NationStates Jolt Archive

Still think ethanol will save us from our "addiction" to oil? We make it out of corn, right? How much oil does it take to grow corn?
Central Illinois farmers planting their corn and soybean crops are paying fuel prices 113 percent higher than four years ago, according to a University of Missouri energy economist.

Fertilizer prices - largely based on energy costs due to the petroleum products comprising fertilizer - have increased 70 percent during the same period.

Lori Wilcox, UM Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute economist, expects fuel and fertilizer prices to increase 10 percent to 15 percent this year. In fact, she sees no relief in sight. Her projections show fuel and fertilizer costs increasing for the next 10 years above 2005 levels.

Abner Womack, FAPRI co-director, said the trend is unprecedented. In the past, energy prices would come back down following a spike, he said.

Farmers' concerns about soaring energy costs were reflected in planting intentions this year. Illinois farmers said they would plant 11.4 million acres of corn, 6 percent less than last year. They said they'll plant 10.1 million acres of soybeans, an increase of 600,000 acres from last year.

Story (http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2006/05/03/business/112803.txt)

We make it out of sugar cane, and have done so for decades. Buy it from us instead.

Ethanol can be made from several different crops.

I suppose that when hybridizing and genetic modification begin to create crops more suitable to fuel production you will see 'gas farms' and more efficient fuel crops.

Afterall, if we can modify crops to produce more food, we can certainly modify them to produce more gas.

We make it out of sugar cane, and have done so for decades. Buy it from us instead.

Actually, I was wondering if sugarcane might be made hardier to grow in cooler climates.

Yes. If no cars are produced and there is no demand.

Yet if the demand increases, they will plant it.

Equador is not the kind of industrial economy that the US is. We need a FUCK of a lot more of it than you do.

Also, the point is that the kind of agricultural output the US has is because of oil. You cannot seperate the two. I doubt that we can grow enough crops to fuel our consumption of energy with the output we have now, nevermind when oil and fertalizer keep becoming more and more expensive.

Ethanol, at least on a national, industrial scale, is dependent on oil to produce.

Still think ethanol will save us from our "addiction" to oil? We make it out of corn, right? How much oil does it take to grow corn?

Story (http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2006/05/03/business/112803.txt)
Uh ... if ethanol replaces gasoline, farm tractors, etc., will be able to run on ethanol, yes? :rolleyes:

Actually, I was wondering if sugarcane might be made hardier to grow in cooler climates.

Given the demand for sugar around the world, if this had been practical then I think it would already have been done. WHether a GM version could be produced now, I don't know, but I would guess that it ought to be possible.
(Big money making opportunity for genetics companies out there.)

I have no idea what your point is.. but, they're going to put an ethanol plant.. factory.. thingy.. in around here.

*walks off*

Uh ... if ethanol replaces gasoline, farm tractors, etc., will be able to run on ethanol, yes? :rolleyes:
That's a self-defeating cycle. you grow corn for ethanol so you can run tractors to grow corn for ethanol...

We need 21 million barrels of oil per day. If an acre of corn yields four barrels of ethanol, how many barrels of oil does it take to grow that acre of corn?

Modern agriculture and the "green revolution," which was really a petro-agricultural revolution, rest on a sea of cheap oil. When oil is $200/barrel, and we're a well placed symtec-laced donkey or hurricane away from that reality, modern agriculture will probably collapse. When that happens and land goes back to producing what it can naturally produce without the agro-petro chemicals, how are we gonna sit another end use consumer, the energy sector, to the table? What will happen to the price of food when it has to compete with our energy demand for land?

Equador is not the kind of industrial economy that the US is. We need a FUCK of a lot more of it than you do.

Also, the point is that the kind of agricultural output the US has is because of oil. You cannot seperate the two. I doubt that we can grow enough crops to fuel our consumption of energy with the output we have now, nevermind when oil and fertalizer keep becoming more and more expensive.

