50 million barrels of oil a day

[Cedarman]

The world uses 50 million barrels of oil per day.  Thats about 5 cubic feet per barrel so thats 250 million cubic feet per day.
That would just about fill a square mile 10 feet deep per day. Or about 3650 feet deep for the whole year.

According to some estimates we are just about at peak world production and oil reserves are going to start downward.

Will we be substituting wood fibre for oil?  If so, its going to take a whole lot of trees.

[rebocardo]

imo, God has blessed this country with more then enough trees to heat the whole country with firewood, especially with the newer stoves.

Even corn pellet stoves are a good alternative to oil based heating.

The thing is you have to start designing houses to maximize the heat from a good stove instead of sticking a fireplace and insert into a wall in the living/great room and calling it good.

[DanG]

That's a lot of oil, all right, but it just doesn't ring down as a big crisis, to me. There are plenty of alternative fuels available to take oil's place when it becomes economically feasable to develop them. As expensive as it is, oil is still the cheapest source of energy on a mass scale. As it becomes scarce, that will not be the case and folks will look closer at their other choices. I predict that oil scarcity will be the saving grace of agriculture, which will in turn bail us out of the ensuing energy crisis. Hopefully, that will spread the wealth a little bit, too, giving some of the energy money to the little guy instead of all of it going to the guy that owns the hole in the ground.  In short, we will be better off without oil. ;D

[Kevin_H.]

Just read a little two paragraph story in the southern lumbermans digest about a montana company trying to produce ethanol from small diameter trees.

Now I like the idea of using a renewable energy source anytime it's possible, but if we are going to need alot more trees in the future...maybe we should start planting them now.
 ;D

[DanG]

I don't see trees as the answer to the energy problem. They can help, but if we put all our ag land into trees, we'll be shooting ourselves in the foot. There are lots of row crops that can outproduce trees over a period of time. In this part of the country, farmers can get two crops a year on a lot of things, further enhancing their energy producing capabilities, and they don't have to wait 20 or 30 years for it to pay off.

[Cedarman]

DanG, to be the devils advocate here, it takes a lot of fertilizer and chemicals to grow agricultural crops.  Also a lot of management. With trees, rotations are longer with chemicals only being used in the first year or two.  A lot of wood is just left to rot after harvest.  True that adds nutrients for the next batch of trees.  
I do not know the best way to go, but petroleum is going to eventually become more scarce with the price going up.
I like the idea that an individual could have a hydrogen generator in his backyard using the sun as an energy source. This would put the power back in our hands and we couldn't be blackmailed by overseas nations.
Whether row crops, trees or new technology we need a new energy source.  We need to use the oil to make Wal-Mart bags.

[HORSELOGGER]

Also, Dang, that 20-30 year rotation is more applicable to pine plantations. I have read articles in the past of some bio mass generator plants using hybrid poplars and silver maples as the fuel source. These were up in Minnesota I believe, And the trees were cut for fuel after around 3- 5 years and the hybrids copiced from the cut stump, so only needed planting once. I thought it was interesting stuff. Heres one article:http://www.mda.state.mn.us/crp/biomass.htm

[DanG]

It would be interesting to know how many BTUs/acre/year you could get with different crops. Without that info, it is impossible to know which crop is best to use. What I do know is, there is no one all-encompassing answer. For instance, a wood-fired SUV would be considered rather cumbersome for most soccer moms. ;) However, alcohol can be dispensed from the same pump we use for gasoline, and methane uses the same hardware as propane. I know very little about petroleum refining, but doesn't it use an apparatus similar to an alcohol still? ???

Also, I'm looking a bigger picture, here. Row cropping is a bit more labor-intensive than growing trees. There are farmers everywhere that aren't working their land because they can't sell their crop at any price, let alone a profitable price. If grains such as corn were a primary energy source, I don't think they'd have any trouble getting rid of it.

I know they are using lots of chemicals in farming these days, but they don't have to. They didn't before these things came along. Crop yields are better with it, but you can still do pretty well without. Fuel grains wouldn't have to be as clean as those used for animal and human consumption. There are chicken, beef, dairy and pork producers all over the place that are crying out for a way to get rid of their waste. My goodness,  ???  there are some more jobs driving spreader trucks!  If a farmer is really enterprising, he can install a big methane digester and siphon the gas from all that waste, then sell the remaining sludge as fertilizer, or use it on his own fields. The possibilities are almost endless. Wood would be a part of the mix, too, as well as the high tech options like fuel cells.
The point I'm trying to make is that we are spinning our wheels in a gigantic oil slick while we are almost buried in cleaner, renewable, job-producing alternatives. ???  We be stoopid!

