Eating Oil

[GliderGuider]

For my own interest I just revisited the calculations for the amount of oil embedded in the food consumed in the United States.

The usual figure cited (from Pimentel) is that every unit of food energy embodies 10 units of non-food energy. I found a study from the University of Michigan (PDF) that claims a somewhat lower ratio of 7.3:1 so I used that.

The average American consumes 3800 kCal per day, which amounts to a whopping total of 4.5 trillion BTUs of food energy per day for the country.

The embedded energy in this amount comes to over 33 trillion BTUs. In the USA 40% of the overall energy used comes from oil, so that means the embedded energy in food requires over 13 trillion BTUs per day from oil.

Oil contains 5.8 million BTUs per barrel.

The food consumed in the United States embodies almost 2.3 million barrels of oil per day. This means that over 11% of all American oil consumption is used to produce and distribute food.

The implication is that the American food supply is extraordinarily vulnerable to post-peak oil price rises such as we're seeing now. I look into the future and I see diets - many, many diets.

[phantom power]

1. I wonder... if a vegetarian diet is assumed, how much improvement results?

[GliderGuider]

2. Americans get about 30% of their calories from meat

Meat takes about 5 (?) times the input per calorie as grain. So inputs would drop by (0.3*.8) = 0.24 or about 25% to replace those meat calories with vegetable calories. That would take the 11 or 12% of the oil currently used down to 9% or so.

[IDemo]

3. Great article on the topic by Richard Manning

The oil we eat

"When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well."

and -- 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.

[Chemical Bill]

4. Pimental lies all the time.

Why should I trust him on this? He assumes that farmers will buy new tractors every other year when he does his ethanol figures. He probably does some similar shit here.

Bill

[IDemo]

5. at least read the article

Pimentel wasn't the author, and "lies all the time" doesn't cut it as a debate tactic......

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Big Corporate Ethanol lies about Pimentel all the time

The character assassination of David Pimentel is THE corporate propaganda success-story of our time. The corporate state has at long last been able to use the radical left to do its dirty work, and in a stunningly efficient manner.

Pimentel has been warning us about soil depletion and abusive agricultural practices for years. He's long been a major thorn in the side of many corporations. The fact that they have been able to orchestrate a campaign of defamation against him using the "tree huggers" they also hate must make them giddy with ironic glee.

No one need agree with everything Pimentel writes. I myself was critical of his and Patzek's 1997 paper on ethanol. But since it also threatened those anticipated big corn ethanol profits, he had to go. So today, Pimentel is a pariah, ethanol has an undeserved greenwashed tint, and the Progressive movement can be reliably used to carry corporate water.

In the words of Yakov Smirnoff: What a country!

--p!

[GliderGuider]

7. How about the University of Michigan?

I said in the post that I didn't use Pimentel's number, but rather one from a U of M paper that was almost 30% lower.

You should be careful with that jerking knee. You could put your eye out and end up unable to read.

[jpak]

8. And what is the Alberta Tar Sand/MacKenzie Gas intensity of Canadian corn, wheat and hog production?

Is Canadian Agriculture immune from the effects of Peak Oil and Gas???

***I look into the future and see many many Canadians scooped up for Export Soylent Green production***

Yum aye...

:evilgrin:

:patriot:

[GliderGuider]

9. We're in exactly the same shape as you. Soylent Maple...