"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

I don't think that using farm crops for motive power has a place in and
energy plan in a world that is using more grain than it can produce
already.

Well, it sure will need to keep the tractors running.

Inefficiently using food to make fuel when fuel is at an all time low
price
is senseless.

Indeed. However oil prices are not currently at an all time low and
won't be in 20 years. Read the analysis.

Oil prices are very near all time lows if you look at an 12 month average
price, correct to constant dollars and take out all the taxes that much of
the world is piling on. The last few months may have got them off the floor
for a bit. Thee is no shortage of oil in the world today. Most of the USSR
and China have not been properly surveyed with modern methods. Iraq has not
had any exploration in 30 years and is using 30 year old technology in
production. In the fields that they have that still produces a great deal of
oil but we have no idea what modern methods could do.

We have skimmed the easy 20% off the US reserves that we have drilled and we
have chosen not to drill any more in California and off shore in California
and Florida. We also don't have a very good idea how much oil is in the
Artic that the greens have managed to get placed off limits.

We haven't built a new refinery in 30 years and the domestic oil drilling is
at an all time low. There is a 40 day wait for a tanker to unload in China
that is tying up a shipping to the point that we can't get rail cars in
Oklahoma until 4 to 8 week after wheat harvest. So there is a lot of oil
delayed in transit and new EPA rules come into effect next month that
fracture the gasoline supply even more. To the point that in some cases only
one refinery is making gasoline that one city will be using.

On the farm side we have used more grain and oil crops than we have grown
for the last 3 years and it looks like it isn't going to change any time
soon. If we use the entire supply of soybean oil to run trucks it wouldn't
keep them on the road two months. The EU may fair a bit better if you have
to raise canola for the meal for cattle you may have some surplus oil for
fuel and palm oil is cheap enough that it might work until it was used up
but it won't take long because it comes from a part of the world where there
are lots of hungry people and more on the way. There is already a market for
all the grain and oil at price above support prices and any competition from
fuel would quickly drive them very much higher. I nice deal for the farmer
but instead of having oil producing countries getting rich you have farmer
and oil producing countries making good money and a lot more people hungry.

The Green Revolution has bought us all the time it can we are back to the
point that we will shortly have more mouths to feed than there is food to
feed them if we are not already there. And pouring food in your BMW doesn't
look good to starving people.

If we were going to use farm raised fuel it should have been done for the
last 50 years when surpluses were a problem not the next 50 years where it
appears that shortages will be the problem.


Gordon