[Paschale]

It's interesting to note that as conventional means of piping oil are in fear of decline, there's been a huge increase in unconventional methods with the help of technological advances, such as harvesting oil from sand pits soaked with oil.  There are still some sources being found, and I for one think that we should build that darn pipeline to the Anwar (sp?) Wilderness in Alaska.  There's a ton of oil up there by all accounts.  That may not help us in the long haul with the depletion of oil, but it sure would take a bit of the pressure off of us being so reliant on OPEC and the Middle East.  Of course, there are environmental concerns with Anwar.  For me, though, a little independence with regards to oil would be well worth any potential environmental risk in Anwar.

Here's an article about some of that sand pit oil reclamation I was mentioning.  

"Alberta sits atop the biggest petroleum deposit outside the Arabian peninsula - as many as 300 billion recoverable barrels and another trillion-plus barrels that could one day be within reach using new retrieval methods. (By contrast, the entire Middle East holds an estimated 685 billion barrels that are recoverable.) "

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.07/oil.html

[DanG]

Just thought about something that has bugged me for years. Ever pass by a sewage treatment plant and noticed that big torch burning off the methane gas?  Why ain't they got a pot of water boiling on top of it?  Heck, the stuff is already in a pipe! They could run it to a big oven and bake dog biscuits, or sumpin. ??? :  Wouldn't that be a great source of heat for a big dry kiln?
If gov. and big biz are going to waste energy, they could at least stop whining about the energy crisis. >:(

[Tom]

Bizness wait'n on Guv'ment is a dollar wait'n on a dime.

Guv'ment's job ain't to do sumpthin', it's to keep you  from doin' sumpthin''

Tom said that.

I'll have to admit, there's an electric generator hooked up to methane pipes coming off of a land fill in Jacksonville.  It serves about a thousand homes,  I've been told. .

[DanG]

Well, there ya go. 8) 8)  Somebody is turning a liability into a profit and helping out the environment at the same time. Makes ya wonder why they keep these little victories such a secret, don't it?

[Tom]

Yep!  Nobody even talks about it around here.  It serves a Yuppie neighborhood.  Maybe those Yuppies don't want it out that they use "waste" gas or maybe they are trying to hide that great big mountain. :D :D


Lookee what I found ! !

http://www.jea.com/community/education/electric/index.asp

http://www.eere.energy.gov/wip/program/repi.html

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy/repi_table.html

 :D :D I wonder how much methane could be captured from the Bush Brewery here? :D

[HORSELOGGER]

Hmmm...Hey!   Maybe I could device a methane powered chainsaw, then I would always be "fueled up" when I'm loggin with the boys ;)

[Ianab]

We have some of the rubbish dump generators operating in NZ and a workmate was recently in the UK maintaining them over there. Basic idea is a shipping container sized box with an industrial gas turbine and a genrator. Drill a few holes into the the old rubbish tip to drain out the inflamable gas, pipe it into the turbine and start it up
After a few years the bacteria have done their thing to the rubbish and the gas flow slows down, pick up the unit and move it to a newer dump or newer area of the site.
Auckland city had problems with gas from old landfills seeping into the stormwater system. Got rather interesting when it started igniting and blowing manhole covers off   The portable power generators was a solution to that by draining off the dangerous gas and using it for something. The power generated paid for the exercise at least.

Regarding growing crops or trees for fuel... problem with annual crops is they HAVE to be harvested when they are mature. So all the years production is gathered in a couple of months. Then you have to process it and store it till it needs to be used. With trees you have more leeway, usually can be harvested year round.. and they can be harvested a couple of years early or late if need be.

Ian

[OneWithWood]

So, Dan, do you see a day when we will be converting shopping malls and subdivisions back to farm fields?   That I would like to see 8)

[DanG]

I'd sure like to see that too! 8)  Ain't gonna happen, but the growth of these might slow down a bit. I don't have a problem with subdivisions, particularly the ones where everybody has a little 1/4 acre lot. That is less of a problem than the current vogue around here of 5, 10 and even 20 acre lots with residential zoning and all the restrictions that go along with it. That's taking up a lot of space that could be used to help everybody. I'm all for stacking the yuppies up like cordwood. ;D

[Cedarman]

This is where my idea of a yard tax could come in. The bigger the yard the bigger the tax. In southern In we have too much timberland being bought up and subdivided into 5 and 10 acre plots with some of the craziest looking boundaries you can imagine.  Looked at one that was 200 feet wide and 2200 feet long. We tax liquor, cigarettes, jewelry as luxuries.  Why not a luxury tax on big yards? They are some of the most polluted land in the country, with all the bug dope, weed killer and fertilizer on them. Maybe if gas got real high most of the suburbanites would move back into the cities. Just my rantinig.

[DanG]

Rant on, Cedarman! I'm with you on this one.  The former paper company has sold off thousands of acres in this area in the past couple of years, with thousands more for sale. So far, our county has held the line on the creation of new subdivisions on that land, but that isn't the case in surrounding counties. The company that sold out skint most of the trees off the land and didn't replant anything. >:(  Hopefully, some of the buyers will see the wisdom in reforesting at least part of it.  We don't have any shortage of pine trees down here right now, but we gotta ensure that we don't in the future, too.

