The Palm Oil Conundrum
Posted by Robert Rapier on November 16, 2010 - 10:16am
People sometimes ask which biofuels are competitive head to head with crude oil. By competitive, I mean those that can actually compete favorably with oil prices on a level playing field (i.e., they don’t require big subsidies or mandates in order to compete). There are two that always come to mind: Ethanol from sugarcane (although less competitive currently due to high sugar prices) and fuel from palm oil (oil derived from the fruits of the African Oil Palm). In fact, in the first book chapter I wrote in 2007 (Renewable Diesel in Biofuels, Solar and Wind as Renewable Energy Systems: Benefits and Risks), I highlighted palm oil as a crop with great promise, but also great environmental risk:
By far the most productive lipid crop, palm oil is the preferred oil crop in tropical regions. The yields of up to five tons of palm oil per hectare can be ten times the per hectare yield of soybean oil. Palm oil is a major source of revenue in countries like Malaysia, where earnings from palm oil exports exceed earnings from petroleum products.
Palm oil presents an excellent case illustrating both the promise and the peril of biofuels. Driven by demand from the U.S. and the European Union (EU) due to mandated biofuel requirements, palm oil has provided a valuable cash crop for farmers in tropical regions like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. The high productivity of palm oil has led to a dramatic expansion in many tropical countries around the equator. This has the potential for alleviating poverty in these regions.
But in some locations, expansion of oil palm cultivation has resulted in serious environmental damage as rain forest has been cleared to make room for new palm oil plantations. Deforestation in some countries has been severe, which negatively impacts sustainability criteria, because these tropical forests absorb carbon dioxide. Destruction of peat land in Indonesia for oil palm plantations has reportedly caused the country to become the world’s third highest emitter of greenhouse gases.
I was especially curious to learn more about Malaysia’s palm oil industry during my recent visit there. Once a key ingredient in biodiesel supplied to the West, it later became shunned as details emerged that tropical rain forest was being decimated to make way for palm oil plantations. As a result, Greenpeace has carried out a major campaign to slow the development of the palm oil industry. So which is it? Is palm oil a blessing or a curse? It took a trip to Malaysia to crystallize my thoughts around palm oil, but the truth – as it generally is – is a bit more complex than the sound bites.
Signs of the palm oil industry were everywhere in Sarawak, which is the Malaysian state that I visited. There are African oil palms growing everywhere; in plantations, on the side of the road, outside people’s houses, etc. There are tankers running up and down the roads filled with palm oil. The port in Bintulu, Malaysia has a tank farm and facilities devoted to palm oil exports. It was apparent to me through talking to people there that the country is proud of this thriving business. But I wanted to better understand the nature of the palm oil industry in Malaysia, so I spent some time with a palm oil grower there.
We discussed yields (which he confirmed as around 5 tons per hectare) and cost of production (much cheaper than crude oil). I learned that palm oil is a heavy user of fertilizer (4 kg of nitrogen fertilizer per tree is the number I was quoted), is heavily dependent on manual labor (mostly from Indonesia; I was told that wages aren’t high enough to entice Malaysians to harvest oil palm fruits), and I did see signs of erosion where some plantations had been developed.
But I was mostly interested in the rain forest controversy. I asked about the grower’s thoughts on the campaign to reduce palm oil usage in the West, which it is hoped would slow or stop encroachment into the rain forests. I was told that even if the West refused to buy the palm oil, China would buy all they could make. So the message there was that the industry would continue to develop whether the West boycotts it or not. I also heard from several people that rain forest encroachment had certainly taken place (I kept hearing “it’s much worse in neighboring Indonesia”), but that the government was trying to address that. The Malaysian government has created conservation zones (I was told that these were mostly hilly areas that couldn’t be planted anyway) in order to preserve some of the habitat being lost. Finally, the grower explained that palm oil was a way for rural poor people to earn some money to be able to feed their families and send their kids to school. While Malaysia is quite developed (it was easy to forget I was in Asia; many areas have a very Western look), an estimated 8% of Malaysians live on less than $2 a day, and I suspect most of those are in rural areas.
The palm oil that is produced in Malaysia is mostly being used for food, but it can also be used for fuel. That is one of the risks going forward that countries that want fuel will outbid those who need food, setting up more food versus fuel issues. Palm oil may be converted to biodiesel, which is the mono-alkyl ester product derived from glycerides (long-chain fatty acids contained in lipids ) in vegetable oils or animal fats. Or it can also be converted to a true diesel replacement by hydrocracking. The hydrocracking reaction “cracks”, or fractures the palm oil molecules. The products of this reaction are a hydrocarbon distillate and a propane by-product. Synthetic hydrocarbon diesel produced from biomass in this way is often referred to as ‘green diesel.’
Neste Oil in Finland began developing their NExBTL hydrocracking technology in 2002, and in May 2007 inaugurated a plant with a capacity of 170,000 metric tons per year of renewable diesel fuel from a feedstock of vegetable oil and animal fat. In 2009 Neste inaugurated a second plant, and they have two more under construction. One of those plants is a $762 million plant in Singapore, and will provide a significant outlet for palm oil produced in the region.
Palm oil represents a difficult dilemma: How does the West address negative social or environmental implications from the development of a palm oil industry (or any industry) that is helping to lift rural people out of poverty by providing an income stream for farmers? Western objectives (saving the rain forests) may be viewed as conflicting with their basic needs (feeding their families and sending their kids to school) — which is of course why globally rain forest continues to disappear. If I look into my crystal ball, I see an industry that will continue to develop due to demand outside of the West, and an issue that governments in Malaysia and Indonesia must address themselves. Based on my observations and discussions, Western boycotts will be ultimately ineffective. For me this is a case of what I would like to see happen (preservation of the rain forests) with what I believe will ultimately happen unless the local governments address this problem themselves (destruction of the rain forests to make way for local economic opportunities).
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The playing field is not level and never as been. Oil is heavily subsidized both in the United States and in foreign countries.
Some have estimated that these subsidies amount to about $300 billion per year around the world. This does not count the vast amounts spent on Wars for Oil Security, fighting the terrorist flashback from these wars and other costs related to oil consumption.
The infrastructure of oil powered vehicles as well as the oil products distribution system are the mandates for oil that bio fuels are up against.
Without their own subsidies, mandates and special protections to offset those of oil bio fuels can not compete.
It is unreasonable to expect that they should.
Without their own subsidies, mandates and special protections to offset those of oil bio fuels can not compete. It is unreasonable to expect that they should.
Except palm oil does, and sugarcane ethanol usually does -- each for their own reasons. They won't need subsidies to compete. Whether crude oil receives subsidies or not, palm oil can compete with it today. That provides some hope for supplies as oil depletes, but potentially at a very high environmental cost.
I know that this is often said, but reading it this time, I got to puzzling about how it can be true. What accounts for the accepted idea that petroleum has had a very high EROEI when compared to other liquid fuels? I had always accepted that the economic expansion of the last couple of centuries was due the the exploitation of first coal and then petroleum.
But the claim of subsidies for petroleum seems to imply that their energy return advantage is not real but is only a result of market manipulation. Surely in the early days of petroleum, in the 19th century, there were not heavy subsidies of petroleum in relation to wood, whale oil, or coal. Or maybe, not so surely. Am I grossly mistaken? Where did the wealth come from to unfairly subsidize petroleum? If it was a loser proposition, why did persons of wealth promote giving it subsidies? There was a time in the recent past when wealthy people actually paid taxes. Or am I mistaken on this, too? I really am puzzled ...
There are two kinds of subsidies, producer and consumer.
Producer subsidies tend to be introduced as industries mature and gain political clout. It works when ROI is falling, and oil companies can credibly claim to be about to lay off thousands of people and go overseas, where the pickings are richer -- things that politicians are scared of.
Consumer subsidies have been more used overseas, in places like Iran, Venezuela, and Indonesia. Subsidizing fuel use is promoted, again by producers, as a way of helping the poor. In fact, it does more to enrich the producers, and entrenches the use of the subsidized fuel.
The fact that palm oil and ethanol can compete in spite of the oil subsidies is quite amazing. Although, they both have their own subsidies in the form of environmental damage, which will eventually have to be fixed by governments.
Subsidies always end up enriching producers at the expense of consumers. When an industry is small and has high growth potential, and it is likely to soon bring down its costs enough not to need a subsidy, temporary subsidies can be a good idea. Otherwise not.
Oil is not subsidized in the USA, rather, the reverse is true: oil users subsidize government.
(People often are confused by the argument that the special taxes on oil in the USA aren't quite enough to pay for road construction and maintenance. Even if true, it is irrelevant, just as it would be irrelevant if there were a special tax on reading glasses that wasn't quite enough to pay for public libraries.)
Some countries are reputed to have genuine fossil fuel subsidies: Iran, Venezuela. Does anyone know if you can drive up to a gas station there with a pickup truck full of empty jerrycans, and expect to get them all filled? What about speed limits? Are they strongly enforced there?
If government gave money to gasoline users, the more they used, the poorer the civil service would be. This implies that speed limits would be strongly enforced, and one could not get a whole bunch of jerrycans filled all at once.
(How fire can be domesticated)
Actually, I think it's a little more complex than this. Oil may not be *directly* subsidized in America, but the *oil companies* are powerfully subsidized both directly - and indirectly, as are all the politically powerful and connected multinational corporations, by means of the internal structure of the political system. It's how it was designed.