Ethanol, at least on a national, industrial scale, is dependent on oil to produce.

Um. Study some geography will ya. Portuguese speaking means that I live in BRAZIL. Now Brazil is a little bigger than mainland USA, has more people, and actually more heavy industry. So if we can do it, then you can.

You do not need oil to produce ethanol in industrial quantities. You need fertilizer yes, but this does not have to be produced from oil. How much shit does the USA produce per day? There is a nice source of fertilizer for you.

Um. Study some geography will ya. Portuguese speaking means that I live in BRAZIL. Now Brazil is a little bigger than mainland USA, has more people, and actually more heavy industry. So if we can do it, then you can.

You do not need oil to produce ethanol in industrial quantities. You need fertilizer yes, but this does not have to be produced from oil. How much shit does the USA produce per day? There is a nice source of fertilizer for you.
Mellow on the hostility, bro. My mistake. For some reason I thought I read the word Ecuador in your sig.

In anycase, you come absolutely nowhere near our 21 million barrel/day oil habit. Not even in the same solar system. Not even in the same reality. China is the second biggest user in the world and they're using only about a quarter of what we use. I doubt Brazil is in the top 20.

Actually, I was wondering if sugarcane might be made hardier to grow in cooler climates.

Sugar beets grow quite well in cold climates, so that's another option.

Look, if the oil companys would just get off the rear ends, and relaese cost effective electric powered cars, the world would be a better place.
We'd take a dive in our economy, but we'd be not damning ourself to a (faster) extinction

Um. Study some geography will ya. Portuguese speaking means that I live in BRAZIL. Now Brazil is a little bigger than mainland USA, has more people, and actually more heavy industry. So if we can do it, then you can.

You do not need oil to produce ethanol in industrial quantities. You need fertilizer yes, but this does not have to be produced from oil. How much shit does the USA produce per day? There is a nice source of fertilizer for you.
Okay, so you are in the top 20, but as you can see you are not anywhere near US consumption.

The United States has proved oil reserves estimated (as of January 2005) at about 21-29 billion barrels. The total annual crude oil production of the United States ranks it third-greatest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia), accounting for about 8% of the world's annual crude oil production. Total U.S. consumption of petroleum is by far the world's greatest (accounting for about one-fourth of the world's annual total), which results in the United States being the world's greatest oil and oil products importer. Nearly 60% of total U.S. oil and oil products demand is now covered by imports, with about one-fifth of the imports originating from the Persian Gulf area. The greatest suppliers of oil and oil products to the United States are Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria, in that order. Demand for crude oil in the United States has been slowly but steadily increasing; annual consumption is now about one-sixth greater than it was a decade previous. In contrast, domestic production of crude oil had been steadily dropping and is now at a 50-year low. Increased production is likely before the end of the decade, however, with more oil coming from deepwater areas of the Gulf of Mexico and new technology becoming available to increase production at mature oil fields. An historical summary of petroleum production and consumption in the United States is shown in Table 2.

Brazil's proven oil reserves are estimated (as of January 2005) at about 11 billion barrels, second greatest in South America (after Venezuela). The most important reserves are located offshore in the Campos basin north of Rio de Janeiro, with more than 2 billion barrels. Other promising areas for development include the offshore Ceara Basin (in northeastern Brazil) and the onshore Urucu field (in the Amazon Basin).

In spite of its wealth in oil reserves and a doubling of its annual oil production over the past decade, Brazil is still only the 15th-greatest crude oil producer, accounting for about 2.3% of the world's total annual crude oil production. On the other hand, Brazil is now the 9th greatest oil consumer (accounting for about 2.6% of the world's annual oil consumption) and its annual consumption has increased by about one-third over the past decade. Brazil now imports about 13% of the petroleum it consumes, with Africa, the Middle East, Argentina, and Venezuela being its main sources, but hopes to increase its own oil production such that self-sufficiency can be achieved before the end of the decade. An historical summary of petroleum production and consumption in Brazil is shown in Table 2.
BTW - You only get about 13% of your energy from bio-fuels. most of your energy consumption is still petroleum and when you go into decline you'll be competing for imports with everyone else.

