How many miles to the acre do I get when I plant palm oil trees.
512 gall to the acre
no harvest for the first five (5) years for the life of the plant, 25 years
then harvest 6 times a year, and then process $$$$$$
at 12 miles to the gallon (what a big arse Harley Davidson gets)
= 6151 miles
average 10,000 miles a year
I need 1.62575191 acres per year for a years supply!
I need 19.53125 miles per gallon for my vehicle to have 1 acre of oil palms give me enough for a years travelling.
Start doing the math or get off the toilet.
You may say this is a fiction because Harley Davidson does not make diesel machines then you are probably Right. But that is your usual tactic, - not looking at the trueth.
Go figure for switch grass, corn, sugar etc. do the math you may get a grip on reality
Oil Shock: Mexico and China Not Exxon Stupid
The run-up in oil, commodity and food prices is not a bubble or conspiracy mounted by a cartel or speculators or dictators or ethanol.
Exxon and OPEC bashing in Congress, and off-base musings in the media and blogosphere, have it all wrong. Washington's politicians and policy makers are parochial and woefully ignorant of economic developments around the world. That is why their prescriptions are either paranoid or populist stupidity which do not address the issues.
Oil and all commodity prices are soaring, in part, because oil is denominated in U.S. dollars and the dollar declines, thanks to Washington's overspending on wars, trade, subsidies and government budgets.
Investors have also moved from banks or credit markets to commodities, thanks to the meltdown due to subprime scandals in the U.S. and the export of the bad loans to the rest of the world's banks.
But the biggest reason prices have been soaring is that astute investors are now understanding the future supply and demand reality.
The Demand Side
China and India are undertaking a Marshall Plan every two years, building massive infrastructure, urbanizing their populations and industrializing. The summer Beijing Olympics will open the world's eyes to China's economic ambitions and abilities.
Beijing plans, over the next 17 years, to urbanize about 300 million more Chinese. They will want roads, cars, buildings and streetlights. The equivalent of five New Yorks, and some 50,000 skyscrapers, are on the drawing boards. Already, 174 subway systems are under construction and a power plant is completed every month. There are already 200 cities in China bigger than Dallas.
In addition are the economic development plans underway in Brazil, Central Europe, the Middle East and other parts of Asia. More than half of the world's economy is now located in emerging, or poorer, countries.
U.S. Gasoline Prices Still Cheap
Prices are being driven upward because the world keeps buying this stuff even at these levels, both in rich and poor nations. In past times, when oil prices jumped this dramatically, there was a corresponding collapse in demand and accompanying price drop. Not this time because the price is not as high, in relative terms, as was US$36 a barrel oil in the early 1980s.
Even at $5 a gallon (which is what Canadians pay) or $7 a gallon (which is what the British pay) there will be plenty of Americans who will cling to their gasoline-guzzlers because they can afford to. Others, who cannot afford higher prices, will still have to use cars due to the fact that the U.S. is one giant, haphazard urban sprawl with minimal or no access to public transportation.
How the Other Half Lives is Different Too
Another reality is that even as prices go higher, cutbacks in usage and/or greater fuel efficiencies in rich countries like the U.S. will not offset the massive growth in consumption or the use of cars in the world's emerging economies.
Right now, the U.S. has 250 million vehicles and China, 37 million. This gap will close over time. So will car ownership in India and other poor nations.
Ironically, the poorer these countries are the more they will continue to increase demand for oil by subsidizing energy use to help their economies, farmers, businesses and families.
Another demand factor will be the ongoing need for energy and oil for power generation. On May 12, China announced it was increasing power consumption by 40% over the next three years, or 12% a year.
Currently, China is self sufficient in thermal coal but is maxed out in terms of domestic production at 2.5 billion tons per year. The supply-demand situation is tight: A 3% fall in Chinese coal production every year equates to 100% of either the U.S. or Australia's total exports, the second and third largest in the world. In other words, all the slack has been taken up in coal which means higher prices for coal and all energy commodities.
Supply is Tight, the Slack is Gone
OPEC is a factor in the supply situation but the cartel controls only 40% of production.
The real problem is that in the long run the taps cannot be turned up to drop prices because 80% of the ownership of all oil and other resources is held by foreign governments in Asia, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
These government corporations or agencies are not efficient, nor responsive to market conditions. They are not devoted to replacing the resources they produce.
Even if they are disciplined and motivated to find more oil, they cannot because they are used by governments as cash cows to buy votes or palaces or armies or terrorist attacks. It costs money to gear up to produce more oil even if you already have it.
These government-controlled companies, unlike their private sector counterparts, fail to reinvest, explore, replace equipment or drill for more resources.