There are "an inordinately complex series of interconnections between nominally private business enterprise and government and through endless, intentionally incomprehensible regulations - which are usually crafted by vested business interests themselves and serve to protect already entrenched powers and shut out new competitors." [Arthur Silber]
In other words, legislation and regulation are made to serve the interests of corporations - whose executives often join the relevant government agencies temporarily explicitly to help write the regulations (the EPA in particular is notorious for this practice due to Monsanto executives who have used the revolving door half a dozen times or more, shuttling rapidly between the two in what amounts to a combined private/public sector career). In a sense, this is how the corporations achieve efficiencies - by having servant government erect barriers to smaller competitors who would represent inefficiencies (in terms of having to compete), but also resiliency. It's the political version of monoculture agriculture. It's one thing that makes the American system so vulnerable.
All of this serves as an indirect subsidy, because corporations are relieved of the expense of actually competing. This is also why it is arguably a mistake to consider America a 'capitalist' country - corporatist would be a better word. I've 'competed' against Microsoft, for example, in Asia, and their licensing terms make it abundantly clear that competition is antithetical to their business model. They use political muscle to ensure potential competitors remain effectively unable to compete. Saves tons of money. Although I have no idea how one would go about calculating the amounts involved, I would argue that this is by far the most significant subsidy that Big Oil gets from the feds.
All that said, there are also more direct forms of subsidies for Big Oil by the American government - dug this up on the web:
The U.S. government has generally propped the [oil] industry up with:
Construction bonds at low interest rates or tax-free
Research-and-development programs at low or no cost
Assuming the legal risks of exploration and development in a company's stead
Below-cost loans with lenient repayment conditions
Income tax breaks, especially featuring obscure provisions in tax laws designed to receive little congressional oversight when they expire
Sales tax breaks - taxes on petroleum products are lower than average sales tax rates for other goods
Giving money to international financial institutions (the U.S. has given tens of billions of dollars to the World Bank and U.S. Export-Import Bank to encourage oil production internationally, according to Friends of the Earth)
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Construction and protection of the nation's highway system
Allowing the industry to pollute - what would oil cost if the industry had to pay to protect its shipments, and clean up its spills? If the environmental impact of burning petroleum were considered a cost? Or if it were held responsible for the particulate matter in people's lungs, in liability similar to that being asserted in the tobacco industry?
Relaxing the amount of royalties to be paid
Greenpeace estimates these direct subsidies cost American taxpayers about $35B per year.
Your mental model of EROEI is wrong; it is not a measure of how practical or economical an energy source is or its suitability for any particular purpose.
An EROEI of 2 means that you need to produce just twice as much energy for the same amount of net energy as an infinite EROEI. If the amount of labour, land, scarce minerals, time and so on required per unit of energy produced is less than half that of an energy source with an infinite EROEI, the energy source with an EROEI of 2 could be more practical.
EROEI also doesn't account for the fitness for any particular purpose of an energy source. One source might be portable, another might be intermittent, one might not be capable of performing much work(e.g. low grade heat suitable for space heating).
"I learned that palm oil is a heavy user of fertilizer (4 kg of nitrogen fertilizer per tree is the number I was quoted..."
If a western boycot doesn't kill this destructive palm oil nonsense, how about a 'Laws of Thermodynamics' boycott? Methinks its days are numbered.
The Wikipedia article for Oil Palm gives a nitrogen requirement of 200 kg nitrogen/ha/yr, which seems to me to be a reasonably small energy input for five tons/ha/year of oil.
But if we think of it in terms of the area of production, five tons is around 35-40 barrels of oil, so 40 acres (16 ha), a typical spacing for oil wells, will produce something like 600 barrels per year, or 1.6 barrels per day. That would be a pretty marginal oil well.
To put it another way, the current U.S. oil consumption is about 20 million barrels per day. To replace this with palm oil would require about 200 million ha, or 2 million square kilometers. That's about six times the total land area of Malaysia.
It looks like palm oil can make only a tiny contribution to the world's energy requirements, no matter how much rainforest is replaced by palm trees.
The Wikipedia article for Oil Palm gives a nitrogen requirement of 200 kg nitrogen/ha/yr, which seems to me to be a reasonably small energy input for five tons/ha/year of oil.
It is. That is the conclusion I came to after doing some back of the envelope calculations. Energy return relative to nitrogen fertilizer was pretty high.
It looks like palm oil can make only a tiny contribution to the world's energy requirements, no matter how much rainforest is replaced by palm trees.
Well, that's the thing. No matter how you slice it, it is hard to envision that even under the most optimistic cases biomass could contribute more than 10% of today's oil usage. That is true no matter what source of biomass or what sort of process you are talking about. You could theorize that algae could do better than that, but not based on today's algae technologies.
Do you think both of those fertilizer estimates are more or less correct? That is, the 4 kg per tree you were quoted and the 200 kg per acre? That comes out to around 50 trees per acre, or planted around 30 feet apart (if my arithmetic skills haven't declined with age as badly as I have physiologically ;) ). That doesn't seem like a very high density, which makes me wonder if one figure or the other is off.
Those numbers I'd anticipate are likely correct to even optimistic. I farm here outside of Volcano, Hawaii on the big island(taro)and know of a couple of palm oil projects in my area. While yields of palm oil aren't much to crow about, yields of grant money per acre are pretty high. . .that's where one finds the interest in palm oil. There's quite an industry here in farming grants.
My major concern would be the vastly different transpiration rates of the palms vs. other natural vegetation. We're in a near permanent drought here now and palm plantations would likely only worsen the issue.
You hit the nail on the head with grant money yield. What is published in so-called 'serious' literature are the biofuel crops with the highest grant $$/acre. This is exactly the reason that Practical Farmers of Iowa was created, out of a dissatisfaction by concerned farm operator/owners that corporate and academic research provides little value for real-world farming operations. Maybe it's time for a Practical Farmers of Hawaii with similiar goals?
That's a great project and I'm glad to hear of it. I hope my blog and website lends toward that direction. The needs in the tropics are different in Iowa and it's hard for those unfamiliar with tropical farming to anticipate the differences. My family farmed wheat on the mainland and by no means did that prepare me for the realities of the tropics.
Don't worry about the tropics being overrun by oil plantations. Not going to happpen. We grow stuff everyone wants that has an extreme value add and, well, palm oil cannot compete with vanilla, tea, coffee, or chocolate.
Yes. Don't worry because the tropics are growing, that is to say getting larger as a geographic region, because of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Sooner than we would like, Chicago will be a tropical city, if there is still a city at that location.
But it's not clear that rain forest type climate area is growing. There is much talk of desertification. I don't know.
The numbers mentioned are per hectare rather than acre. I make the separation in the order of 47'.
NAOM
200kg of nitrogen per hectare/year is 178lbs/acre, which, amazingly enough, is almost exactly the rate that nitrogen (in the form of Anydrous Ammonia) is being applied within miles of where I write this for next year's corn crop in Iowa. To make Ammonia (NH3) from electricity requires 12 to 14 Megawatt-hours per tonne, and 36 MMBTU from natural gas (10MWH/ton) so those 200kg require 2.0 to 2.8 MWH of input energy to create. I'll be generous and say 5 tonnes (5000kg) of palm oil has 40 Mj/kg, or 11 MWH/tonne, for 55MWH. So we've got a net EROI on the fertilizer of 20 to 27. As a comparison, the approximately 200kg of NH3 going into the black iowa soil around me will produce about 180 bushels of corn, and 540 gallons of ethanol (~1.2 tonnes), which is about 13 MWH, for an EROI *of only the fertilizer* of 4.6 to 6.5. (It's worth pointing out that 180 bushels of corn is 4.5 tonnes of biomass... so the tonnage of agricultural product per kg fertilizer input is almost exactly the same for corn and palm oil. Note this is per year, with ~120 days of growing for the corn. Palms get all year)
This is actually better than I thought it would be, so maybe palm oil does have a chance. But the reality still depends on the *economics* of the person harvesting the biomass to be able to make a living, and have the potential to own the land they are working.
Reading this, I just realized I was calculating tree density based on 200 kg per acre, when in fact the Wikipedia article was stating the nitrogen requirement per hectare (my America-centric English-system brain assuming things). So that comes out to only about 20 trees per acre, if the 4 kg per tree figure is right. That means the trees are, on average, around 46 feet apart! Are they really that large? Are these yield numbers etc. really accurate? It seems to come down to about 64 gallons of oil per tree.
From Selangor/ Malaysia
I'm measuring about 4 oil palms within an area of 20m X 20 m (60+ feet x 60+ feet) or that 1 oil palm need some 10m X 10m (33feet x 33 feet)
That's about what we came up with when we were eye-balling it. We were guessing about 10 meters apart.
(It's worth pointing out that 180 bushels of corn is 4.5 tonnes of biomass... so the tonnage of agricultural product per kg fertilizer input is almost exactly the same for corn and palm oil. Note this is per year, with ~120 days of growing for the corn. Palms get all year)
Lots of biomass from palm that you aren't accounting for. Further, the energy content of palm oil is much higher than for ethanol. As I told someone else recently, the reason they are growing palm over corn isn't because they can't grow corn.
I should have qualified that as economically viable tonnage per acre. All that extra biomass with the palm results in higher labor costs, for little or no economic return on investment. As for what crop to grow.. Grow whatever gets you at least 4-5 tons of directly marketable biomass per acre. If you don't get at least 3 tons, put up a solar or wind farm, or start an ecovillage instead.
Palm oil mills (sterilizers or crushers) can (and in many cases do) have biomass cogen plants using empty fruit bunches (EFBs) and other waste products as well as smaller biogas systems for liquid waste.
The bio-waste from palm oil vegetation can be dried, pyrolyzed to charcoal and used to create loma prieta. All this on site, without hauling low value materials from one place to another. Charcoal can also be compressed into bricks for use as a fuel at a later date, or just to sequester some carbon. Great stacks of elemental carbon bricks are quite good evidence of actual sequestration, and are quite stable against bio-degradation.
