Pod People

It occurred to me awhile back that I should experiment with food crops that make sense for the desert.  Since I have a yard full of mesquite trees and mesquite pods are supposed to be quite edible, that seemed like a good starting place.   See what I mean?

That's a flowering agave in the foreground, but notice lots of mesquites behind it?  The native mesquite around here is Prosopis velutina.  Well, I'm getting a lesson in the uncertainties of agriculture.  We had a cool spring and lots to plants, including mesquites, had a delayed flowering.  No problem, I thought.  I talked to my horticulturist friend Gene while I waited.  He said that nutritional quality of pods varied widely.  Pods with reddish highlights are supposed to have a higher sugar content.

Is Oil Reefer Madness?

How many times have you heard someone talk about "our addiction to oil"?  I'm getting a bit tired of it.

Physiological addiction occurs when you consume a pharmacologically active substance such as opiate narcotics, alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine in sufficient quantities with sufficient regularity that you crave the substance and have withdrawal symptoms if you don't get the compound often enough and in sufficient quantity.  Once past the withdrawal phase, your body and brain may not need the substance and may function better.  The tetrahydrocannabinol (THC in marijuana) referenced in the famous poster from the pot exploitation film Reefer Madness may actually be less dangerous and more beneficial than some of the other addictive substances.  I leave that to the reader to decide...

None of this is true of oil.  Oil is like air--we need it to function and there's no good alternative.  The United States consumes more than any other nation.  We could probably consume less and still maintain the world's highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and our economic and military dominance.  But not a lot less without big changes.  Morgan Downey has a great interactive graph on his blog, scarcewhales which he hasn't posted to in a while, unfortunately.  He's busy on other projects.  What you'll see on that graph is pretty strong evidence that America's oil consumption per person has overall risen much less than many other nations in the world.  We've also maintained our position as the nation with the highest per capita GDP.

I would suggest that we are the world's dominant power precisely because we consume and process more energy from oil and other sources than any other nation.  We convert that energy into a fabulous array of goods and services, incredible air and land transportation systems,  and a military machine that can project all over the globe at a moment's notice.

If that's an addiction, it's tough to overcome.  Since we don't have much choice as oil supply tightens, I'd very much like to see us using the power and wealth we now possess to leverage new energy sources, transmission systems, and transportation infrastructures so that we can maintain as much as possible.  I'd also like to see as many as you as possible out of your cars and planes so that we can save as much oil as possible for the tractors, mining trucks, trains, and jets that support all the things we need and use.  We should our feet, bodies, and brains more.  The real addiction is to inactivity.  A fit population would feel better, work harder and smarter, and produce more value.

Any chance I'll see a few more folks on my bike rides to work soon???

Growing Fuel? Not with food crops.

Notice I'm not piling on and writing about the Gulf Oil Spill.  It is worth noting in passing that even if the spill amounts to several million barrels over several months, that will still only come to a tiny sliver of the world's 85 million barrels per day of consumption.  And that ties to my real topic for this post.

I asked a friend of ours who studies the world food supply how much food in calories the world produces.  Joel sent me some numbers and a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In 2009, the world produced 2.2 billion metric tons (mt) of cereal grains, 0.4 billion mt of oil seeds, 0.16 billion mt of sugar, 0.29 billion mt of meat, and 0.14 billion mt of fish.  Since most of the meat was made by feeding the cows and pigs the cereal grains, lets drop those out.  And I'm skipping dairy, since it's mostly water.  So the world produced about 2.9 billion mt of food in 2009.  I wondered how much of that is usable energy.  A study I came across at the University of Florida, puts the metabolizable energy in wheat, corn, and soybeans all at about 1500 calories per pound.  Since those grains make up the biggest share of the 2.9 billion mt, that gives us a ballpark figure of 9.57 quadrillion calories produced in 2009.  A barrel of oil has approximately 1.39 million calories of energy.  So at about 31 billion barrels of oil a year st current rates of consumption, that's 43 quadrillion calories of oil per year.

That means there's over 4 times as much energy in the oil we burn in a year compared to the food we grow in a year.  Can we expect ethanol produced from food crops like corn or even sugar cane to provide a significant fraction of our transportation energy requirements?  David Pimental, a respected ecologist at Cornell University, has performed extensive analyses of biofuels, especially corn.  He summarized his work last year in the Harvard International Review.  You should go read the article for yourself, but he calculates that if all the corn grown in the U.S. in a year could be made into corn ethanol, it would provide only 4% of our energy consumption.  But that's not taking into account the whole energy budget, I think.  Last year, we used 33% of our corn production to produce 9 billion gallons of ethanol, which only has about 2/3 the energy of gasoline.  The works out to the equivalent of 143 million barrels of oil, which sounds decent.  However, since the most optimist estimates of the amount of energy put into corn versus energy back is 1.3 to 1, that means we burned 109 million barrels of oil to get the corn ethanol.  That leaves 34 million barrels of oil equivalent.  The U.S. uses 20 million barrels of oil per day.  So we used 1/3 of a year's corn crop to produce slightly less than a 1.5 days of transportation energy.  Using all the corn would only give us 1.3% of our energy needs for the year.