Besides, as prices rise there is less incentive for them to produce more. In fact, they can produce less and make the same amount.
One of the worst examples of public ownership of oil resources is Russia's Gazprom or Mexico's Pemex. This company, owned by the federal government of Mexico, has not invested in growth with the result that Mexico's oil production has begun to dramatically decline despite the existence of huge potential reserves in the country. Pemex ships most of its cash flow to Mexico City which represents 40% of the federal government budget.
By contrast, the real finders are private-sector oil or mining companies which must find new reserves to replenish their inventories or face falling stock prices and investor unrest.
Rich Countries' Options
Congressional threats to sue OPEC will only make some American lawyers rich, not add supplies in order to push down prices. Removing gasoline taxes, as Hillary and McCain proposed, is simply another foolish "subsidy" which will keep up demand by making gasoline cheaper to buy. Likewise, levying huge windfall-profits taxes on Exxon or other oil companies will merely aggravate the supply situation by reducing the cash they have with which to find and produce more oil.
The only sensible policies for the United States, Canada and other rich countries to adopt is for governments to impose dramatic fuel efficiencies on carmakers; to mandate hybrid vehicles; develop alternative energy sources such as ethanol to lower import costs and arrest urban sprawl as a means of enhancing urban density and the use of public transportation.
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Thank you Diane Francis & Huffpost for bringing a well thought out post to your readers. The one-string fiddle that usually plays this topic here has gotten tiresome.
For the trolls who want to make this issue into another cultural war are beyond help, and no matter how many times KTM tries to explain it to them, they just won't get it. Save your typing fingers.
Maybe while the trolls are on that long walk to the soup line they will have time to ponder the pearls that were thrown their way and have some regret they didn't pay attention. Ha!
We don't have to geniuses to grasp the reality of peak oil, but we do have to get beyond fear, anger, and paralysis to make reasonable preparation and adjustment.
Good Luck to us all!
Great article except for the plug about ethanol.
What needs to happen is a triage of the transportation industry.
We produce 5 million barrels per day. Let's prioritize what gets it. Commercial aviation, commercial trucks, farm and construction machinery.
What's left over? What industries that are dependent on oil do we want to keep afloat (RVs, boats, private aviation)?
What's not crucial or worth subsidizing we force to go electric.
Americans need to wake up and come to grips with the new reality. Life as we knew it is gone.
Ethanol can not be used as aviation fuel. It is corrosive on aluminum, its energy density is too low and jet engines can not operate on ethanol unless specifically designed for it.
In any case, we are not running out of oil for decades to come, we are just running out of cheap oil. There is no need for any kind of active government control who gets fuel and who does not. The market can sort this one out quite well.
Did I advocate using ethanol?
I think NOT.
And you're wrong. There is a need for the government to ration fuel.
The market hasn't worked worth a damn.
One can't burn ethanol in planes. The energy density is way too low and the current generation of jet engines is not optimized for it. I bet there would also be a number of other technical concerns (ethanol is corrosive!).
It takes oil and natural gas to make ethanol. The EROEI is very close to one. It's almost not worth making. It's a great subsidy source for several corn growing states, though.
I think you need to think again about the situation. The world has not suddenly run out of oil. We have plenty of it left and we will be using oil for many decades to come. It is just not as cheap as it used to be and never will be cheap again. That is very different from not having any.
Corn ethanl EROEI is 1, but sugar cabe based is between 4 and 5, while current energy markets are betwenn 15 and 20. Energy denisty of ethanol is about 70% of kerosene, so I would not say it is far below. There isn't a whole lot of aluminum in the guts of a jet engine, and there is none in the hot section. Might chew up a combustor, not sure.
What you are describing is called the oil depletion protocol and lots of people have been espousing it but on a grander world scale. That so we would not kill each other over the stuff. How do you think that has worked out. No, such talk is heresy in America. Rationing. Please! Let the price dictate who gets it has always been what America is about.
It's time for America to change and it's time to start rationing. Truckers will go broke without rationing or people will go hungry because they can't afford the prices of food whose cost quintuples overnight.
We need to figure out what industries must have cheap fuel. Everyone else is put on a diet. We mobilize the nation just like we did in WW2.
We are the proverbial yeast in the petri dish that consumes all of the sugar as fast as it can, turns it into alcohol, and then dies in it. People in a oil dish, turns it into CO2, and then dies in it. They have know for 40 years about peak oil. 40 frickin years. And 99% of America STILL does not know. It's like the powers that be constructed this incredible trap to destroy us. Create this world that depends entirely on fossil fuels, then watch it destroy itself when we start to run out.