Look, if the oil companys would just get off the rear ends, and relaese cost effective electric powered cars, the world would be a better place.
We'd take a dive in our economy, but we'd be not damning ourself to a (faster) extinction
Oil companies don't make cars. Also, teh transportation sector is the largest consumer of energy in the country. So we switch to electricity - where do we get the electricty from?

Mellow on the hostility, bro. My mistake. For some reason I thought I read the word Ecuador in your sig.

In anycase, you come absolutely nowhere near our 21 million barrel/day oil habit. Not even in the same solar system. Not even in the same reality. China is the second biggest user in the world and they're using only about a quarter of what we use. I doubt Brazil is in the top 20.

We are not, because we use ethanol. See. It works. In terms of energy demand Brazil is eighth in the World (or was last time I saw figures anyway) but in terms of oil usage we are down around 30th. Now how do we close that gap. Some is ethanol, some is hydroelectric We can do more as we have no direct solar energy harvesting here which is ridiculous given that we are a tropical country.

No we are nowhere near your 21 million barrel a day habit, and that is a habit you have to do something about. The use of alternative fuels is viable, but only if ther is some intent to reduce energy usage in general.

However your argument that it takes oil to produce ethanol does not withstand scrutiny. It takes less energy used than it produces, even from corn. Fertilizer is not a problem as there are many sources for this that do not depend on oil (it just happens to be the cheapest source at the moment) and the fuel used to run farm equipment and the processing plant is less than 20% of the fuel produced. (If it is set up right.)

But at the same time, over 50% of soy farmers are using biodiesel in their vehicles...it's biodiesel that will keep food costs down, not ethanol. Fertilizer production can be more energy efficient, and if combined with more efficent farming will further mitigate costs. Corn production is down because corn prices are still very low in both nominal and real terms; a decade ago, corn prices were much higher than they are now, and today's price is little above that of the early 1990's. It takes time for surpluses to be consumed, which means prices will remain depressed and production as well until the supply bubble of corn is deflated.

Cellulosic ethanol has a lot more promise than corn-based ethanol; however, improvements in both technologies are desirable to distribute the demand for feedstock among multiple sources. Solid waste, paper/wood products, sugar, bagasse, wood, grasses, and other abundant and much more energy efficient products are possible for ethanol production...the only barrier is cost, but that's coming down.

Some added benefits of ethanol are the products produced, and higher fertilizer prices spur developments of improvement in efficiency and alternatives. I think higher prices are driving a boom rather than leading to economic disruption...it's getting more apparent with each week of high prices and getting bigger to boot. Farming may be on the verge of its next revolution, one that is greener and more efficient than any in the past.

So PsychoticDan, what do you think should be done? Surely there are some constructive things that can be done to at least help reduce the problems? At least more contructive than running around like headless chickens screaming "We're doomed!"

So PsychoticDan, what do you think should be done? Surely there are some constructive things that can be done to at least help reduce the problems? At least more contructive than running around like headless chickens screaming "We're doomed!"
We can face reality and realize that our car culture is not sustainable. We can stop promoting the use of army vehicles for personal transportation. We can build trains instead of freeways. We can move closer to where we aork and get our food. We can grow food closer to where we live around our towns and cities. We can realize that cheap and abundant energy was a one shot deal and we blew it and start to appreciate how important energy is in our lives. We can realize that light bulbs are not magic - when you turn one on you are using a precious resource.

Am I crying wolf? Maybe. People often forget that at the end of that story the wolf did, indeed, come.

We can face reality and realize that our car culture is not sustainable. We can stop promoting the use of army vehicles for personal transportation. We can build trains instead of freeways. We can move closer to where we aork and get our food. We can grow food closer to where we live around our towns and cities.
Well I would support these kinds of measures anyway so I can't disagree with that.

