Profit from the Peak : the End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century by Hicks Brian.; Nelder Chris

Author:Hicks, Brian.; Nelder, Chris [Chris, Hicks, Brian.; Nelder,]
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2010-01-30T13:31:58+00:00

According to U.S. government scientists, a rise of about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit between 1980 and 2002 reduced the annual yields of the world ’ s major cereal crops — wheat, corn, and barley — by a combined 40 million metric tons. 45

Then there is the matter of fuel consumption. According to author Michael Pollan, a half gallon of fossil fuel is required to produce a bushel of corn. 46 If biofuels are to provide any sort of relief from imported oil, they cannot require such enormous inputs of fossil fuels.

Clearly there are limits to corn ethanol. But what we can achieve with cellulosic ethanol remains to be seen.

Limits to Biofuels

Aside from the specifi c limits on corn ethanol, there is another, larger issue that applies to all feedstocks, and that ’ s demand.

We are suffering under the tyranny of the automobile. We are simply consuming so much fuel that at some point the decline of oil supply cannot be made up by anything else.

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Fatih Birol, chief economist for the IEA, affi rmed this in a June 27, 2007, interview with the French newspaper Le Monde . 47 Noting that Europe, the United States, and Japan are all greatly increasing their biofuel production, but that the expectations are overblown and will not help the greenhouse gas emissions problem, he explained:

Some of these policies are not based on a solid economic rationale: The biofuels will remain very expensive to produce. But even if these policies succeed we think that the biofuel portion of total hydrocarbons will only be 7 percent in 2030. To reach that 7 percent, one would need an agricultural area equivalent to the surface area of Australia, more than that of Korea, Japan, and New Zealand. Therefore, for these economic and environmental reasons, 7 percent of the total production of fuels is a very, very optimistic fi gure. The agricultural fuels will never replace the oil of OPEC , as some hope for it. Their contribution will remain minor. (Emphasis ours) 48

Again, the problem is scale. Fundamentally, nowhere in the world is there enough unneeded, arable land and water to grow the requisite feedstock for the immense volume of biofuels we will need, no matter which feedstock you choose, and the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is so low that in most cases, it ’ s simply not worth doing. As Dr. Tad Patzek of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the top experts on the feasibility of biofuels, has said:

[The] vision is to capture in real time most of net growth of all biomass in the US, while at the same time mining soil, water, and air over 72 percent of our land area, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. This biomass would then be devoured to feed our ineffi cient cars. We would have little food production, as well as little wood for paper and construction. In effect, the new brave US economy would be dedicated to feeding cars, not people.

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