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March 9, 2006
Fill your SUV with biodiesel - and just keep on riding!
By: Silvio
In this age of rising oil prices and impending Peak Oil the countries that are most "addicted to oil" (USA and European Union) have strong plans to go down the road of biofuels - and especially biodiesel for replacing diesel or gasoline used for transportation needs.
Biodiesel seems to be the best answer to all our transportation nightmares: it's a clean source of energy (actually - they say - it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere), you can even produce it in your own backyard (just plant a few seeds of soy) and, above all, it's renewable and so it will last forever!
Nice, uh?
Ok, let's make some calculations: from the Energy Information Administration, the United States alone, in the year 2004 and just for transportation, used 42,755,135,000 gallons of distillate fuel oil (that's about 162 billions liters).
According to Wikipedia, some studies have shown that soy produces around 40,000 liters of biodiesel per square kilometer, while rapeseed 115,000 and Jatropha 160,000.
Let's do some simple math: to produce the current amount of distillate fuel used for transportation in the US alone, soy fields should occupy 4,046,144.80 square kilometers (161,845,791,856 liters needed / 40,000 liters per square kilometer). If we decided to use Jatropha "only" 1,011,536.20 would be enough - the only problem is that this is a semi-tropical plant, but, hey, with global warming probably Chicago could become semi-tropical in a couple of decades.
Anyway, if we want to stick to the more traditional soy (especially the beloved GM version), that's 4 millions square kilometers.
You probably remember that the total land area of the United States is 9,161,923 square kilometers. So this mean that almost half of the total surface of the United Stated (including mountains and deserts) should be filled with nice and green soy fields. Isn't that a bit too much?
But here come the nice part: according to this article by the Institute of Science and Society:
UK-based DI Oils predicted in 2004 that the world market for biodiesel would grow by 14.5 percent annually to 2.79 million tonnes by 2010.
...
DI Oils has fastened on jatropha, a fast-growing, high-yielding tree that can be planted in semi-tropical areas on “wasteland and irrigated with sewerage water”. According to its CEO, the company already has plantations totalling 267 000 Ha in Ghana, Madagascar, South Africa, India and the Philippines, and intends to expand to 9 million ha.
...
The production of soya in Argentina could increase to 100 million tonnes.
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Recently, the Spanish government of Zapatero announced that Repsol will install a biodiesel plant in León. It is predicted that the raw material will be obtained from oily crops and will come from regions where labour and land is cheap and where GM crops are permitted, i.e., in the Southern Hemisphere.
Ah ah, there is the trick! Let THEM (Africa, South America, Far East, always the same bunch of countries we are quite used to colonize) plant jatropha, soy, rapeseed for OUR biodiesel - who cares if this means even more deforestation and still less food for those people!
The important thing is that our SUVs can run - and our conscience be clear, as we are running on biodiesel.
Posted by Silvio at March 9, 2006 4:34 AM Category: Environment