It's actually over 50 years since the world heard about peak oil. The conclusive evidence was presented in 1956. Two generations of Americans have ignored it. The rest of the world hasn't. So it's mostly an American problem, really.
True so very true. I just don't get it. When we peaked, how could we think the world would not. This is a pretty big country, it's not like Albania. But bury our heads in the sand we did.Now that we're looking around again, guess who's at the door .... Mr Wolf. And he's not here to solve problems. It's like Hirsch said about peak oil wackos always being wrong....eventually the wolf does eat the boy.
In the end it seems to come down to this: there are plenty of people who don't seem to notice when history hits them with a two by four. The peaking of US oil production and the oil shock in the 70s were such events. Few seemed to care after the quick, and wrong, fixes were in. Now we have run out of quick fixes and what was an easily dealt with reality in the past has become an unstoppable and barely alterable chain of events. We'll survive. But a lot of people will have egg on their face and useless big iron in their garage.
The simple fact is that the cheap easy to find oil is gone. Imagine that. Only took 130 years and we are still complaining. Grow up people. Speculators don't cause oil comapnies to go 30 miles offshore and drill 20,000 feet into the earth instead of going to east Texas and punching a hole in the ground. Geology does. America has dissolved into wishing and dreaming ("The Secret") and wanting something for nothing (Las Vegas). It ain't even fun gambling anymore, if it ever was. And I am grown up to know that if I wish hard enough for something I might get hemmoroids. America's glory days are gone and remember when is the lowest form of conversation. I am sick of hearing how great America is. America stinks.
61% of these criminal prices are due to Phil Graham and the Enron loophole..!
It is all fake Speculation..!
We must Nationalize our Oil Companies and all holdings and service companies including Halliburton..!
Just remember this is all due to criminals from Texas..the Enron traders and our Texas Oil criminal government...!
Just why do you sound so shrill? It's not going to change anything and you don't come off as particularly insightful. Especially the "nationalizing" part won't change anything because US oil companies do not own the oil we are eventually burning in our cars. They only lease the fields it comes from. You can be sure all the leases have escape clauses in case "company ownership" changes.
FLAGGED: BIG OIL APOLOGIST.
This article is of the same apologist bullshit KTM spews all over this site on every oil-related article.
This issue is primarily driven by speculation-friendly loopholes introduced in 2000; what oil shills like the author and KTM are doing is merely misdirection; as long as they can get anyone to buy into the Peak Oil fallacy, that's one more voice talking nonsense rather than demanding needed trade regulation reform.
A country built on a non-renewable resource must change or face the inevitable competition in the world market for those non-renewable resources. Our energy policy dictates our foreign policy. We need access to other people's oil. Much of our domestic oil was used to fight WW II. FDR went to meet with the Saudis two weeks before he died. For the past sixty years we have been dependent on oil, including foreign oil. It is too late in history to change that course. We should have done whatever it took beginning in the sixties to avert global warming and secure renewable sources of energy. I disagree that the market is not being manipulated. Futures trading is exactly what is driving up the price of oil. The other factors mentioned are all very important but there is no free market with ICE and OPEC. Peak oil is still being debated. Why isn't Iraq back on line, for example? Someone is profiting from driving up the price of oil. The Enron loophole is one reason. Call it the "London loophole." We need transparent markets, not further deregulation. Most of all we need a new energy policy.
Wow. You go from moderate supple-sider to radical Marxist at the end there. I'm a progressive, but I totally disagree with your last section.
CAFE standards are useless. If the price of gas is high enough, consumers will flock to the most efficient vehicles that meet their needs. We're already seeing this with the surge in compact and sub-compact car sales and the corresponding decline of the SUV market. With experts like Robert Hirsch predicting $12-15 gas in four years according to the same demand-side fundamentals cited in this piece, I don't think that the market needs any help in this regard.
The automakers won't be able to ramp up efficiency at the same rate as gas prices are increasing no matter how hard they push. The first generation of plug-in hybrids won't hit the roads until late 2010. It's a heavy industrial manufacturing sector. It can't respond to such rapid changes in the energy market.
There's no such thing as a 10-year plan to get America's transportation fleet off of foreign oil. It's just not possible even with an Apollo-like commitment. The time to act was in the early 1980s, when we knew we were headed for peak oil shortly after 2000. We needed cheap oil to build the post-oil infrastructure economically. Now all we can do is drastically cut back on consumption of just about everything, and inflation will take care of that.