Yet a further idea: these carbon bricks might be used as a reserve currency in our reformed financial system. They truly have intrinsic value just like gold! or even better than gold whose intrinsic value is largely illusory, IMHO.
Worth remembering that gold-as-a-store-of-value has been money for thousands upon thousands of years across many, many cultures. In fact, it's still money today - I can convert a Maple Leaf into spending currency with ease all across the globe. I think it's a mistake to dismiss that as illusory. One of the chief benefits of gold-as-money, particularly relevant today, is that its supply cannot be arbitrarily increased (which constrains the rate of increase in money supply, which precludes unending and ruinous inflationary spending by a nation when it's currency is tied to gold). Aristotle set forth the determinants for what makes an acceptable currency:
Durable: Money must stand the test of time and the elements. It must not fade, corrode, or change through time;
Portable: Good money needs to hold a high amount of 'worth' relative to its weight and size;
Divisible: Money should be relatively easy to separate and re-combine without affecting its fundamental characteristics. An extension of this idea is that the item should be "fungible", defined as "being freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind."
Intrinsically Valuable: This value of money should be independent of any other object and contained in the money itself, starting with rarity.
Would carbon bricks fit these criteria? Dunno, but I know gold has, for millennia.
I don't really intend carbon bricks as a substitute for gold, but rather as a substitute for fiat money in its current role as a reserve currency. Carbon bricks have the tangible existence which fiat money lacks. There value relative to gold can be determined by trading in a market.
Money bricks are not easily counterfeited. Real palm oil carbon bricks contain radioactive carbon-14, which is not present in fake bricks made from coal. They represent a real improvement in the environment in that carbon has actually been removed from the biosphere where it is causing global warming. It is a step towards a realistic trading in 'carbon credits' without the possibility of political cheating. No credit for pretending that you saved a forest. Credit is given only for the physical stack of bricks. A living forest thus becomes a resource from which money can be produced sustainably.
On the other hand, making artificial radioactive carbon-14 and using it to 'salt' coal bricks will be counterfeiting money. Doing this has always been considered illegal. In this case there will be an evidence trail that will be fairly easy to follow.
Looking at the food perspective of this whole thing, the yields listed here seem very low.
I'm i missing something here? This yield seems very low. 1 hectare is around 2.5 acres... 24oz of palm oil in my kitchen shows just over 5000 calories. So 5 tons of this stuff is around 2 million calories per hectare or less then a million calories per acre? That is horrible yield of calories per acre... I think tomatoes can do better! (82 calories a pd/20 tons an acre=1.6 million calories/acre)...
Are these numbers right listed in the article?
I'm i missing something here? This yield seems very low.
The numbers are right, but they don't include the leftover meal after the oil is pressed, or any of the associated biomass. A gallon of palm oil will contain somewhere in the vicinity of 110,000 BTU, give or take. I am traveling just now and in a hurry, but so just double check to see if that is consistent with what was on the bottle.
48 servings, 110 calories per serving...24oz of organic Colombian palm oil shortening.. Your right that there would be leftover residue, but not sure how many leftover calories would be in that.
I think where i could be screwing up is crops per year. Is there only one harvest per year from oil palm???
Why don't they plant other trees in the mix, so its not so much a monocrop? They could easily add bananas, cocoa, jackfruit, durian, cashew ??? Lots of tropical trees out there. Of course yield would drop per acre (oil).
Using food for fuel is amazingly stupid. The whole transportation industry needs to move to electricity, sourced from nuclear, hydro, wind...
Your right that there would be leftover residue, but not sure how many leftover calories would be in that.
a lot more than you might think. We had some discussion on this on RR's blog, here.
From the Wikipedia page for palm oil;
For every tonne of palm oil produced from fresh fruit bunches, a farmer harvests around 6 tonnes of waste palm fronds, 1 tonne of palm trunks, 5 tonnes of empty fruit bunches, 1 tonne of press fiber (from the mesocarp of the fruit), half a tonne of palm kernelendocarp, 250 kg of palm kernel press cake, and 100 tonnes of palm oil mill effluent.
That comes out to 14 tons of (presumably wet/moist) biomass per ton of oil, or about 7 dry tons. At five tons of oil per hectare you then have 35 tons of dry biomass – roughly equivalent to 24 tons of coal!
So clearly, the majority of the energy is NOT in the oil.
I will also add, that this combined yield of 5tons oil and 35 tons dry biomass, per hectare is VERY high, and could only be achieved under ideal conditions.
But even at half that yield, it makes an excellent energy crop, we can pick and choose which parts we want to use for food, animal feed or energy.
But overall, it will not solve the world's problem!
Using food for fuel is amazingly stupid
A-freaking-men
Using food for fuel IS amazingly stupid !! Not to mention "using wine" for fuel, ( see Palm Wine and Palm Wine Liquor "Akpeteshie" )
Palm Oil is an excellent food.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1OyI-Qu9ZI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFJ2euqieQY
Edible oils are one of mankind's fundamental nutrients.
Neste and UOP technology is not really hydrocracking. The process is a modified hydrtoreating step to saturate the olefines and remove the oxygen molecules. The final product is normally referred to as renewable or green diesel, not biodiesel which is an ester. Biodiesel has many drawbacks compared with renewable diesel, having worse ignition qualities, higher NOX emissions and very poor stability.
On the other hand renewable diesel has exceptional ignition qualities and excellent stability, which makes it the best process by far, and it could be used for jet fuel production.
However I am yet to be convinced that palm oil to diesel/ jet is in any way sustainable.
Neste and UOP technology is not really hydrocracking.
It isn't hydrocracking in the conventional refinery nomenclature, because that takes long hydrocarbons and cracks them to shorter molecules. The Neste technology does fracture the lipid molecule, getting rid of that 3-carbon backbone in the process and turning it into propane. So to me, it is "cracking", but admittedly with differences from petroleum cracking.
You means it deoxygenates the glycerol. Agreed, but is is not carbon-carbon bonds breaking which is what hydrocracking is. The catalysts are also very different. A zeolite type for hydrocracking and Mo/W sulphide promoted by cobalt or nickel for hydrotreating.
In addition with hydrotreating the veg oil must first be pretreated to remove alkaline earth metals and P which are catalyst poisons. Also the olefine groups cause an exotherm on saturation and cooling is required, otherwise the catalyst bed gets baked.
Many of the IOC's have patented co-processing of veg oils with mineral diesel. Have a look at Conoco, BP, Petrobras and Albermarle. Shell have patented real hydrocracking of veg oil. Veg oil can also be processed in an FCC (fluid catalytic cracker).
Have a look at Conoco, BP, Petrobras and Albermarle.
I actually worked at ConocoPhillips when we developed that process.
Shell have patented real hydrocracking of veg oil.
So they are actually fracturing the C-C bonds in the hydrocarbon chain? Not sure why someone would want to do that; those chains are already in the jet/diesel range.
Shell do wierd and wonderful things like GTL as well. See the Pearl Project and its runaway cost.
The veg oil hydrocracker is for green gasoline amongst others. It also makes good olefine cracker feed. High in paraffins.
By deep catalytic cracking it is also possible to produce olefines, mainly C3 and C4's.
I agree with you. Why crack premium jet and diesel fractions to lighter.
Shell do wierd and wonderful things like GTL as well.
I know. Check the latest posting on my blog:
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2010/11/14/inside-shells-bintulu-gtl...
:)
We participated in the Biofuels Markets Africa conference in 07. Several of the industry participants stated clearly that high-quality palm oil (low FFA content) could be processed in the same hydrotreatment stream as regular diesel with no need for any extra infrastructure, and no separate downstream components. It just would go directly into the finished product.
I don't know this to be true, but they sure made a convincing story. The most elaborate presentation on the subject was by Engen....not exactly a group known for flim-flam.
Assuming the theorectical basis is correct, I would think the big obstacle here is marketing. We are still in the luxury stage of biofuels where people want the brand, the bumper sticker, or the wonderful warm feeling inside that comes from consuming something perported to be "green". Having the fueld come out of a regular diesel bowser is not providing this warm-fuzzy feeling.
Once alternative fuels are needed, all this will dissapear, and we'll just get down to business. As an oil crop, palm oil is best in class, and if total dry biomass is taken into account, it is among the most productive plants on earth.
In addition, it actually NEEDS understory cropping to thrive, so the arguments about monocropping don't necessarilly hold water, either. There are many vast tracts in Africa where there is no competition with food crops, no competition with rainforest, and the oil palm is native.
Yes, it needs a little fertilizer, but much of this can be recycled from the plant waste itself.
My comment is that I'm appalled, especially as it seems that palm oil is profitable without subsidies. For me this means that I can easily see how after oil becomes scarce all objections will be muted and the human species converts the whole tropical region in a gigantic monocultural palm oil biofuel farm.
Back of the envelope calculation:
- world oil use at present stands at 32 bln barrels per year which is about 4.5 bln. tonnes per year
- at 5 ton/hectare it would take more than 900 mln. hectares or 9 mln. square kilometers to replace present oil usage - which is roughly equal to the area covered by rainforest (~10mln.sq.km).
Or we can think of it this way... every percent we get from palm oil will mean 1% less rainforest. Of course, at least initially not all area will come from the destruction of rainforest, but this is assuming that those countries will have suitable land, free from other usage - which becomes less and less likely as population and economies grow over time. At the same time energy usage will keep growing and those regions are already pressed by other factors (climate change, urbanization etc.). Maybe we just left the genie out of the bottle with biofuels... and I put some of the blame on the European bureaucrats that helped kick-starting this.