Obviously, trying to pour our food into our gas tanks won't get us very far.

Post-Roundup World

Donny hit Send just as the WiFi shut down as the sun dropped and the farm's solar panels stopped working.  The Ωmail service some former Googlers had built with the wreckage of Gmail after Google folded wasn't free, but it was the best way to keep in touch with his wife back in the city.  He, Fred, and 4 other guys had come here in Fred's Prius because Fred had learned there was a farmer with WiFi in the dorms who hired city workers, albeit not for the same pay as the more experienced latino workers.  The immigrant latinos weren't coming up nearly as much since the economic collapse in the U.S.  They had been able to carry enough gas in the Prius to get to the farm, but weren't as sure about finding gas on the way home over the deteriorating roads at the end of the season.  Donny locked up his iPad in his locker and got into bed.  He thought for a few minutes about  the uselessness of his Ph.D. in Economics, but the hard work tilling, planting, and pulling weeds was better than the sporadic dole in the city.  The farmer paid his wages directly into PayPal, which had managed to stay in business and take over some of the functions that the failed banks once performed.   The handful of remaining banks only troubled themselves for what passed for wealthy in America's shrinking economy.  The farmer numbered amongst those wealthy few.  He had bought up several of his failed neighbors and had enough cash to pay for human workers, since machines were now too expensive to run.  Donny thought wistfully about his wife and kids, and of the oil-rich world of his youth, when life was easy and people weren't starving back in the city, but exhaustion quickly put him to sleep.  

Where's Your Beef Been?

Recently, the Population Reference Bureau and the International Food Policy Research Institute hosted their first "Malthus Lecture".  A distinguished researcher we know spoke on Meat.  How's that for a title?  This follows on the heels of a special issue of Science Magazine devoted to Food Security.  I subscribe to Science and I looked at outline of the lecture as well as the web sites of the food organizations.  With the world's oil production on the verge of a 4-5% annual decline, one would think there would be some discussion of effects on food supplies and human populations, but there's not.  Why is this?

Let's lead into this with my experiences with the iconic meat animal, the cow.   I go way back with cows.

Cattle ranching is a ubiquitous feature of the American Southwest.  All my field work as an undergraduate and a doctoral student was on range I shared with cows.  We're within running distance of a large ranch where we routinely hang out with cows, and my wife has photographed the  round-up.  She's helped with a round-up on horse-back on another ranch.  This shy girl was photographed in the arid Owens Valley in California on my way to the Death Ride.

Offshore Drilling and Arithmetic

Ok, I'm playing catch-up.  I've been otherwise occupied with other interests and psychotic computers.  But the recent plan by the Obama administration to open new areas to offshore oil drilling is provocative on several levels.

Oil wells are inherently messy and potentially damaging to the environment.  Nothing much can eat the oil, and oil makes life tough for creatures that encounter it.  Might have something to do with why petroleum has stayed stabile over geologic time scales.  There are some bacteria living at the bottom of Lake Baikal that seem to eat oil.  Since Baikal is the deepest lake in the world the bacteria probably can't be too choosy down there.  Correction--Reading about the Gulf oil spill indicates lots of bacteria in the ocean seen to eat oil.  It's painfully apparent that by no means all the oil gets eaten, however.

Unfortunately, we aren't going to do too well in the short term without oil to burn.  Over on my companion website, I'm trying to document the shortfall.  It's hard too see how we can cushion the decline in oil production from the good established fields that are declining around the world without some new production.

That's said, let's be realistic about what can be obtained by the new areas being opened up.  The New York Times article about the plan reports the Interior Department claims there could be "as much as a three-year supply" of oil in the area being opened to exploration.  The only actual figures quoted are "as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, "the richest single tract".  Assuming we could achieve the maximun practical recovery from a field of 70% of the oil, that's 2.45 billion barrels recoverable.  At the current U.S. consumption rate of about 20 million barrels per day, that's a 122.5 day supply, which isn't quite 3 years.  In another article in Bnet report the areas around Alaska could amount to 19 billion barrels, which sounds more substantial.  Applying our arithmetic, that works out 665 days for a total of 787.5 days, which is a bit over 2 years.  And that's assuming we keep it for ourselves...

The Oil Crunch; The ITPOES Report

The second report of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security was released last month.  Richard Branson, Virgin Group's founder is one of the members, and was in the news regarding the report.   People can download it from their website--http://peakoiltaskforce.net/.   I read through it, 60 pages, although I skimmed some of the appendices.  This might be the best recent analysis I've read, although I admit I've only skimmed the IEA's reports, which I think soft-pedal the situation.

The report has quite a bit of supporting information relative a projected oil production plateau of 92 million barrels per day.  This is significantly higher than the 89 million b/d I've seen claimed by Morgan Downey and others.   If true, this puts the point at which demand intersects with production (their "oil crunch") out a few years, rather than happening within the next year.  Same effect, but a bit further in the future.