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Politics : Welcome to Slider's Dugout

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To: SliderOnTheBlack who wrote (72)	6/26/2005 4:04:50 PM
From: Slagle	of 50403

Slider Re: "Oil Substitutes" Nice thread! I'm working on a "back of the envelope" set of calculations using real recent data from a Georgia soybean farm we sold a few years ago with regards to the cost of production of soy bean oil for a petroleum substitute as a "bio-diesel". One of the problems you have is making any sense out of the various data sets about alternative fuels. I think ethanol is the most difficult. You have nitrogen fertilizer inputs to consider. Then, if the ethanol being compared is in Brazil and being produced from sugar cane is "slave labor" being used? Even in Brazil there are all sorts of government price supports to consider and that is even more difficult to figure with US corn derived ethanol. Then there is the fermentation/distillation step. How much does that cost, with respect to labor and energy? There is posted data claiming ethanol is a great thing and conflicting data saying it is a bust. I don't know which to believe. But soybean oil is MUCH simpler. It works directly as a 100% biodiesel fuel with a heat of combustion of 128,000 BTU/gallon as compared to 130,500 BTU/Gallon for #2 Diesel. Soybeans require no nitrogen fertilizer and can be harvested and combined without using a chemical defoliant in reigons subject to frost (maybe an advantage to cold climate beans, as opposed to Brazilian). Soybeans can be "no-tilled", corn cannot. The oil is simply pressed from the beans with no intermediate fermentation to consider. It can all be done with machinery. I have seen data on palm oil as bio-diesel that is being used now in Thailand. But as I have see it done, it is terribly labor intensive. There are two forms of palm oil. One is copra oil, pressed from the meat of the giant Philippine coconut (not to be confused with the tiny Caribbean coconut you see in Florida). The harvest involves climbing the 100 foot coconut tree. The other palm oil comes from the oil palm which has small pingpong ball sized fruits which are hand picked. Need I say more? Soybeans are produced without ever being touched by a human hand. A high yield beanfield at 20% oil by weight could yield two barrels of oil per acre. But how much oil and how many man-hours are required before harvest? Hopefully I will have some good hard numbers soon that I will post here if you like. Can you think of anything else that I need to consider? Slagle

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