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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries

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To: Slagle who wrote (67089)	8/7/2005 2:02:05 PM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (2) of 74559

I figured the Brazilian advantage in sugar->ethanol was the tropical climate and cheap labor, so low energy, labor intensive production maybe would have an edge over the highly energy intensive US system of producing crops. I discussed this with Duane Chapman (Cornell) and he told me that when he was at the World Bank he did an investigation of this issue and decided that it was an energy sink even in Brazil, or at least had a very low EROI all told. The bottom line is that plants only convert about 1-2% of the sunlight falling on them into energy stored in sugar. And when you spend fossil fuels to grow them the net gain is very low. Photovoltaics get 15% perhaps +/-. Making them also requires a lot of energy and other resources at present. So it is hard to beat fossil fuels at this point. Hydro and wind maybe where nature funnels the energy through particular points. Chapman was very skeptical of wind though too. There is a reason why we switched from biomass energy to fossil fuels in the industrial revolution.

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