We can face reality and realize that our car culture is not sustainable. We can stop promoting the use of army vehicles for personal transportation. We can build trains instead of freeways. We can move closer to where we aork and get our food. We can grow food closer to where we live around our towns and cities. We can realize that cheap and abundant energy was a one shot deal and we blew it and start to appreciate how important energy is in our lives. We can realize that light bulbs are not magic - when you turn one on you are using a precious resource.

I think relocation of food/industrial production might have some negatives, because short distance shipping tends to be more energy intensive and less efficient than long distance; large ships and trains are very fuel efficient in terms of ton-miles per gallon, but they are difficult to implement for short distances. Short-distance travel requires less efficient means of transportation and more energy, and I think that's why prices of localized goods are inflating much faster than ones produced in relatively distant locations.

Localized products could be shipped by electric or alternative fuels vehicles, but long distance shipping does have major energy advantages over localized production; a better idea would probably be the creation of more circular industry, where complementary industries are concentrated to minimize shipping costs and improve efficiency by reducing waste and then shipping large quantities of them to market. That would take advantage of both relocation as well as decentralization rather than sacrificing one or the other.

There are also advantages to the decentralization of residential and commercial areas; mass transit, alternative fuels, improved efficiency, carpooling/sharing and better planning are all necessary steps to maintain the advantages of decentralization in the face of higher energy prices.

Regardless of the reasons for their demise, fossil fuels have to go. Energy needs to be priced according to market demand and not held artificially low or abundant as it was for the past few decades due to regulation; I recall reading something that mentioned that 80% of our energy needs in the past 20 years have been met by improved efficiency rather than new generation capacity, and given the amount of room for further savings it isn't unreasonable to assume we could reduce demand for new capacity even further while still keeping up a strong rate of growth.

Oil companies don't make cars. Also, teh transportation sector is the largest consumer of energy in the country. So we switch to electricity - where do we get the electricty from?

Ahh but would you say they have influence on the auto industry?

I think relocation of food/industrial production might have some negatives, because short distance shipping tends to be more energy intensive and less efficient than long distance; large ships and trains are very fuel efficient in terms of ton-miles per gallon, but they are difficult to implement for short distances. Short-distance travel requires less efficient means of transportation and more energy, and I think that's why prices of localized goods are inflating much faster than ones produced in relatively distant locations.

Localized products could be shipped by electric or alternative fuels vehicles, but long distance shipping does have major energy advantages over localized production; a better idea would probably be the creation of more circular industry, where complementary industries are concentrated to minimize shipping costs and improve efficiency by reducing waste and then shipping large quantities of them to market. That would take advantage of both relocation as well as decentralization rather than sacrificing one or the other.

There are also advantages to the decentralization of residential and commercial areas; mass transit, alternative fuels, improved efficiency, carpooling/sharing and better planning are all necessary steps to maintain the advantages of decentralization in the face of higher energy prices.

Regardless of the reasons for their demise, fossil fuels have to go. Energy needs to be priced according to market demand and not held artificially low or abundant as it was for the past few decades due to regulation; I recall reading something that mentioned that 80% of our energy needs in the past 20 years have been met by improved efficiency rather than new generation capacity, and given the amount of room for further savings it isn't unreasonable to assume we could reduce demand for new capacity even further while still keeping up a strong rate of growth.
The average morsel of food travels 1,500 miles before it hits your plate in the US. In canada the figure rises to 3,000 miles. There is no way that it takes less energy to transport food that far when, for example, Oxnard, a farming community, is just 8 miles from my home. They grow oranges there. I get my orange juice from Florida, though, because all of Oxnard's production is sent to Sacramento to be processed into frozen orange juice for shipment to Canada. The whole food distribution network was created to run on cheap oil. When it's not cheap anymore it will need to be changed.