For me this means that I can easily see how after oil becomes scarce all objections will be muted and the human species converts the whole tropical region in a gigantic monocultural palm oil biofuel farm.
Bingo. That is how I could see the future unfolding.
Fuel does not pay enough for dedicated monoculture biofuel farms. If fuel prices actually get high enough to justify putting 5% of the population back to agricultural work on palm-oil biofuel plantations, then maybe. But this does not account for the huge demand reduction that will happen from more efficient vehicles and carpooling.
If, however, someone can find a way to grow $5/lb coffee in the understory of the palm oil bulk fuel crop, maybe. The future is integrated food & fuel farms.
You forgot corn ethanol, which in temperate regions with adequate rainfall produces sugar at a lower cost than sugarcane. One of the reasons that sugar prices are high... is that there has been a switch from High-Fructose Corn Syrup (Corn Sugar) back to Cane Sugar. The other part that is left out of the sugarcane cost equation is labor. There are also huge subsidies to both sugar, and corn. But trying to untangle the commodity cost increase or decrease from subsidies is damn nearly impossible.
In Iowa, anyway, it is possible for a farm owner/operator to make a reasonable ($50,000 to $75,000) USD a year living from farming 1000 to 2000 acres. If you can find a sugarcane owner/operator that does at least 50% of the labor required for the crop, I would love to visit. I really would like to be proven wrong. What I have observed with sugarcane (and many equatorial climates), is that because of the potential for year-round cropping, the ownership of land (and wealth) becomes very concentrated into the landowners, who are only able to produce low-cost crops by paying very low wages. For instance, sugarcane in Hawaii is NOT cost competitive on the world market, and this is because of the high level of worker protection and benefits, and thus a high labor cost. However, Hawaii's biggest cash agriculture export is extremely high-value hybrid seed corn.. which is exactly the thing (along with tractors, combines, and semi-trailers) that allow farmers in Iowa to make a living growing corn and soybeans, and STILL own at least some of the land they make a living from.
Palm oil production, as far as I can tell, leads to the same plantation and large centralized plants that sugarcane (and high-fructose corn syrup) do. But at least in Corn's case, there is at least a chance to make a living as a corn farmer, and own your own land. This is because much of the same infrastructure used to produce cheap 'corn sugar' can be used, if desired, to produce OTHER products with a higher value.
" derived from glycerides (long-chain fatty acids contained in lipids ) in vegetable oils or animal fats."
I would rather say that these oils are "acylglycerides". The glycerol part is the glyceride; and the acyl part is the fatty acid.
CH3(CH2)n(C=O)-O-CH2
CH3(CH2)n(C=O)-O-CH
HOCH
Although this may be gibberish. I would call that a diacylglyceride (with two fatty acyl chains of n+2 in carbon length.)
Your mixing a lot of things together but I don't think that plantation/ concentration of wealth in the agricultural industry is considered a problem. Indeed your example of the corn farmer leaves someone with inadequate cash reserves to weather a bad year or two assuming he spends most of his net income to live a "normal" lifestyle. Also of course if he loses his crop his net turns into a huge loss leverage in very high and farming. Figure it costs him 100-300k to put a crop in if he loses half his 75k net turns into a 75-200k loss not zero. Generally this means he loses his land eventually and its bought by agribusiness. Thus in the long run he is certain to eventually lose playing the farming game by borrowing money.
Next of course even in third world countries the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture is falling. For the US less than 3% of the population is engaged directly in agriculture. To be blunt we in general don't really give a crap about them.
A much larger portion of the US population is living below the poverty line for example. In third world countries of course the situation per capita is worse.
I'm not condoning any of this but my point is as long as we insist on BAU even with biofuels we will replicate the same concentration of wealth and efficiency of scale process that works across all other industries. Farming is not special and not some how unique. I think your claim is wrong. The combination of how our banking system works and economies of scale ensure that industries will be concentrated to what ever level is most efficient. The cash is there for any entity large enough to average a fairly steady net profit and hold enough debt to ensure the banks will work with them. Its the old line about owing the bank a million dollars.
Now this is the important part. The leverage that eventually takes out the small farmer still exists it did not go away indeed in general the leverage used in the large scale operations is even higher. As the system becomes more concentrated all it takes is for one player to over do it and default. As leverage increases even fairly minor market swings can catch and over extended player and take them out. The bank is forced to take over operations even if the government bails things out the party is now over. Your not dealing with a failed family farm but 10 of thousands of acres of palm oil, corn, sugar can thats now thrown on the market. This drops land prices and reduces the leverage ability of all players leading to more defaults..
I think you see how the game goes. Its the intrinsic nature of the system and its not tied to any particular industry. Biofuels, UNG etc etc are all simply leveraging a financial system thats built around cheap energy and infinite growth.
My opinion is that because this is how the game is played now any attempt to extrapolate biofuels forward into providing a replacement for oil is ludicrous. If you instead consider them being produced without the economy of scale and leverage then its clear that the volumes would be much lower no way they could sustain the current scale of economy.
Where does it end as far as I can tell very low. Look at Japan, the rust belt and even Iowa. Of course as the credit support collapses it leaves only the cash players i.e the true wealthy. They buy in at a fraction of the credit inflated prices yet in reality most probably pay too much even as they get control of the particular industry. Look at the oil bust in Texas for and example. Eventually of course these same people lever up again and the party is on.
Its this coupling of our credit systems to industry and economy of scale thats the problem. And personally I don't see that this system is viable in a post peak oil world. As various industries go bust the cash buyers find themselves looking at very low returns on their investment as the overall economy shrinks. Because of the generic nature of the problem this is even true in the palm oil industry and corn etc. The prices vs costs never result in large profits.
Whats failing is not the financial system itself with fiat currencies it can be propped up. Whats failing is economy of scale itself. In a world with overall economic shrinkage economy of scale is now unable to provide the returns it once did attempts to create profitable smaller ventures cannot compete with the marginally profitable to subsidized unprofitable large scale industries that teeter along.
Hopefully you can now see that the end result is there is basically no way for anyone to make any money regardless of how they run their operations. At best the large cash players manage to retain their nominal wealth thats about it.
Considering biofuels as some sort of special industry is wrong its not special and no different from the rest of the worlds industry the ready availability of debt leverage during the growth phase ensures that your screwed for years if not decades after large highly leveraged players finally collapse. If the overall economy is contracting then this condition is effectively permanent.
Regardless of how it ends it seems clear that it will be a very different social/economic system from what we have today once leverage becomes impossible to deploy. Given the way things work the natural outcome wold be for whatever wealth remains to be concentrated in the hands of a very small number of players yet this obviously causes instability so ...
You are exactly right about leverage. But it works two ways. The farmers that are farming in Iowa today weathered the farm crisis of the 80's by *avoiding* leverage, and paying off the land. Everyone still farming remembers all the guys that bought into the growth craze 20 years ago, and then bought the leveraged land at bankruptcy auctions because they had local banks that would lend them money based on a 10% overall exposure to debt, and 90% fully paid-for farmland that was handed down through the family. The leverage and corporate farms are what get all the press, but the old guy set in his ways is the one farming after the bubble pops.
Corporations and leverage simply cannot compete with farm owner/operators when it comes to long-term business sustainability (30 year outlooks) The owner-operator will happily sacrifice his *average* $50k/year net for living expenses in short years, sell some land, work another job. The corporate operation has no other option once the bank account runs out. Then in a good year, you'll see a $300k net, a new house, a new combine, and investment in the farm operation. A corporate operation will blow it on shareholder dividends that provide no return to the farm.
If he owns it outright and has not taken out loans. My point is if farming was done from a stable financial base of stored money then its financial picture is quite different. If its done with using debt then the bad years are unsurvivable.
The farmer that owns land and say uses it as collateral for a loan to buy more can expand and "beat" the more conservative farmer perhaps landing some fairly long term contracts perhaps having enough cash flow to use the futures market to lock in prices etc.
Now the same principal applies to any business farming is not special its and issue of how you finance a business a small family owned factory or store could readily operate either off of cash or debt.
My point is that your family farm or biofuel production is tightly tied to our current financial system which favors those who decide to use leverage until of course it eventually fails.
Discussions about biofuels that ignore the effects of financial leverage on the market indeed the entire economic system are missing a huge part of the issue. Its the financing that allow creation of huge destructive palm oil plantations.
Palm Oil produced from smaller family plots and varied agriculture are not nearly as big of and issue. However the aggregate production would almost certainly be significantly lower and the price higher. Indeed its doubtful that any reasonably sustainable approach to biofuels would result in production levels capable of replacing a significant amounts of petroleum usage.
Not telling what the real numbers are but perhaps less than 4mbd max globally with exports of perhaps 2mbd or so ?
Palm Oil as a contender to replace oil is reliant on highly leveraged large scale investment. And of course sensitive to large losses if you have a regional crop failure say from drought. Heck a really good year is just as bad as it would drive down prices.
The intrinsic problem is banking or debt leverage is tied to a fixed schedule is not readily adjustable. Futures market can of course lock in prices but since your already in debt your talking about even more borrowed money to get a fixed return in effect insurance. Or of course outright crop insurance.
It seems obvious that widespread replacement of oil with biofuels is completely dependent on our current financial system remaining capable of financing the large project and underlying this that the fuel production is sufficient to power and economy capable of supporting such a system. For oil at least which was much cheaper to produce this required steady net economic growth with relatively mild inflation in any given year.
