CobaltBlue,
I'm not so sure about the soybeans. I have a friend who farmed several thousand acres of beans from the 1960's through the mid 1990's and he knows beans and the bean business like nobody else I know. Almost by accident he got into the bean futures business in the early 1970's and even though he is no longer farming he is still in that business in a big way. He travels to Brazil and elsewhere just to see how the crop there is doing so as to be better able to "game" his futures positions.
Beans have lots of advantages, no need for nitrogen fertilizer, and some land doesn't even need phosphate, though most land does. Each average acre nets a barrel of oil that is roughly equal to a barrel of #2 diesel. Beans are easy on the land, especially no-till beans but even cultivated beans will generally improve soil quality over time. Soybean oil is simply pressed from the beans, no need for fermentation or distillation, and the whole operation is done completely by machinery with no need whatsoever for human labor, unlike palm oil. And in addittion to the oil you get a large amount of soybean meal that has numerous uses.
But here is the rub: the USA has aproximately 63 million acres of beans in cultivation now and all this production is already "called for" in its present end use markets. My friend thinks that even doubling the present amount of production would be a real problem.
OTOH, flying across the USA you see vast amounts of uncultivated land and I know from personal experience that a soybean will grow on practically any soil that receives sufficient rainfall and most anyplace that is flat enough to be traversed by a tractor could be farmed with beans, this being the majority of the land in the east and a considerable portion of the west so maybe by taking some extreme measures soybean oil could provide some meaningful percentage of the USA oil usage. When you consider that we now have some 98,000 sq. miles in beans now and that the land area of the lower 48 states is in excess of 3 million square miles, maybe bean cultivation on a vast scale would go a long way toward meeting the USA petroleum oil needs, I just don't know. And maybe with some genetic enhancement the oil yeild could be made to exceed a barrel per acre.
One thing that I like about the soy bean concept is that it is simple to evaluate. It is being done now and there are few imponderables like all the problematic aspects you have with corn or even cane ethanol. In my mind, if soy oil for fuel is not a paying proposition the other concepts are probably for sure not. Maybe swithchgrass ethanol is the exception.
CB, I think you mentioned one time that you garden some. Just for grins plant you a few soy bean seeds. Makes a pretty green bushy plant and the young beans are delicious in a salad.
Slagle |
