuters who drive less than 30 to 50 miles per day.
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