The only reason biofuels even look good now is simply because the oil based financial infrastructure is still relatively intact. The banking system itself is still functioning under the belief we will return to growth if we print enough money. That assumption is probably false. If so then eventually the mega palm oil plantation will eventually find their credit lines cut and as I said once a few collapse everyone will find that they have no credit.
A cash based replacement via fire sales probably wont even be able to maintain previous production levels. Thus your looking at rising prices even as overall economic conditions worsen as credit problems cause production to fall. Lack of credit ensure net income falls even as prices increase as operators that survive can barely hold on without defaulting.
Sure some operators are flush with cash but if so its because they are conservative they are not going to overextend in such conditions. Those that do go down.
Your family farmer is out of the picture simply because few individuals have the cash to purchase and operate such large farms.
Hard money loans become the norm not the exception and hard money lenders are notorious for stripping their assets just to make a profit with no concept of the future.
And of course if you do it the right way i.e smaller more diverse family farms operating off of savings you don't get the economy of scale required.
Thus in the end the ignored issue of how biofuels are financed becomes in my opinion the key issue. No matter how you construct things in the end the only stable biofuel production possibility can power an economy thats a fraction of our current one.
Current financing simply creates a short term bubble that gives the illusion of a solution.
It could work for years even decades but in the end it fails. The only really sad thing is when it finally does fail it results in million of acres of land ruined and untold numbers facing extreme hardship.
We would be far better off to not even try to replace oil in the first place but simply learn to live with a significantly lower fuel usage level regardless of source.
In the end its your family farm but only after conditions are correct and probably not producing ethanol for fuel.
This is why I love temperate climates and winter. You have less than a month to get the crop in, so 20 year old equipment that costs 10% of new still gives you 50% of the productivity of new. And the major driver of your productivity is if you know how to keep old equipment running. This gives the small guy with a mechanical ability, a pile of junk parts, and a welder a huge advantage anytime the leverage system falls over. Or you can get the same thing with diversity.. integrated crop/livestock/agri-tourism completely negates the advantage of so-called 'economies of scale'.
We'd also do well to remember that Henry Ford built his first cars to run on moonshine.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the leverage system were to collapse and banks start up homesteading again.. Live on the land, farm it for 5 years and pay rent with half the crop, then you own it.
memmel, this is one of the most insightful posts I've seen on TOD, thanks. The logic here is straightforward, your conclusion dead-on:
"I think you see how the game goes. Its the intrinsic nature of the system and its not tied to any particular industry. Biofuels, UNG etc etc are all simply leveraging a financial system thats built around cheap energy and infinite growth.
...
Its this coupling of our credit systems to industry and economy of scale thats the problem. And personally I don't see that this system is viable in a post peak oil world."
I would add only this:
The article places responsibility for 'protecting'' the environment with governments. In my view, this is very nearly the same thing as placing responsibility for protecting the hen house with the fox (who will proceed to invite his buddies the wolves over for dinner).
As an example, the article notes that the Malaysian government - no doubt to generate a little plausible deniability to deflect environmental concerns - 'protected' hilly areas where the trees would not grow anyway (I can see their UN ambassador pounding the table, vehemently insisting 'we are environmentally responsible - why, we have protected X% of the rain forest!'). This is a familiar strategy - lawyers use it in court all the time to tie the legal system up in knots for years. This is what governments *do* - and that's how *that* game goes. Thus the pattern is fixed. Especially in the 3rd world.
So any kind of serious, large-scale push for palm oils, as conventionals deplete, will likely lead to massive environmental degradation coupled with severe impact on food prices and availability - which will especially impact those poor farmers who are trying to make a buck off of biofuels to feed their families, not recognizing that in so doing they are playing a role in driving up food prices - bit of a positive feedback loop there. Ongoing impoverishment and dependency upon BAU incentivizes more of the same. We've seen this movie before. It ends very badly - especially for the poor bastards who were suckered into destroying their own futures because of their desperate though necessary focus on the short term.
This is actually reminiscent of some of the New Deal era policies.
In any attempt to prop up some version of BAU, all the standard incentive structures associated with BAU come into play - environmental degradation, impoverishment and dependency among the poorest of the poor, etc. Those effects are often then used to justify the need for further attempts to prop up BAU, citing the opportunity that plantation work will give those poor to feed their children, and reduce dependency (while promising that governments will manage the needed environmental protection). This is the exact argument jeppen sought to advance in one of his posts yesterday. Sheesh, how many times will people be fooled by such rhetoric?
BAU is the core problem. The longer people seek to cling to it, the worse the damage that will be done. I honesty don't think it could be any clearer.
Again, kudos to Memmel for improving his writing presentation. It shows a lot of respect to the readers.
Thank you for the article, it confirmed many things I thought true.
Palm oil will have a substantial impact on energy impact in certain countries, but certainly not the US. Many tropical countries (I am thinking Africa) will use palm oil as a job-producing, FX-conserving alternative to importing oil from long distance. I would not be surprised if it gets over 50% market share in some countries.
However, as part of a global solution, there is no way it will be meaningful. I suspect even the 10% share forecast is highly optimistic.
BTW, I have seen oil palms growing in Zanzibar. They do not have to live in previously forested regions. Also, there is a significant opportunity for second cropping for grasses for livestock.
It's back again. That poppup-weasel "bio-energy". When will everyone finally get the message that photosynthesis is TOO inefficient to be useful on a large scale!. By converting some sand and bauxite into glass reflectors, and some steel into generating machinery, one can produce EXACTLY THE SAME NET ENERGY OUT as 100 to 300 acres (depending on final target energy format required) of ANY bio-mass crop using only ONE acre of solar-thermal electricity generating plant. 8750 hrs / yr, etc. etc.
AGAIN!
photosynthesis is TOO inefficient to be useful on a large scale!.
You are right of course, LenGould, and Dr Franz Trieb emphasises this point emphatically. But you have to realise that bio fuels work in place that CSP does not, in the mid tropical belt. Bio fuels also work at the individual level. So I think that you are going to have to accept that biofuels help to provide important income to people otherwise excluded from global markets. Of course getting the right balance is difficult, but then we can't do it so why should you expect that local tropical farmers can?
Let's hope that NASA's Omega project is successful. This will take the pressure off rainforests.
They are after liquid fuels, not electricity.
Robert, why not algae-based biofuels? Mark Huntley of Cellana is pushing seawater-based algae farms. They can use saline water (a plus) and not interfere with arable land that could be used instead for food production (another plus). They need lots of CO2 and other nutrients. The CO2 they can get from power plant waste, but they have to buy and import the other nutrients. To me, this looks like the weakest point, as phosphate will soon get more scarce and expensive, and of course these chemical nutrients could also be used instead for food production.
I think his primary market is the airline industry, and the military. It's certainly a challenge to replace all that fossil sunlight and nutrients with what's available at present. Even if the sunlight is "free", the nutrients still have to mined and transported, CO2 from coal, NPK from the usual sources.
why not algae-based biofuels?
Because they are not cost competitive, and have not yet been produced at anything beyond pilot scale.
To grow any meaningful amount of algae you need millions of acres of ponds, which are expensive to construct, and need flat land, which is generally the most sought after. You could terrace land, like China does, but even more cost and environmental impact. Cellana's ponds are lined with hdpe type liners - how expensive is that? But if you don't then you have seawater soaking into the ground, making it useless for anything else.
And, as you point out, you still need to supply nutrients. The best place to do an algae operation would be at the sewage plant for a arid area city, like Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc, where you already have nutrients in the water, and normally got to quite some expense to remove them. Even so, it is still a niche application.
There are millions of acres of oil palms, and only hundreds of acres of experimental algae farms. Even Cellana's website has "estimated yields". After decades of research, and dozens of companies trying, there is still not one commercial scale algae to oil operation, to give "actual yields" and "actual costs"
It is hard to imagine a greater environmental impact on the land than turning it into saltwater algae ponds.
Algae plants do not need farm land or forrest land. They can operate on non-arable, even desert lands. And there's not dozens of companies, there's hundreds. With 100's of millions, if not billions of dollars being invested. Even oil companies are investing in algae.
The reason the costs are so high now is because these are essentially research and development organizations. With high engineering type labor costs. Once a model plant is constructed that operates efficiently, that design can be replicated all over the world.
From Solazyme:
http://www.solazyme.com/cellulosic-diesel-fuel-algae
From Solazyme:
Solazyme has a very different model than open ponds. They use fermentors. That has allowed them to produce enough oil to supply the military for testing, but keeps them from enjoying all of the supposed advantages of algal fuel.
Algal fuel is a long way from large scale, commercial reality. NREL shut down their algae program in the mid-90's because of various issues, and those issues are still with us.
"Algae plants do not need farm land or forrest land. "
But they do need flat or terraceable land, and they need pond liners. The local version of the EPA is not going to let you pour salt water on the land and let it soak in.
In the US at least, desert lands are "the precious" and you are unlikely to get permission from the Feds (who own about 80% of them) to do anything. So the algae farms will have to compete with regular farms for the land, although just now there is a rare opportunity to take over abandoned suburbs and convert them to algae farms.
PVGuy,
You really need to take a look at the NASA Omega project. This solves all of the problems with algal oil except one from what I can see.
Space...uses open water
Feed stock...uses sewage effluent liquid
Energy....uses wave power undulations to move material through the syste peristaltically
Containment....uses polyethylene supported by surrounding water
The problem it does not solve, so far,? CO2 capture from the air.
The scaleability of this project is immense. If they can solve the one last problem then they have cracked it, and will be able to supply most of the oil for heavy transport and aviation, though not shipping (the largest container shipping I believe will go nuclear).
So I wouldnot go writing off agal oil for even in the short term.
