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Strategies & Market Trends : Heinz Blasnik- Views You Can Use -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (2653)	6/25/2003 5:15:30 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4907

can't imagine the amount of turkey guts needed ... but you can imagine this: turkeys take energy to produce. turkeys require water and feedstock, which requires more water as well as petroleum and natural gas for fertilizer, as well as transport costs. i haven't seen an estimate for the energy cost of turkey, but i have seen a figure of $89 per pound of protein from beefsteak once you back out the subsidies. supak.com people like to say that this or that technology will come online once costs reach a certain level. but many alternatives actually are net consumers of energy. w/r/t turkeys, you need to look at the fossil energy that goes into making a turkey, and the bio-energy which results (i.e., the turkey). if you then want to turn the turkey into a fossil fuel substitute, you have a conversion factor (obviously you can't convert 100% of the energy). let's be generous and say your conversion factor is 50%. well, the "percentage of energy return (as food energy per fossil energy expended) of most energy efficient farming of meat" is 34.5%. sa.niu.edu so if you start with 1000 calories of oil, you get, in the best case, 345 calories of turkey regardless of cost. you then have to convert these 345 calories into fuel, so you then apply the 50% conversion factor, which leaves you with 50% of 345, i.e., a whopping 172.5 calories of oil equivalent, in this very rosy scenario. naturally this means you have a net energy loss of over 80% of the original fossil fuel energy. so the turkey guts sounds kind of like a nonstarter to me...