Fuel made from food

23 Replies to “Fuel made from food”

1. My wife reacts badly to canola oil so she would be happy to see it all go up in smoke.

   1. Canola is one of the “industrial seed oils” that have been identified as causing widespread inflammation in the body. Yes, use it for fuel please so I can find some products in the store that don’t list it as a major ingredient.

2. The worst environmental disasters of the last quarter century were all the results of government policy.

   1. Agreed. One of the last speeches by the author, Michael Crichton, (who wrote “The State of Fear”), highlighted the damage done to Yellowstone by well intentioned environmentalists trying to deal with the wolf population (at the end of the presentation “Fear, Complexity and Environmental Management” given at the Smithsonian in 2005). Here is the link (you can skip the introduction as you can for most speeches – Crichton was very entertaining)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USYbrhQWFR8

3. When the US started making ethanol from corn, the price of corn went up worldwide, and many poorer people went hungry as corn producers sold the stuff to the highest bidder.

   Now we’re about to do the same with canola.

   In a land full of oil.

   Politicians are stupid.

4. Burning food, because we’re down to our last couple of hundred billion barrels of recoverable oil just sitting there waiting to be scooped up, cleaned up.

   I imagine farmers would be able to grow something delicious on those “wheat fields” instead of canola.

5. Exactly. When the hungry are fed, around the world, only then should anyone consider burning food as fuel. Not before.
   I did some rough math, which I haven’t published because I’m not certain about it. But apparently, one third of Saskatchewan’s cropland is now used to grow canola, which is about the maximum you can do based on a 1:3 crop rotation. And about half of that will be going to crushers for fuel use (not because everyone decided they need to buy Becel). So that means one sixth of Saskatchewan farmland will be used for fuel (not counting ethanol, either). One sixth! Maybe we should be growing food, instead?

   1. The amount of water waste is nearly incomprehensible, and ultimately will be devastating to humanity.

   2. Agreed. Nothing can justify burning food.

6. When you burn carbon for energy, does it matter the source for the carbon regarding the amount of CO2 exhausted into the atmosphere?

   Doesn’t make sense…….

   1. Yes. The carbon under the ground isn’t a part of the carbon cycle. Anything grown on the ground is, of you make fuel out of that it gets its carbon from the air.

      That being said, don’t take this as any sort of support for this policy. Ask any trucker about biodiesel.

   2. CO2 is not a pollutant or climate driver.

7. As an old hippie, I was mildly amused when Obama got elected and suddenly everyone had “gone green” (read: communist Red). My company ditched all the plastic water bottles and started providing pitchers of water and trays of coffee cups in the conference room. Yeah … that inane insanity is now long gone.

   But what really amused me … and still does to this day … is the sudden rediscovery of 1970’s Jimmy Carter era “alternative” energy sources. All the formerly FAILED responses to the Arab Oil Embargo; solar panels, wind power … and biofuels … suddenly became “forward-looking technology”. Puhleeze … !

   It got so silly, that suddenly every nut bar in the “green technology” space were giving interviews about their French Fry grease powered diesel Rabbits. Puhleeze! I’d already seen and lived through this movie. I know the ending … wasted time and money on novelties and nothing to show for it. But we live in a bizarre new low-information, low-understanding era where we have achieved incredible technological advances … with the essential assist of cheap, plentiful, EFFECTIVE, fossil fuels … but we insist on pretending our automobiles can be fueled by the waste from MacDonalds and Chik-fil-a.

   Yeah … I blame Obama … and the Communists who used him as their vehicle to take down American Capitalist prosperity.

   PS … Obama was elected in 2008 … and the government and industry started installing solar panels everywhere … my local HS’s parking lot is covered with em. We are rapidly approaching the end of their effective life cycles. Just as in the 1980’s … I look forward to our landfills getting filled with these things.

   1. Thanks for reviving my memories of the alternative energy boondoggles from the 1970s and 1980s. Here in Canada, governments have also spent decades and hundreds of millions in the Bay of Fundy trying to “harness” the power of the tides. That has finally been shut down, unlike the wind and solar farm madness.

   2. I’m not sure that Rapeseed would actually qualify as “food”…

      1. Regardless you can grow food with the same inputs. A replacement.

8. “(U)sed in cooking, as an ingredient in soap and margarine, and as a lamp fuel (colza oil). The esterified form of the oil is used as a lubricant for jet engines and can be made into biodiesel.”

   https://www.britannica.com/plant/rapeseed-plant

9. Enviro-nuts want no fossil fuels, no nuclear, no hydro-electric. Only wind and solar for electricity.

   And they actually believe we can replace all building products and oil products from plants. With no mining, no logging the forests, no fertilizer, only organic farming. And we’ll still have lots of plants to eat with our bug diet.

   They have no brains!

10. I’ve been arguing for years that it’s deeply immoral to use a food crop to produce motor fuel. It’s probably too late to stop this insanity since so much money flows to corn (and now rapeseed) producing states and provinces.

11. Back in the day when we still called it “rapeseed” and the farmers well lulled into the high prices of the day, my Dad would say that the country was being raped to death (coincidentally Trudeau the elder was PM at the time, no less!). Nobody was growing cereal grains anymore. A neighbor, holding out for even higher prices, had 25 bins full of canola (not sure how many bushel bins) and Dad said he hoped it all rotted. Not sure if pops was secretly pining for mandator crop rotation laws.

    1. Back in the day, the Sexsmith Hotel had a T shirt that said: “Sexsmith – the land of Rape and Money”

12. The (life cycle) EROE for biodiesel ranges from 1.3 to 2 (breakeven is 1) Nuclear power ranges from 50 to 80. Since input energy has a cost, economic breakeven EROE is considered to be around 7. Biodiesel is fuel for the innumerate transitioning to the bankrupt.

13. Don’t worry; I understand the Deputy Prime Minister can find out from her family how many BTU’s of heat you get from burning the average human body.