My advice would be to look at the thermodynamics of photosynthesis. Then go and read some of the literature of David Alan Walker (Biofuels, facts, fantasy and feasibility or Biofuels - for better or worse). Do a Google seach for these papers as they are very good and so is Walker.
I will stick my neck out and state that algae will not be a solution any time soon, if ever. To date it has drained millions if not billions of $ of investment with no sign of any commercial facility that could produce fuel products economically. Algae might produce lipids but the reality is that they do so only in relatively low conentration of the total biomass and growth is inhibited by high light levels. There is little evidence that over a long period that algae does significantly better than other plants. You might be able to build an algae farm in a desert but is it perfectly flat? If it is not then your open pond construction costs will balloon. For PBI you simply would not be able to afford the cost. What about the carbon dioxide.
As for Solazyme I see turning sugar into algae as little better than fantasy. The thermodynamics are against you all the way.
Paul, I don't know if you travel much, but there is plenty of flat land in the SW USA like around Phoenix and Las Vegas that a little seawater percolation into would not make much difference either way. Many areas out there are dry lake beds already chuck full of salts. True enough there are infrastructure expenses, but so there are to maintaining crop lands.
Algae produce the most oil per unit mass of any biofuel. I don't know how that translates to acreage, but it seems to first order to allow smaller footprint. I guess it's great that there are already "millions of acres of oil palms" but they so far have not made a substantial dent into replacing liquid fossil fuels.
What makes the game of finding a replacement for petroleum interesting, IMHO, is that each candidate replacement has its own special selling points and special technical needs. The sales pitch for algae had me hooked for a long time, but now I have an idea as to what its special problem might be. The algae life form lives immersed in water. It is close to the surface, but not AT the water/air interface. It absorbs the CO2 that it needs from the water. To grow at the maximum rate allowed by incident sunlight, it must have much more CO2 in the water than is there naturally, hense the interest in locating algae farms close to coal fired power plants.
I'm not sure that this explains why algae have shown so little actual progress. But the fact is that algae have been showing great promise (and little progress) for a very long time. I have pretty much put them on the shelf along side to controlled nuclear fusion, and cold nuclear fusion.
Seems I've heard something along these lines:
Algae-based fuel is the fuel of the future - and always will be.
couple things I have heard - it is difficult to grow algae photosynthetically in high enough densities to get meaningful amounts of fuel out - light probably can't penetrate very far through a dense layer of algae... hence the idea to feed a carbon source. Second open ponds can easily be contaminated by other types of competing algae - which becomes problematic if you have genetically engineered an algae that produces large quantities of oil. Last I think it might be quite energy intensive to actually extract the oil from the algae... could be a problem breaking down the cell walls.
Paul, I don't know if you travel much, but there is plenty of flat land in the SW USA like around Phoenix and Las Vegas that a little seawater percolation into would not make much difference either way. Many areas out there are dry lake beds already chuck full of salts. True enough there are infrastructure expenses, but so there are to maintaining crop lands.
D, I haven't been to Phoenix but have spent plenty of time in S.Ca and done the flight from there to Vegas - magnificent desolation.
Things is, you don;t have to Az or Nv to find the conditions - there is already a VERY large body of salt water, loaded with plant nutrients, in southern California - the Salton Sea!
But, I am aware of ideas to do it near the coal power plants in Az, to sue their CO2, and that is a good start. OIne thing rarely mentioned in optimistic yields for algae is that always relies on a concentrated CO2 source, to elevate the CO2 in the water way above natural levels - so what do you do if you don;t happen to have a CO2 source handy?
There is also the problem of getting seawater into somewhere like Az, as there is no fresh water to spare. Even the sewage effluent, after high level treatment, goes back into the aquifers. You will lose two acre feet per year from evaporation - how do you replace that in Az.
Algae can produce more oil than any other biomass, but it needs intensive conditions. It is the equivalent of comparing food per acre from a well run greenhouse with open field farming - higher yields, but much more intensive (and expensive).
Because it's difficult, if not impossible, to stop the ponds being colonised by foreign, less potent but more adaptable, algae.
According to a seminar I attended two weeks ago, Mark Huntley of Cellana said he doesn't care if other algae colonize their raceways. Not sure what a less potent algae is doing if it's out-competing the regular or preferred guys. You must mean less oil per unit mass as less potent.
He said there have been calculations that a Maui operation tied to the power station there could produce enough biodiesel to supply the Hawaiian islands. Could be a niche industry, but good enough for the island folks.
If high-output algae is truly being out-competed by low output algae, won't you reach a point where there ain't no more high output algae? So after a transient period, you wind up with a steady state condition of all low output algae, absent repeated inputs, and seems like that would need to serve as the basis for assessments of actual long term project output and economic feasibility.
It sounds really odd to me that someone pushing algae as a solution would say he doesn't care if the preferred algae are outcompeted. Why not just allow the overachievers to colonize the whole thing in the first place and save the expense of the initial high output inputs, so to speak.
I must be missing something here.
ozzy, I'm not qualified to say if one algae is much better than the next, but it does seem to me that if all algae are an order of magnitude or so better as biofuel producers than palm oil or sugarcane, coconuts, etc., then it might not make much difference which particular species is dominating the crop out on the raceways.
Good point, D - devils in the numerical details, as usual. :)
I have one of those minds that can't let go of niggling details, though - if it's a non-issue, why is it being raised at a conference as, well, an issue?? I am missing something. But, that's not unusual. :)
Sounds like you need a strong selectable marker to keep the wild type bad strains out and the good oily guys in there. i imagine they are trying to make a cheap selectable marker for these ponds.
Need to teach farmers to make solar panels basically. The counterargument is always that it helps farmers to make biofuels -- ultimately we need farmers to stop farming biofuels and make solar cells and storage system components -- which take us from 1% bio-solar efficiency to 18% for silicon!
we could only hope for the maximum efficiency of 29% theoretical -- so even boring old 14% efficient would be awesome return over bio-solar -- which is darn miraculous.
To save the bio-creatures on this planet an inorganic solution may be much better.
And solar-thermal electricity is too expensive!
A gallon of palm oil containing 35 kwh of energy costs about $1.90.
The cost of 35 kwh of solar thermal electricity is about $3.50.
AGAIN!
Solar-thermal electricity is too expensive!
Also you can't eat electricity.
But you don't eat gasoline or diesel fuel either. so I miss you point. electricity is useful for transport and lighting and food preparation and so forth...
Majorian -
It appears that you have fallen into the trap that a lot of people do when they compare the cost of fuel with the cost of electricity. It is a sort of apples & oranges problem.
A kwh or generated electricity, after it is delivered and transmission losses are taken into account, is perhaps 0.85 to 0.09 khw of directly usable energy at the point of use, be it for lighting, heating, or running plug-in cars or hair dryers.
However, a kwh of energy in the form of palm oil or other combustible organic material, must first be put through a heat engine to do useful work. As all but the largest heat engines have an efficiency of no more than about 0.25, you are left with no more than 0.25 kwh of usable energy.
So, when you pay $1.90 for a gallon of palm oil with an energy content of 35 kwh, you are really paying $1.90 for approx 9 kwh or usable energy, which is about $0.21/kwh.
Now, when you then compare that to $0.10/kwh for solar thermal electricity (your numbers, not mine), the palm oil is almost twice as expensive. (As we need to take into account transmission losses for the solar thermal, the cost of solar thermal at point of use would increase to about $0.12/kwh.)
This is a good example of the 'form value' of energy, a term that isn't used much anymore but which is still a very important concept when making comparisons.
The point I was making is that palm oil is a cheap way of making energy which is why they are doing it in Indonesia instead of Arabia or Alaska. It's pointless to compare the energy per acre advantage of solar-thermal over plants. Speaking of apples and oranges, electricity is not a liquid fuel.
> palm oil is a cheap way of making energy
Yes. Low capital cost, and with cheap labour, low operating cost.
> which is why they are doing it in Indonesia instead of ... Alaska.
??? Oil palms don't yet grow in Alaska. Maybe in seven or eight decades...
> electricity
The thing about electricity, besides the high capital cost, is that Indonesia and Malaysia can't export it anywhere. (Except maybe as aluminium, but there's no money in that.) Electricity doesn't fit their business model.
If an infrastructure exists to deliver electric power, then electric power is more liquid than gasoline in certain respects.
I know the if is big but in certain places palm oil makes less sense than solar.
And this leads to yet another thought...
We tend to want to 'globalize' analyses of this or that technology response to PO - to test it against the question 'will this support BAU or anything like it'? We look at it from the macro level, since that's where we can really see the predicament.
It would be quite useful, after that, to perform a sort of in-place analysis based on local factors, to see if some proposed technological 'fix' or other (which we may declare DOA for purposes of BAU), is, rather, a good fit for its locality based on conditions likely to prevail in a post-peak world. Hard to see nuclear ever being a good fit for any locality, due to expense, required knowledge base, construction/infrastructure requirements, etc, but biofuels may well fit many places.
I suspect Malaysian palm oil will never offer much help the US, or Europe, or maybe even China. But it may well soften Malaysia's landing once PO bites and make it a more livable place post-peak.
That is, many ideas which fail the BAU test could easily result in local, non-BAU prosperity. And because I am of the opinion that there is no 'techno-solution' to the BAU test, it's in the latter area where much more attention and effort would be productive.
ozzy43,
Yes exactly (I know, I promised to stay away but I can't resist this one...hey, Robert has sworn off a few times too but always comes back...:-)
I am always surprised that the same people who swear to tenants of localization and de-centralization/de-standardization will turn around and judge any alternative harshly because it does not compete well in a centralized/standardized world economy...the very type of world economy almost all of us accept as coming to an end...