Ahh but would you say they have influence on the auto industry?
Not really. In fact if you do some news searches you'll find that oil companies and car manufacturers are at each other's throats right now, each blaming the other for high gas prices. Oil companies blame car companies for flooding the market with 8 mile per gallon SUVs and car companies blame oil companies for not investing in refinery capacity and oil exploration.

Also, the point is that the kind of agricultural output the US has is because of oil. You cannot seperate the two. I doubt that we can grow enough crops to fuel our consumption of energy with the output we have now, nevermind when oil and fertalizer keep becoming more and more expensive.

But the US produces waaaaaaaaay too much food. So maybe it'll be good if the production went down. And you can always stop using machines and go back to good ol' folk power, who wouldn't need to drive that much because they'll be working in the fields.

The average morsel of food travels 1,500 miles before it hits your plate in the US. In canada the figure rises to 3,000 miles. There is no way that it takes less energy to transport food that far when, for example, Oxnard, a farming community, is just 8 miles from my home. They grow oranges there. I get my orange juice from Florida, though, because all of Oxnard's production is sent to Sacramento to be processed into frozen orange juice for shipment to Canada. The whole food distribution network was created to run on cheap oil. When it's not cheap anymore it will need to be changed.
Part of the problem is that we as consumers have gotten used to being able to eat certain fruits and vegetables year round, instead of during the seasons when they're locally harvested--assuming they're locally grown anymore, that is. One thing high energy prices might help revitalize will be local farming communities and co-ops. It's odd, I have to say, to see California oranges at the Publix, because Florida is famous for their citrus (and it's better in Florida, besides :p though I wasn't saying that when I lived in California).

And what none of this even begins to deal with is the fact that even if we could make enough ethanol and biodiesel to maintain our needs, we're still dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere, and there's this little issue called global warming to deal with.

Not really. In fact if you do some news searches you'll find that oil companies and car manufacturers are at each other's throats right now, each blaming the other for high gas prices. Oil companies blame car companies for flooding the market with 8 mile per gallon SUVs and car companies blame oil companies for not investing in refinery capacity and oil exploration.

If it's any consolation to them, I blame them both. :)

Uh ... if ethanol replaces gasoline, farm tractors, etc., will be able to run on ethanol, yes? :rolleyes:
Yes. But how much ethanol would you need to power the vehicles? Will you need 0.5 acres of corn to produce enough ethanol to harvest 1 acre? Or will it be 0.9 acred, making it uneconomical? Or will you need 1.2 acres, thus making it a losing proposition?

BTW, I don't know the answer to those questions.

Part of the problem is that we as consumers have gotten used to being able to eat certain fruits and vegetables year round, instead of during the seasons when they're locally harvested--assuming they're locally grown anymore, that is. One thing high energy prices might help revitalize will be local farming communities and co-ops. It's odd, I have to say, to see California oranges at the Publix, because Florida is famous for their citrus (and it's better in Florida, besides :p though I wasn't saying that when I lived in California). Yes. that's exactly my point.

And what none of this even begins to deal with is the fact that even if we could make enough ethanol and biodiesel to maintain our needs, we're still dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere, and there's this little issue called global warming to deal with.
The issue of supply aside, the reason biofuels do not contribute to global warming is because the carbon cycle is complete. You remove any carbon pumped into teh air when you turn around and grow crops to produce more fuel. Carbon from burning into the air, carbon from teh air into the crops, crops burnt for fuel...

If it's any consolation to them, I blame them both. :)
I blame us. No one forced Hummers down our throats. We could have easily said, "man, I really do not need to make my penis look that big."

You do not need oil to produce ethanol in industrial quantities. You need fertilizer yes, but this does not have to be produced from oil. How much shit does the USA produce per day? There is a nice source of fertilizer for you.
Oh, man, if there was a way to turn TV crap into energy we'd be laughing.

But the US produces waaaaaaaaay too much food. So maybe it'll be good if the production went down. And you can always stop using machines and go back to good ol' folk power, who wouldn't need to drive that much because they'll be working in the fields.
No kidding. Imagine how much we'll have to grow when we're not just growing food, but gasoline as well.

