I like to adopt a simple approach. My concern is about agriculture in its widest sense and its dependence on oil. Diesel to be more exact. Can we replace the present source of diesel with something more akin to the fuel of the inventor himself (Rudolf Diesel)? Yes in theory, but we face two issues, one the supplies of raw material and two the growth in demand.

Try then a simple scenario. Take a small country town like Dalwallinu in WA. (Get the map out if you don’t know where it is). It’s on the edge of the wheat belt. Its livelihood is agriculture and especially wheat. Without diesel, the town ceases to exist. Can that town begin the steps towards self sufficiency using solar energy and photosynthesis as its primary diesel supply process? Yes. It can develop ponding and reactor systems to grow the right kind of lipid rich algae. That can be processed by trans-esterification into a fuel ( R Diesel just used peanut oil). Thus the small beginning is to build plant that the town can power its vehicles with. As production costs reduce, bigger plants can be built. Farmers then can start to fuel their tractors and headers with this fuel.

I stress that this is LOCAL and under the control of the local shire, not Shell or Caltex. Yes, I can know all the usual objections and there are some hurdles, by proof of concept is a first step. The process is well underway in the Netherlands and a brewery in London has been capturing waste carbon dioxide to produce algae.

Can we use Canola? I doubt it. Can we use hardy trees like mallee to get at an oil source? Yes we can and we do at Narrogin.

The biggest hurdle? Investment in plant to do the work.

No renew, the biggest hurdle is EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). Think of it like this, every living organism on the Planet has to make an "Energy Profit" in order to survive and reproduce. If you consume a 100 calories, but expend the same (or even one calorie more), in the process of getting that 100 calories, you will die. And this is also why there will always be some oil left in the ground, because when it takes the energy contained in one barrel to retrieve, refine and bring that barrel to market, the game's over. "Cost" doesn't come into it. Economics doesn't trump the physical laws of the Universe. The EROEI of all forms of bio-fuel are very marginal at best, and may even be negative (depending on whose figures you trust). A guy called Dr. David Pimentel has done a lot of work in this area. If you google his name, along with EROEI, I'm sure you'd find a lot of background. Further, to replace our current demand for fossil fuel with any kind of biofuel would cover more land than the Planet has available. That puts the energy density of petroleum, plus our current use of it (around 83 million barrel a day), in some kind of perspective, as does this quote from George Monbiot:

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44 x 10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/

rstuart;
No worries, my problem is read a lot of the stuff on the
various web sites but don't usually remember where.

Renew;
In olden days farmers always had paddocks set aside to grow
fodder for their draft animals. I guess the same will apply in your
suggested scheme. The question is how much acreage would be needed for
bio-diesel production ? Would it make the farm uneconomical ?
Kim-Bax raises the related issue of ERoEI, and certainly it makes the
large scale production of bio-diesel very dodgy.
However on farm production might just be practical if the land can be
used for multiple purposes such as crop rotation.

Your next problem is how to get the produce to market ?
Unless the railway is electrified and the rail head is nearby then
you won't get the crop to market.
For a while I guess that food production will get a priority
allocation of diesel.

If you have to revert to horse power then you will need about 20 to
50 times the number of farm workers that now work on the land.
Problems, problems !

Kim and rstuart, I am familiar with Pimentel - indeed his latest edition of "Food Energy and Society" is sitting here on my desk - and I am fully aware of EROEI. But. We either say goodbye totally to "Dalwallinu" as a town and all its people, their history and send the bricks and timber to the recycling yards or we attempt to try renewing old ways.

Now this is oil mallee:

"The establishment of the Narrogin integrated mallee biomass plant was originally designed as a short-term research and development project by Western Power, and is now under the control of Verve Energy, with four primary objectives. These objectives are, firstly, to produce renewable electricity; secondly, to produce eucalyptus oil; thirdly, to produce charcoal; and fourthly, to activate carbon from that charcoal. The energy input is from mallee eucalyptus trees."

That was Fran Logan in the WA parliament Hansard. And note please that the trees are not felled merely coppiced. A medieval process that still survives in the UK.

I quote that because it shows that multiple outputs can be derived from the one resource, all of which are useful.

And whilst this might be a tad heretical, why not use wheat locally and NOT transport it 1000s of kms by train/truck. i.e. use wind to grind it locally and use it locally.

We are going to face insurmountable problems if we persist in overlaying appropriate technologies on a system that is inherently untenable because it is based on fossil diesel.

Algae - I do not have the EROEI data to hand and I suspect it isn't worked out adequately yet. Apart from producing betacarotene from brine algae (I was in a business that did this)there are only the odd Spirulina Chlorella palnts operational.

If it is so that these concepts are fouling EROEI principles then we must re-think, but right now, we are even thinking!

Bill

Dovetails nicely with "Energy is everything" from a few days ago. The fairly simple premise is unless you can expand (or maintain) your energy supply your economic can't grow (or be maintained at the same level). Given that most if not all oil producers are hitting their peak then we are going to have an energy crisis at some point. I don't think we'll wake up one morning and go "OMG, petrol is $3.99.9 a litre, how will I drive my v8/truck/tractor; hey, why are my wheatbix $7 a box... " it will be a series of increases and declines as demand is produced and then destroyed but costs will trend up. e.g. the cost of oil is down but my loaf of bread is still $3.20 at bakers delight. You'd expect price to fall when the cost of transportation does wouldn't you?

Unless we can start coming up with alternatives now. Which would require farsighted government policy. This seems to be lacking. I've not heard much from any of the parties on what they intend to do about Australia's energy future (other then the Howard governments mooted nuclear option)

I should have said NOT even thinking....... well, some of us are but not our three levels of government.
Bill