Such is the case with solar...the Germans develop it like mad, but in Southern California, North Africa, or even the Middle East it is still often dismissed. It seems completely counter intuitive, unless you recall that the Germans are as interested in export as in home consumption (at last check, they still exported more per person than any nation on earth).
Certain bio-fuels may make local sense close to where the crop is grown, and with a very, VERY efficient transport system (one thinks of the American mid west and the Mississippi and Ohio river barge system as the transport.
But your point is well taken...consideration of what will sustain a relatively modern and civil society close at source of production should be always on the table....enough stable and modern local regions lead to a stable and modern world...
RC
majorian -
Then why were you making the comparison in the first place?
joule-
Obviously because the critical factor is cost not the efficiency or inefficiency of plants versus solar-thermal.
I think this point is often overlooked. Efficiency is useless if you can't afford it. The PV cells used by NASA are very efficient, double that of normal cells, and at least 10x the cost - is that efficiency worth the cost for anything other than a satellite?
The simple fact is that projects won;t get done by anyone other than government, unless they are cost efficient. It is often cheaper just to use more of something (e,g. land) than to go to ridiculous complexity to minimise it.
As good a technical idea as concentrating solar thermal is, no one has been able to make it cost efficient to do without generous subsidies, even with "free" land in the desert, so it is not self replicating.
If growers can do palm oil profitably, then it can be, and obviously already is, self replicating. Doing it profitably by razing rainforest is a different story, and speaks more to the government for letting people do that, and of the customer who buys it.
Solutions that are cost efficient (=profitable) are far more likely to be implemented on a large scale than ones that aren't. Anything will be profitable enough with high enough energy prices/taxes, but the cheaper solutions will then be getting done on an even larger scale, unless prohibited by law. And clearly Malaysia is not about to stop palm oil growing, though we can hope they might stop clearing the rainforest, but ultimately, that is their decision. Ours is whether or not we will buy the products of rainforest clearing.
lengould,
You say:
But part of a real, sustainable response to the decline in petroleum supply is that a planned response must allow us to maintain a healthy biosphere. (We are all animals, and really need the biosphere to survive.)
Whatever the arguments for or against this or that proposal, we must keep in mind the survival of the biosphere. Survival of the biosphere, for me, is not a matter of efficiency but of necessity. We don't yet know how to do space travel on a budget. Witness the cost overruns on almost all NASA projects. So be careful about efficiency arguments on so vital a project.
Totally agree with you, geek7.
I think the thing to remember is that the degradation of the biosphere, while global in aggregate, really happens at the local level, one local chunk at a time. And that's the level at which the destruction will need to be halted, and reversed. Via local, truly sustainable projects - for food, energy, etc. We're not going to have some global 'fix' - all ecologies are local. The arguments about whether some proposed 'solution' can be replicated in such a way as to work at a global scale to perpetuate BAU are all stuff and nonsense - a waste of time and energy. Worse - they are dangerous. BAU is a dead man walking. The sooner we recognize this and turn our attention to local and sustainable efforts aimed at maximizing local well being, the softer the post-peak landing we can expect and the quicker the path to a healthy biosphere and human well being, within the limits of the constraints upon the future that past and present actions have imposed.
You miss the mark. Again, simply stated, IF a plot of land is to be considered useful to convert sunlight into an energy resource, then it is FAR more sensible (in a ratio of approximately 100+ to 1) to employ solar thermal electrical generation than ANY bio-crop-to-fuel process. Algae, palm oil, etc. etc.
Electricity is just as useful for rail transport as diesel. In a highly constrained technology future, electric farming is far more likely than diesel (crops can be sown and harvested by animal effort if necessary, but central operation like thrashing, storage conveying, grinding are most efficiently done with electricity.
The BIGGEST ARGUMENT for bio-fuels is that they enable the continuation of the BAU driving of personal transport vehicles, and do so using land resources in poor foreign nations.
Len,
You made a really gross over generalization. You said photosynthesis, not bio-fuel. Is there something in the human economy that is larger scale than the biosphere? I think not. We are all part of the biosphere. When we are all dead and gone, the biosphere (AND photosynthesis) will still be functioning on a really large scale. Get a grip on reality, please.
geek7. Your criticism flies above me (I generously presume).
1) In what way exactly is "bio-fuel" directly substitutable for "photosynthesis". Demonstrate in sentence(s) please.
2) My comparison of the efficiency of conversion of sunlight's raw energy available per sq. meter of available land area into useable output forms of energy is exactly to the point. All a field of palm oil plants is is a system for converting sunlight into useful output energy, a job which the solar thermal plant does at least 100 times more efficiently.
a) A bio-fuel system first uses plant photosynthesis to convert approx. 2/3s of 1% (eg. 0.66%) of incoming sunlight into total plant matter, including trunk, leaves and roots, and fruit. Allowing for energy inputs to fertilizers, planting, harvesting, transporting to processing centres, processing, and transporting to end use points, perhaps 0.1% of the incoming sunlight gets converted into useable fuel energy.
b) A solar thermal generating station using dish stirling generators presently operates at about 28% efficiency converting incoming sunlight to electrical energy output. Allowing perhaps 5% losses in moving that to point of use, and the initial three months of output to replace the energy used in its construction, the net product is about 25%.
25.00% / 0.10 = 250 times greater effectiveness of the solar thermal system versus the palm oil system. Assuming only a 50% coverage of land by the solar collectors, vs. eg. 90% coverage of land with palm oil crops still leaves 250 * 50%/90% = 139 times less land requirement for solar thermal vs. palm oil. Then factor in the 2x minimum greater usefulness of a kwh of electricity in propelling a transport vehicle vs. diesel (legitimate as long as any diesel worldwide is used in personal transport vehicles in reasonably sunny regions), you arrive at a figure of 139 * (2/1) = 278 times less land requirement for solar thermal vs. palm oil.
For discussions of economic competitiveness, see Sargent & Lundy engineering's analysis of NREL data, in which they determined that "If quite assured efficiencies of scale by constructing (only) 2 to 8 GW of solar thermal generation in the USA between 2010 and 2020 were realized, solar thermal electricity can generate saleable electricity at a wholesale cost of between 3.5 and 6.2 cents / kwh (current values)" which is a VERY competitive price even with dirty coal, and the electricity would be available to customers at exactly the peak period when demand (and prices) are highest.
Unlike corn or cellulosic ethanol, palm oil production greatly increases GHG emissions due to land use issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_palm_oil
A renewable energy/food source that greatly increases GHG emissions sounds absolutely horrible.
Undoubtably further development will occur but the West shouldn't dream of backing such fuel as 'green'.
Colombian Trade Unions are very much again biofuels (mainly from sugar cane and palm trees in Colombia) because they say that it needs very cheap labor cost to be profitable. If you would want to give any living wage to the working force, there would be no way to earn some money with palm oil or sugar cane biofuels.
I heard that rape oil could be a profitable biofuel in the european union if you transform it in diesel. It should be very easy, but the stories I heard about are about farmers producing the fuel they need for their machines.
Rubbish. If so, palm oil would be several times more profitable. As Robert pointed out at the start of his article, palm oil trumps everything known to us at the moment in terms of oil(energy?) yield per unit of land area. See:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
According to the table at that link, palm oil is five times as productive as rapeseed.
Alan from the islands
Except for the problem that oil palms don't grow in the European climate. They're tropical.
Even the European Union is not crazy enough to suggest growing oil palms in coal- or gas-heated greenhouses is "green".
Oops! Slight parsing error in my brain there. Did not compute that the rapeseed was to be grown in the EU not just processed there. Problem when discussing two separate regions in one post.
This thread has brought to mind some thoughts that I have had since being aware of Peak Oil. The fact is solar energy is abundant all year round in the tropics while being rare in winter the further away you get from the equator. How can the solar energy that is available in the tropics year round be delivered to winter prone regions?
Desertec is one high tech, capital intensive idea. Shipping ethanol, plant oils or biomass (wood pellets, bagasse etc.) from the tropics to temperate regions is a low tech option that can be done with current shipping resources. Question is, does it make sense? Might not now. Might do some time in the future.
Alan from the islands
In fact, solar resources are not as bad in habitable climates away from the equator as you imply. FAR more important to any location's solar energy potential than latitude is cloud cover.
True - just look at Germany, whose FiT subsidy has resulted in sufficient home-based solar coming online that it's destabilizing their grid. Not a country known for abundant insolation.
Robert,
Do you have actual numbers? How about $/Joule in the refined fuel?
Seems to me that this cost is ultimately driven by arable land price, and it is ironic and disturbing that undeveloped rainforest goes so cheaply.
Don't know exact costs, but I would be shocked if it costs more than $60 a barrel for jet fuel derived from palm oil via the Neste process.
What a coincidence that this particular article shows up today. Just this morning I was talking to my dad about oil palms as opposed to coconuts, their relative yields and how I could not figure out why it was not being grown here.
We went for a drive to visit a friend of his that had offered him some grapefruit and on the way back I was pointing out arable land that was doing absolutely nothing, for want of a viable cash crop. The area around where my dad lives used to produce premium (very rich tasting) cocoa for export. There were also large acreages of bananas usually for export to the UK/EU. As recently as the 1980s there was a small sugar factory less than 20 miles away and there area areas that are planted with coconuts.