Oh believe me if we wanted to and took the 600 billion spent already in Iraq and used it for an apollo size project to create or subsidize pure electric vehicles which are now technically feasible then we would not be worrying about $5 a gallon oil. "70% of all us vehicles drive less then 40 miles a day." We donot need the oil , we need to let technical innovation become unimpeded by the politicians. Why is that tesla motors is able to produce pure electric driven cars that can go 200 miles without a charge but GM, ford, toyota, and nissan can't? Imagine tesla motors having the finacial resouces that some of the big 5 auto companies have today? Oil is the big scam.. and unfortunately millions have died as a result of it.
http://www.teslamotors.com/
Huh? Everybody who wants one can buy an efficient car today. There are no waiting lists. I am not sure where you are getting your information from, surely not your local Toyota dealer.
There are many ways to save gas, buying a new car is only one of them. And it happens to be the most expensive and least efficient one. Sharing a ride, on the other hand, is free and can be implemented by millions of people tomorrow. A single shuttle bus line takes the burden of dozens of people to buy a new vehicle while reducing the gas demand by far more than any hybrid or even electric technology could possibly achieve.
Finally, plenty of people can move closer to work. I have been planning my life around public transportation all my life. It is not nearly as hard as many seem to think.
The problem is unique, but the solution is multi-dimensional. All it takes is a little bit of common sense and what looks like an impossible industrial paradigm shift becomes a simple matter of changing habits.
Inflation is a matter of cheap money. The US was printing dollars like crazy for the past decade. The results were perfectly predictable. Americans just did not listen. But do they ever?
Again, check history and find that we were scared to death of peak oil back then. Now we are
being told same again. That is part of the Future's Market but is far from the truth. Check congress
and their deregulation and find blame there. Those very people who lost their shirt last year on the oil markets are getting it back this year. Congress was briefed on December 14 and decided to
do nothing. Iran and Saudi are storing their excess oil in tankers in the ocean. We are not near
peak oil. In fact, Alaska has enough oil to supply the US for the next 200 years but that is a well
kept secret. Study the Commidities Future's Modernization Act of 2000 where 11,000 pages were added and it was not even up for debate on the floor.
Huh? Why would you have been scared of peak oil back then? There were no predictions of global peak oil much before the year 2000. Anyway.
Don't have a clue where that tanker nonsense comes from. Can you give us a source? It's always nice to track down where and when urban legends originate. Maybe I should check "The Onion"?
Crikey! If you tell them about peak oil now, I won't have time to build up my portfolio. Please, I need some more time!
By the way, the Chinese demand will peak in a few years as their excellent one child per couple policy shrinks their population. They will then seek immigrants (with noses held) or face a massive downward spiral.
Hmmm... how about looking at reality? Chinese per capita energy demand is MUCH lower than European and American demand. It really makes no difference how Chinese population grows or shrinks. China's energy demand will continue to rise for decades.
http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/energy-resources/variable-351.html
As far as their productivity is concerned, it will also grow far faster than their population. China has the most modern production facilities in the world and continues to build aggressively on their expertise to manufacture. Something we are completely losing.
How about population control as a remedy? No, you won't hear much about that one because we must have growth to keep this beast humming.
Gee , Miss Francis it takes some courage to come here and deliver the truth, that rising oil prices are due to strong fundamentals. It conflicts with the devout religion that oil companies are omnipotent (except when the price goes down) and slapping them around is all it takes to get back to $.50 gal. gas.
After all the reserves of oil are infinite and all we have to do is just drill more forever and all our problems will be over right?
Weaning Americans of of this sort of drivel will be nearly as hard as weaning them off of the BIG LIE of the 'green' automobile. It's a thankless job that just has to be done.
Don't neglect the collusion factor. Those epic profits are the direct result of the oil companies keeping their margins, whereas a typical capitalist would ordinarily expect those margins to diminish as price increases. Perhaps they're not as crooked as they appear, but they are still crooks, and they're not interested in doing the right thing.
Check out the swaps that are allowed now too!!
Like Enron investors can Swap contracts and report higher values on those contracts than paid. Thus artificially inflating the value of each contract they SWAP but no cash changes hands and they never lose the ownership. They are playing us like CHUMPS.
EXCUSE ME!!!!!!!!!!
YOU FORGOT TO MENTION SOMETHING IN YOUR ARTICLE!!!!
These people who invest in 401k's, 403's, and other funds never thought thier own money would be used to buy furtures in oil and food that would drive up thier very cost of living. The FUND MANAGERS are getting Super Rich while the people are actually losing money even with a 20% return.
$2000.00 profit in a quarter is still a loser if the cost of gas is $3600.00 a month. That is a lose of $8800.00 in a quarter just to buy gas.
Push the Mutual Funds and Retirement Funds out of the Futures markets.
WHAT GOOD IS A RETIREMENT FUND IS YOUR HOMELESS!!!!!!
Posted May 26, 2008 | 12:26 PM (EST)