[beenthere]

From what I gather, the property tax laws and federal income tax rules don't encourage long term investment in land for a timber business and for forest management. Paper companies in the midwest are doing the same. Without incentives, the land will go to the highest bidder and that would be us folks who want a piece of the country and can afford to go there. Now, with forestry land assessments (WI) jumping in one year from $1000 per acre to $3000 per acre (ag land at $200 per acre), I will wonder what impact that will have on land sales.
Gov't can take control and tell each of us what we can and cannot do with our land, or the people can convince govt. to tell everyone else what they can or cannot do with their land. I am not sure I like that way very much.  
I remember the song "this land is your land, this land is MY land...."  Recently I am beginning to understand what was meant by these words, and kinda interpret them to say "kiss your private land rights goodbye".  

I see nuclear energy as our way of the future, out of necessity, if nothing else.

[DanG]

You've got a good point there, Beenthere. I sure don't want the gov or anybody else telling me what to do with my little chunk of Paradise. Nor do I want to tell anybody else what to do. Sometimes, we have to be told what we can't do, though, but that's another subject.

Now this may seem off-topic, but I'll try to bring it around to where it fits in. :  I've been working with and studying my animals for some years now, and have made some progress in controlling the behavior of my dogs and horses.(the cats are a lost cause :D )  The only method I've had any success with is to make it easier for the animal to do things my way than any other way. I don't use rewards or punishment, just gentle persuasion over a period of time until the behavior I want becomes habit. One thing has occurred to me about myself over this time; the more I study animals, the more I understand about people. You can make a dog jump through a hoop if you put a pork chop on the other side, or make a horse jump a fence by poking him with a hot-stick, but you'll just make the dog greedy and the horse scared of you. People are the same way, whether it is one person or a whole nation. We don't need regulations and restrictions to get us out of the mess we're in, we need leadership. A true leader can make people see the proper direction and follow it without beating them over the head or telling them what they HAVE to do. If it makes economical sense to plant trees or raise fuel grains, and people are led in such a manner that they will trust, rather than fear, the whole crisis will take care of itself.
The only problem with all this is that I don't recall seeing a leader of that caliber in my lifetime. :-/   Some say our current leader is the one, and some strongly disagree. I like what he is doing, but we won't know for years whether it is really the proper course. Even with four more years, he will be long gone before we know the final results. Like all the rest, he will just serve as an example to his successors, either a good one or a bad one.

I tend to agree with you about the nuclear(or is that "nucular"? :D ) option. I ain't a fan of it, but we'll probably see more of it.

[Larry]

We need to get FDH started on a fuel cell project.  He can start with this one

http://storeforknowledge.com/itemdetails.cfm/ID/1692

and move up from there. :D ;D :D

In reality our power company has a few demonstration fuel cells providing power for individual houses now.  They are I guess a hybrid type that use propane to generate the hydrogen.  High oil prices might provide the push to get these things working as a true fuel cell.

[Ron Wenrich]

Government only exists through taxation.  As long as the people pay the taxes, the government survives.

Government also controls behavior through taxation.  They put high taxes on tobacco and alcohol just so some people stay away.  But, not too much tax to put anyone out of business.  Of course, a lot of palm greasing goes on amd the consumer pays the bill.

But, government also doles out large sums of money to make projects run.   The space program, internet, computers, roads, railroads, and lots of other things have come about through government funding.  Its called publicizing the risk, but privatizing the profit.

If the government really wanted to change the types of fuels we have, they can.  We have a guy up the road that just got a $100 million grant to liquify coal and to use it for a fuel.  Lots of universities are running studies that are subsidized by government dollars.  

But, government doesn't like the idea of hydrogen or methanol.  These are fuels you can make in your back yard and how would they tax it?  There's only a few oil companies and they are relatively easy to control, compared to millions of backyard hydrogen or alcohol stills.

We have a few state congressmen that are trying to abolish property taxes at the local level.  They'll be doing that by taxing everything else.  Things that aren't taxed now, like food, utilities, clothing and the like will be taxed.  None of our services are taxed, but now they would be.  There will be winners and losers in this plan - lower income families will lose, high income families will probably win.  Farmers will come out ahead, as will any other land based business.

But, in exchange, the state will put our local schools on a budget.  If you want to build a new school, you can't raise taxes to offset expenses.  I'm not real comfortable with the state regulating local issues.

[Fla._Deadheader]

   Since we had this stoopid power outage for 10 days and still counting for some folks, I already have 2 projects to work on.

   I know there are some very intelligent folks that hang out here, and when I tried to spark a little interest a few months ago, I ended up being the butt of a lot of ribbing. Ain't gonna happen any more, until I get the projects working and on the market. ;)

[Cedarman]

Just read the article Kevin did. The article also said that he thought he could produce ethanol for 91 cents a gallon.
I still like the idea of backyard generators to give each of us control of our energy source.