Cocoa farming in this area is all but dead since, my dad says the old farmers are dying off and their descendants are not interested in farming and the meager returns it offers. Since the EU no longer gives preferential treatment for Caribbean bananas, exports have plummeted and production now appears to be for the local market, including a small banana chip factory near where the sugar factory used to be. Since the sugar factory closed, all the land that was in sugar cane was switched to bananas (oops), other crops or left idle. The coconut oil industry was wiped out in the early 1970s by a disease called lethal yellowing that wiped out complete coconut plantations. Though attempts were made to resuscitate the industry with disease resistant varieties, it has never recovered and now most coconuts are reaped before they are fully ripened and sold for drinking (coconut water).
I have observed considerable acreages of land all over Jamaica that were once in sugar or bananas or coconuts that are now idle. Can anybody think of a good reason why Jamaican farmers are not rushing into oil palm growing, apart from the fact that it's never been grown here commercially before? I know one: They have never heard about Peak Oil. Any others?
Alan from the islands
This is off-topic, Alan, but your post caused a thought bubble on my part.
Is any hemp (the legal kind) being grown in Hawaii for hempseed oil production? I understood that this could be used as a feedstock for biodiesel, as well as a replacement for fossil fuels in some industrial processes (plastics, paints, etc). I'm curious if the claims of hemp supporters hold sufficient weight that farmers consider it to be a viable cash crop.
And any non-Hawaiians that want to chime on on this, feel free. :)
There's no legal hemp in Hawaii. There was a push for sugar cane ethanol, but that idea failed because of the high unionized labor rates. Hawaii imports ethanol from Central America. It's interesting to note that PV growth in Hawaii is the highest in the US, because it is cheaper than the (fuel oil fired) utilities.
There's no legal hemp in Jamaica either AFAIK and no matter how hard law enforcement tries, there's a very strong financial incentive to grow the other kind. Other uses for hemp pale on comparison to the huge sums to be made in producing hemp for recreational purposes. Some fundamental changes are going to have to happen for the situation with hemp to change but then, fundamental change is what Peak Oil is all about.
Alan from the islands
Alan, find out how much the land rents for (or the cost per acre). If it's under $200/acre rent I say we organize something and call it POFW (post-oil farmers of the world), and put in 5 acres of oil palms, and 5 acres of sweet sorghum.
Why sweet sorghum? Sugar cane is already well entrenched in the tropics as a crop. Why not use sugar cane instead.
Jamaica's sugar industry is on life support but, it more a result of politics than any inherent inefficiencies. An experiment with socialism (state ownership) in the 70s, coupled with a tradition of labour (union) friendly governments since Jamaica gained independence in 1962 meant that only the few privately held sugar factories ended up with anything close to world class efficiency. The government has been trying to sell the state owned sugar operations for years but the prevailing labour and investment climate has resulted in repeated failure. A recent sale is supposed to be going through but, I'll believe it when it's done.
In that sort of environment what would make sorghum more viable than cane?
Alan from the islands
Speaking of biofuels, I've seen a link to Joule Unlimited posted in a couple of places, and even in a post here on the Oil Drum on the May 5th Drumbeat, but I don't think anyone commented on it. It looks like they want to make diesel and ethanol just using sunlight, concentrated CO2 and seawater. It kind of looks too good to be true for me so was wondering if anyone here knew if it is a load of rubbish, not scaleable/ feasible, or could actually be useful.
http://www.jouleunlimited.com/why-solar-fuel/how-it-works
There are any number of this type of shell company spouting the benefits of algae. What they want is you as an investor(patsy). Put your money in and watch it grow - smaller. Much smaller. This looks like a re-incarnation of Greenfuels. Same place. As for $30 per barrel - if it is too good to be true , it generally is. They have added all thr algae buzzwords, that it is like buzzword bingo. Imagine trying to get ethanol out of an algae solution. It beggars belief.
This lot are in the realms of science fanatsy. 15000 gallons per acre. That is about 120 mt per hectare of biodiesel!!!!!(not even biomass). That would breach both the 1st and 2nd law of thermodynamcis and would imply a thermodynamic efficiency greater than the theoretical maximum. Maybe they are going to use artificial light and a genie. Learn the thermodynamics before investing in scams. Read this from Professor David Walker.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p3064x5344334w37/
As for John Kerry's endorsement I would rate that a useless as a chocolate teapot.He does well to find his way home.
Algae projects are often run by conmen. Do not get conned.
Thanks for the reply and the link. I'll read it properly later. I did think the whole thing looks a bit too good to be true. I'm not going to get conned as I'm not looking to invest. I'm just trying to work out if I'm a doomer or not, and subsequently if I need to stock up and prepare etc or if I decide technology will save the day.
When any of these scams advertise things like $30 oil the response is simple - "how much of it can I buy from you at that price, and when can I pick it up.
If they can;t *sell* to you at that price, then, quite simply, they can't *make* it for that price - they are just trying to monetise the hype (or hope).
Quite. I could not agree more.
Google Earth has lots of satellite images of palm tree farms and burning forests.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3073/3016656475_c386489ce6.jpg
The pattern is unmistakeable and you can gauge how much land is being used fairly quickly.
I love the sound of laughter, so I'll just say
artificial photosynthesis.
Nothing like the smell of burning entitlement in the morning. It smells like... catastrophe.
Palm Oil? PALM OIL? WTF?
Do you people have any idea of the level of misery and brutality that is inflicted on the people who have to do that work? Like making $1.14 a day for moving a TON of palm fruit?
Watch this movie first:
http://freedocumentaries.org/int.php?filmID=95
a documentary made BY palm oil workers about their plight and the brutal repression they have faced.
THEN we can start talking about palm oil.
Palm Oil. Gah...
Without watching the video I would guess that it compares favorably with the level of misery and brutality that is going to be inflicted on unemployed people in third world tropical countries when they no longer have food aid or cheap corn, wheat and rice courtesy of industrialised agriculture and can no longer access cheap fossil fuels. Think Somalia, Rwanda etc.
I would rather live here, where I am knowing that there are options for energy crops that could, for example, provide fuel for farm tractors, trucks, buses and locomotives when petroleum starts going unobtanium. The fact is, Jamaica like most of the rest of the world is totally unprepared for Peak Oil and it makes me feel like I want to run but, where to? I've heard Norway is good but, who knows? One could be jumping out of the proverbial frying pan into the fire.
I would rather advocate for the planting of crops like palm oil to replace coconuts and double the potential oil yields per acre, whether for food or fuel but. The problem is, such a project will take time and we may not have enough of that.
Alan from the islands
"...the grower explained that palm oil was a way for rural poor people to earn some money to be able to feed their families and send their kids to school...
"...an estimated 8% of Malaysians live on less than $2 a day..
What a tragedy. So the grower is no longer self-sufficient in food supplies, and now relies on the foreign-controlled price of palm oil for his daily bread. The man is a sorry fool.
He thinks his children will be better off by sending them away to an expensive school, thus fitting them out with useless notions that do not improve their chances of survival in the coming interesting times one jot; while denying him the pleasure of their company and the benefit of their labour.
Those Malaysians who are living on less than $2 a day now will be those who will be still living past the end of the mineral energy era. The palm oil producers will not be so lucky.
What a tragedy. So the grower is no longer self-sufficient in food supplies, and now relies on the foreign-controlled price of palm oil for his daily bread. The man is a sorry fool.
Why would you jump to that conclusion? What I saw were a lot of palms planted outside people houses. So they still grow their food, but they have added a few oil palm trees to the mix so they can sell the fruits to local coops. It isn't like they gave up the rest of their food growing capabilities.
"What I saw were a lot of palms planted outside people houses"
Thanks for that observation, Robert. This is what I would have thought would happen in communities where subsistence is the theme. Having a cash crop with a stable demand is a very powerful stabiliser for such people, as long as corrupt local officials do not intervene. Broad rape of the landscape for monocrops that place peoples food security at risk is a government problem and responsibility and must be addressed at that level.
Hi Robert!
Sorry for the generalisation; your comment gave me the impression that the grower was a grower of a substantial crop, and the food they purchased was an important part of their diet.
Nevertheless I stand by my point. When the thinking world is trying very hard to move away from any dependence on the multi-nationals and western economies, especially when it comes to energy-related products at the end of along supply chain with wildly fluctuating prices, it seems a shame to me to see people who have an established subsistence lifestyle coming to rely on any part of the trembling 'western' pack of cards.
Recently I noticed some excitement among old-style farmers at their ability to use their meagre but increasing wealth to buy petrol-powered hand tools (strimmers, brush cutters etc) to make their farming easier, which again exemplifies the very direction we should be moving away from.
I rejoice at what the west would term "the poor subsistence farmer" "the undiscovered tribe" - for these people have managed to avoid participation in the worst of the mineral energy era's excesses. They have a better chance of outliving many of us as the mineral energy era comes to its natural conclusion.
"I've decided that the best think for you is that you remain too poor to purchase any of the luxuries I use every day". eh?
The subsistence farmer with a few palms in his yard may be a pretty image, Robert, but I suspect that represents an immeasurably small fraction of palm oil products sold worldwide. Here's the other side of it, the side which has suddenly developed a taste for making you believe they've discovered ecological responsibility and god.
Sime Darby Ltd.
600,000 hectares = 6% world production, therefors 100% = 10,000,000 hectares. How many subsistence farmers with a few plants are needed to make up 1%, equivalent to 100,000 hectares?
(1 metric ton = 7.33 bbl crude oil, 48 mm tonnes = 1,173 mm bbl = 3.21 mm bbl per day, about 4% of world use of oil.)
The subsistence farmer with a few palms in his yard may be a pretty image, Robert, but I suspect that represents an immeasurably small fraction of palm oil products sold worldwide.
About that, I have no doubt. The bulk comes from large plantations. The small farmer is just making a few dollars and adding a small amount. For him, it may amount to a lot of his income, but the overall contribution is certainly low.