Here's a site comparing corn to other fuels: http://burncorn.com/CountrysideCostAnalysis.php And realize that organic/sustainable agriculture is gaining ground rapidly, at least in the US and Europe, and they *can* grow crops with equal or higher yeilds than chemically dependant farmers. So the environmental "issue" is really a straw horse. Besides which, there are a great many other non-traditional crops which yeild far better than corn. Take cattails, for instance. http://newcrop.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/Typha.html Yields of 1000-4700 gallons per acre (depending on climate and how many crops per year) are possible. Most farmers here in WI have portions of fields which are unusable in wet years -- don't fight nature, go with the flow, stop draining those areas and plant them to cattail instead. Simple stuff -- just a lack of knowledge, really. Bill Stewart wrote:
At 02:54 PM 10/26/2001 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
Biodiesel is being sold in the US as we speak for anywhere from $.99 to $2.50 a gallon, depending upon whether it's made from waste or virgin vegetable oil. Given the economies of scale working here, once they build up a larger presence, those prices will drop. And, if I'm not mistaken, much of Europe is already mandating that all diesel be sold with at least 20% biodiesel. You might also look at Brazil which fuels a large portion of it's vehicles with ethanol already. VW's new fuel will be even cheaper.
Making biodiesel from virgin oil scales well, since you can use non-food-grade oils, but there's still a substantial ecological effect of converting land from non-farming or food-farming to energy-farming. Waste vegetable oil has a much different scaling ability - until you get most fast-food french-fry leftovers used for fuel oil, it scales up really well, but after that it hits the wall.
Ethanol has similar problems - you need to grow a lot of sugary or starchy crops, which not only displace food crops (having similar land needs), but at least in third-world countries tend to be grown by slash-and-burn agriculture, which rapidly destroys land, usually rainforest.
On the other hand, for an area that doesn't have oil, the tradeoff between wasting farmland for energy crops and using it for export crops to buy energy from outside could go either way. Of course, when the "area" has government boundaries defining it, especially in the third world, there tends to be a huge amount of social policy and/or corruption distorting the market prices. But sometimes you can exploit other governments' corrupt social policies, e.g. grow cocaine or opium and buy oil or food or toys with the profits.
-- Harmon Seaver, MLIS CyberShamanix Work 920-203-9633 Home 920-233-5820 hseaver@cybershamanix.com http://www.cybershamanix.com/resume.html