Energy worries

Now, I have a bee in my bonnet about 'info' like this. I enjoy that you presented it, and I am a big supporter of bio-diesel.

But.......

According to the chart there, We all should grow 'oil palm' because it produces 13x as much fuel per acre as soybeans.

But - soybeans produce every year. Here in my back yard.

'Palm oil' (are they saying palm trees, or what?) likely doesn't grow here in my back yard, so actually it produces 0 oil for me. It would be the worst thing to plant. Lowest yield..... And let's pretend it does grow here in my back yard - how long does it take to grow before I can start harvesting it? Do I need 10 years of waiting for the 'palm oil' to mature before I even get one harvest? And, does it produce any other product at the same time? With soybeans for example, I get a whole mess of high-protien livestock feed at the same time as I get the oil. If I get nothing else from the 'palm oil' I might still end up in worse shape trying to grow it, even tho it will give me 5x as much oil in my lifetime as the soybeans would.

They say corn will produce 18 gallons of oil per acre (naturally - corn is super high in starch, low in everything else like oil....). But, here in my neighborhood, we grow 200 bushel per acre corn. Over in Texas or Mo or the Dakotas, getting 120 bu per acre is doing pretty good. Up noth of me, getting 80 bu per acre yeild is an ok crop.

So, does that mean here in my back yard I might be getting more like 36 gallons of oil per acre, compared to someone up north getting only 15 gallons of oil?

How can they come up with some perfect number of gallons of oil per acre for any of these crops, when yield varries so dramatically with climate & location?

My oil yield chart I think would look _very_ different than theirs _for my location_.

Corn - 35 gallons (plus a whole mess of starch)
Soybeans - 55 gallons (plus a lot of high-protien feed suppliment)
Hazelnuts - 25 gallons (plus - some shells?)
Peanuts - 10 gallons (plus some shells)
Coconut - 0 gallons
Oil Palm - 0 gallons (do you harvest the fruit, or tap the tree, or is this something else entirely?)

Then factor in the byproducts some of these produce - in addition to the oil - and the ecconomic & actual benifit of some of these 'new old' crops pretty much goes away entirely.

They make a nice study, someone can live off the grant money for a few years.

But in the end, corn, soybeans, wheat, & alfalfa is what we have to work with in the USA. Canola, sohrgum, milo, beets, etc. will find their small local nitches, but there just isn't enough proper land & climate to look at those crops as a big deal.

(To go off topic, even switch grass for biomass doesn't do so well in a _real_ comparison to alfalfa - alfalfa you can harvest 4x a year 'here' and remove the leaves for high-protien livestock feed, keep the stems for biomass use, and have a better return per acre than just harvesting swichgrass 2x a year 100% for biomass.....)

Now, there is no way an acre produces enough oil of any crop at all per person here in the USA......... Lucky to get 75 gallons per acre from most of the crops. We seem to fill our 20-40 gallon fuel tanks every week or every other here in the USA.....

We won't find some new super oil crop that grows in 50+% of the USA - we already have it, it's soybeans, and that is the major oil crop we will have to work with. It doesn't produce all that much oil, but it does have some high-value by-products.

Jerusilum artichokes are a terrible weed, they are the reason Roundup came about. No one in their right mind is going to plant those things.

I like the studies, I like your input, I like this thread, I support alternative fuels & funding for them & all. I really do. But we do have to add a little thought into it all, & see that perhaps that simple chart really doesn't tell us anything worth knowing - unless we get a lot more info on the details they are leaving out?

--->Paul

Here in NW Wisconsin, sunflowers are a popular oilseed crop for farmers producing their own diesel fuel substitute. Good oil production, easy to handle seeds, and the remaining meal is a valuable feed. I don't have the notes I made from a farmer's presentation regarding oil production, but it was impressive. But, it is also using up a food to produce a fuel that we have shown we cannot use efficiently.

......................Ethanol is , Anything BUT , an acceptable substitute for oil based energy production . It is corrosive , it ruins "O" rings and other rubber parts and corrodes metal fuel system parts as well . It is "in" fashion because of the vast quantities of corn we grow in the USA , government subsidies so farmers , their Co-Ops and large corporations are going to be sucking on Uncle sam's ----- . EveryBody is in this game to make a fast buck ! Were we to plan , Longterm , we'd find that converting over too cultivation of crops that will produce a substitute for diesel fuel would be much Wiser in the long run . Diesel engines are tremendously , More efficient and powerful than any gas\ethanol engine of equivalent displacement you might care "too compare" . As usual it's politics and Greed which are driving the debate rather than honesty and factual information . , fordy...

Jerusalem artichokes are being looked at for their ethanol production, not oil for biodiesel, according to what I've read. Sunchokes are high starch, like corn. That's probably why they weren't on that list.