That’s A Lot Of Grass

Robert Rapier passes along a bar napkin calculation showing that 1000 acres of miscanthus (a plant you can make ethanol from) production would fill 55 seconds of US oil demand.

I don’t feel like checking RRs numbers right now, I just want to pass along a note of caution about numbers like these. I can use this kind of calculation to make any liquid fuel technology look bad, because US oil consumption is just too high. And no single tech, not cellulosic ethanol, grain ethanol, butanol, biodiesel, or anything else will single handedly replace oil.

RR is right to carefully scrutinize producers claims, because there is a lot of misinformation out there. A lot of promises have been made and broken, and that harms the biofuels industry on the whole.

But these kinds of numbers, while good to provide perspective on the scale of our problem, can themselves be misleading. So keep that long lost shaker of salt handy.

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