No kidding. Imagine how much we'll have to grow when we're not just growing food, but gasoline as well.
But by waaaaaay too much I mean more than you can consume. That's why you have all those subsidies to keep farmers from getting their stuff to the market. The added supply would send prices for foodstuffs into the negative otherwise.

The issue of supply aside, the reason biofuels do not contribute to global warming is because the carbon cycle is complete. You remove any carbon pumped into teh air when you turn around and grow crops to produce more fuel. Carbon from burning into the air, carbon from teh air into the crops, crops burnt for fuel...
I don't have any figures to back me up, but that feels counterintuitive to me--surely we have to be dumping more into the atmosphere than we'd be taking out, since you have to figure that we'd never replace fossil fuels entirely, and we're rapidly reaching the point where we've got to not only reduce the amout of pollutants we're sticking in the atmosphere--we'll have to halt them altogether.

I blame us. No one forced Hummers down our throats. We could have easily said, "man, I really do not need to make my penis look that big."

I sure don't. :cool:

I sure don't. :cool:
Hell man, I drive a '99 Hyunda Accent. You know I'm secure. :eek:

I don't have any figures to back me up, but that feels counterintuitive to me--surely we have to be dumping more into the atmosphere than we'd be taking out, since you have to figure that we'd never replace fossil fuels entirely, and we're rapidly reaching the point where we've got to not only reduce the amout of pollutants we're sticking in the atmosphere--we'll have to halt them altogether.
As long as we're using fossil fuels, you're right. But the feedback loop of plant to fuel to carbon to plant has to be correct when you think about it. If you release the carbon from a ton of vegetable material and then grow a ton of vegetable material you have to take the carbon from the atmosphere in order to do that. In fact, if it were possible to completely eliminate our use of fossil fuels, which really are just dead plants, then we could remove the carbon from the atmosphere that we put into it from our use of fossil fuels because each year we would have to grow more crops for fuel as our demand grew so we would remove more carbon each year through agriculture than we released through burning it.

Whether that's possible I doubt for the same reasons you stated, but it's theorhetically true.

Hell man, I drive a '99 Hyunda Accent. You know I'm secure. :eek:
I drive a Mustang GT. :( Iswear it's not small, though. :(

But by waaaaaay too much I mean more than you can consume. That's why you have all those subsidies to keep farmers from getting their stuff to the market. The added supply would send prices for foodstuffs into the negative otherwise.
True, but we weren't producing way too much until the petroleum revolution in agriculture. Its petro chemicals that make all that possible.

True, but we weren't producing way too much until the petroleum revolution in agriculture. Its petro chemicals that make all that possible.

Sorry, but we started producing too much from our agriculture around 5000 BC. Until we did we could not have priests and other non productive members of society. It has nothing to do with petro-chemicals.

Sorry, but we started producing too much from our agriculture around 5000 BC. Until we did we could not have priests and other non productive members of society. It has nothing to do with petro-chemicals.
Sorry, but you weren't producing enough food to feed 400,000,000 people 5,000 years ago.

The Oil We Eat. (http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html)

Modern farming is all about petroleum. All commercial fertalizers and pesticides are made from petroleum. For every calorie of food energy we consume here in the US we consume 10 calories of fossil fuel energy not counting transportation and cooking. When the oil is gone food production will probably plummet.

Unfortunately, even if we took all the corn in America and turned it into ethanol, it would only satisfy about 1/3 of the gasoline market. The realistic amount of corn that will be used is far lower.

A little more on oil and food:

The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when the planet’s supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain—wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world’s poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the American situation. We say we have poor people here, but almost no one in this country lives on less than one dollar a day, the global benchmark for poverty. It marks off a class of about 1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people—that is, one third of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.

More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html

We make it out of sugar cane, and have done so for decades. Buy it from us instead.

