From the National Biodiesel Board: Biodiesel capacity.

[NNadir]

The National Biodiesel Board reports that there is 180 million gallons of biodiesel capacity, supplemented by capacity in the oleochemical industry that could - if needed - provide an additional 110 million gallons.

http://www.biodiesel.org/pdf_files/fuelfactsheets/Production%20Capacity_Updated_Sept2005.pdf

One barrel of oil contains 42 gallons. Thus the Biodiesel industry could potentially provide about 6,000,000 million barrels of oil.

The United States imports about 8,000,000 barrels of petroleum a day. Thus the biodiesel industry is ready and waiting to take the monkey off our back for about 18 hours. From what I hear, junkies will take any amount of time they can get to keep that monkey off their back, it just feels so good to satisfy one's urges.

The DOE has this to say on the subject:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biodiesel/

[phantom power]

1. I wonder how much we could make, in potential.

As in, if we did something like use a third of our arable land to switchgrass, or whatever works out best.

(whatever "arable" means, given that our climate is changing)

[NNadir]

2. Switchgrass, I think is proposed by biofuel advocates for ethanol

production, in one of these cellulosic fermentation schemes.

I don't know what the potential is, but I'll guess with climate instability, some trucking to production facilities may be involved. Maybe that, or else we can set up caravans of nomadic fermenters who follow the rain and the grass wherever respectively, it falls and grows. It would make for a wonderful bucolic scene, the peasants pulling their reactors across the prairie.

[dcfirefighter]

3. Any new energy source requires an investment in capital

According to the UN, there are 412 million ha of agricultural land in the US. Current population is roughly 300 million.

We are talking about solutions to problems. Any solution involves a change - whether it is in the number of nuclear plants, or the number of biodiesel processors, it's a change.

A man can be fed for a year with 5000 s.f. of land, a few hand tools and roughly 1/10th of one man's labor. This would be a nutritious balanced vegan diet. Of course, like many of my countrymen, I like meat, and cheese. Even with a full acre per person, average consumption of meat and dairy would have to drop. But it would leave 292 ha of land for other production.

If that 292 ha were farmed with:
soybeans, at 45 gal per acre, could produce 32 billion gallons of oil;
sunflowers, at 100 gal per acre, could produce 72 billion gallons of oil;
rapeseed, at 125 gal per acre, could produce 90 billion gallosn of oil;
mustard, at 140 gal per acre, could produce 101 billion gallons of oil;
jatropha, at 175 gal per acre, could produce 126 billion gallonf of oil;
palm trees, at 650 gal per acre, could produce 469 billion gallons of oil; or
algae, at 15,000 gal per acre, could produce 10,815 billion gallons of oil.

Any of these would require a massive investment seed & oil processing capital. Additionally, algae would require a massive investment in ponds, the others could likely be sown and harvested with existing technology. In each case, and especially for the land grown crops, a significant portion of the carbon consumed by the plant growth would be returned to the soil as compost / green manure.

US Oil use is about 20 million barrels per day, or 840 million gallons per day, or 306 Billion gallons per year. With the exception of algae (which requires capital in the form of ponds) and Oil Palm trees (which cannot be grown on all of the US agricultural lands), none of our crops can replace our current use levels.

For comparison, if the electrical output of 1500MW nuclear plants were converted to liquid fuels, it would require about 1000 of them to provide the energy equivalent of our current oil consumption.

None of these potential solutions is a magic bullet that will allow us to continue living as we have. We must make ECOlogy part of ECOnomics, perhaps by assessing usage fees for externalities.

[NNadir]

4. All of these numbers depend upon the availability of water, weather, and

nutrients, including many that are chemically produced at great energy cost. Given the growing instability of the climate, we open ourselves not only to food famine (and yes, that can happen even here, and energy famine simultaneously. No matter what the calculations said about land area in Northern Illinois this summer and what could grow there, very little actually did.

Also all depend on harvest and mechanized transport which reduces the actual amount of energy that must be expended to create the energy to be used.

If nuclear sources are used to make liquid fuels, electricity will only be a side product from cooling high temperature gases in thermochemical processes. It is not really suitably modelled by the majority of modern reactors, almost all of which are designed to produce electricity.

It would take about 5000 reactors, at a cost of 8 to 10 trillion dollars to provide all of the world's energy by nuclear means. My view is that such a thing is achievable and desirable in an ideal world, but we do not live in an ideal world, mostly because people keep kidding themselves. Thus the world will build fewer reactors than it needs. Therefore we are pretty much out of realistic options.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that even if the world elected to go completely nuclear that it would be an easy thing. Clearly it would not, and there will be environmental hell to pay for our past practices no matter what we do.

[dcfirefighter]

5. All numbers depend on something

I'm not personally afraid of nuclear power, and support it's development. However, to say that X proposal requires optimistic assumptions while Y proposal doesn't, is fairly arbitrary.

I'm a fan of changing economic rules to more closely follow ecological rules. As such, energy SHOULD have a higher price for the user - as it currently has a fairly high price for everyone but the user.

I THINK that, with full cost accounting, overall energy use would decrease drastically - and most of it would be delivered over wires, rather than in tanks or car-loads. I would be suprised if the vast majority of it wasn't generated from fission.

Transport Energy: Most of it could be reduced by enabling producers to move closer to consumers, as well as enabling employees (labor producers) to move closer to employers (labor consumers). Note that the largest tranported commodity, by ton-miles, is coal. The second largest commodity is grain - 3/4's of which is fed to animals. Demand for meat is fairly elastic. The supply of land is perfectly inelastic, and as such, standard economic rules do not apply. The key to making land markets behave efficiently is to charge titleholders a market-rate user fee for the maintenance of their title.

HVAC & Lighting Energy: Most can be reduced by 'green' building techniques and modern appliances. Reducing the cost of building is paramount: capturing the externailites will dictate that the propert materials and techniques be used; reducing the taxes assessed against the value of the building will shorten the time between upgrades and increase the rate of construction of new and replacement buildings.

Industrial Energy: Capturing externalities will insure that markets substitute low energy goods for higher energy goods, reducing overall industrial energy use per unit output. An example would be the substitution of vitrified clay pipe for ductile cast iron or PVC. Currently, economic rules dictate that industrial goods minimise labor inputs. With a few changes to the tax law, the rules would dictate that industrial goods minimize ecological costs. A neat side-effect would be to increase employment.

[NNadir]

6. Fair enough.

No matter what proposals I hear or make though, I still think we have hell to pay, a lot of pain on a scale we cannot even imagine.

I don't think that much of what's coming will afford to many opportunities for rational contemplation of the alternatives.