Make it from hemp. :D

We'll make oil from coal for a while before bother converting to ethanol. We have plenty of coal.

Frankly, we have plenty of oil. We're just not producing it very quickly.

The average morsel of food travels 1,500 miles before it hits your plate in the US. In canada the figure rises to 3,000 miles. There is no way that it takes less energy to transport food that far when, for example, Oxnard, a farming community, is just 8 miles from my home. They grow oranges there. I get my orange juice from Florida, though, because all of Oxnard's production is sent to Sacramento to be processed into frozen orange juice for shipment to Canada. The whole food distribution network was created to run on cheap oil. When it's not cheap anymore it will need to be changed.

The energy used relative to the quantity is much less; in overall terms more fuel is consumed but you're moving a lot more stuff relative to the amount of fuel consumed. Plus, trains and ships (along with planes) are equally as capable of using alternative fuels like biodiesel, which besides being superior to ethanol is proven to be energy efficient and provides better fuel economy better lubricity than straight diesel.

It's built on cheap oil, but is not as vulnerable to high prices as localized shipping of goods. Plus, shipping doesn't take up a lot of oil usage; more than half of our oil is consumed by automobiles, with industry and shipping barely consuming 1/3 the amount of transportation. Plus, ships' (and trains) fuel efficiency is growing at a pretty rapid and constant rate compared to ordinary vehicles, and the competition within the shipping industry constantly drives innovation. Small, local shipping is most vulnerable to higher prices, which means it's possible that the goods most likely to be affected would be those

Agriculture can diversify away from fossil fuels; our consumption of oil today in industry is unchanged since 1981 and negative from 1973, which means the actual production process is more efficient. Transportation can be considerably improved in terms of efficiency, and farming methods will have to improve in order for companies to minimize costs and maximize productivity. There's a lot of room for savings and alternatives, and in the event of any energy crisis it is guaranteed that agriculture, industry, and shipping would get priority.

I apologize if someone has already said this, but the answer is clear: Cleaner fuels must come hand in hand with higher efficiency standards, which in turn will lower the price of oil due to decreased demand, leaving us with a smaller dependency on oil, oil that will be cheaper then currently.

I apologize if someone has already said this, but the answer is clear: Cleaner fuels must come hand in hand with higher efficiency standards, which in turn will lower the price of oil due to decreased demand, leaving us with a smaller dependency on oil, oil that will be cheaper then currently.

Ideally, that cheaper oil will still be uncompetitive with alternative fuels, resulting in it being discarded as economically inefficient and ending the whole mess altogether. The coal, copper, bronze, and all other past "ages" in history didn't end due to a lack of their respective resources but rather the onset of something better. Hopefully, the same will be true with the Petroleum Age...I think it will, but we can't tell until it happens.

Ideally, that cheaper oil will still be uncompetitive with alternative fuels, resulting in it being discarded as economically inefficient and ending the whole mess altogether. The coal, copper, bronze, and all other past "ages" in history didn't end due to a lack of their respective resources but rather the onset of something better. Hopefully, the same will be true with the Petroleum Age...I think it will, but we can't tell until it happens.
Well, that's the ideal, but in the medium term I think it's likely will have a transitory period, in which alternative fuel will be more common, and oil will get cheaper and cheaper until it is hardly used (at least in the first world, that is.)

Well, that's the ideal, but in the medium term I think it's likely will have a transitory period, in which alternative fuel will be more common, and oil will get cheaper and cheaper until it is hardly used (at least in the first world, that is.)
The problem here is supply and demand and the relationship of demand to price.

If the demand for oil drops off to such an extent that it the price drops below the alternatives then this will, in itself, act as a trigger for increasing the demand for oil, thus holding the price at more or less parity with the alternatives.

However before any of that can happen the price of the alternatives hads to be lower than that of oil, which is not yet the case. As people are already screaming about the price of oil now, imagine what they will be doing when the oil prices reach a level wherat the alternatives become economically (and not just environmentaly) a better option.