biodiesel certainly is no replacement for oil, because it would be a mammoth task to build the necessary fields of shallow pools, and there's simply
not enough room, hemp is no alternative eiter, check out
lifeaftertheoilcrash.net...
"Biofuels such as biodiesel, ethanol, methanol etc. are great, but only in small doses. Biofuels are all grown with massive fossil fuel inputs
(pesticides and fertilizers) and suffer from horribly low, sometimes negative, EROEIs. The production of ethanol, for instance, requires six units of
energy to produce just one. That means it consumes more energy than it produces and thus will only serve to compound our energy deficit.
In addition, there is the problem of where to grow the stuff, as we are rapidly running out of arable land on which to grow food, let alone fuel.
This is no small problem as the amount of land it takes to grow even a small amount of biofuel is quite staggering. As journalist Lee Dye points out
in a July 2004 article entitled "Old Policies Make Shift From Foreign Oil Tough:"
. . . relying on corn for our future energy needs would devastate the
nation's food production. It takes 11 acres to grow enough corn to fuel
one automobile with ethanol for 10,000 miles, or about a year's driving,
Pimentel says. That's the amount of land needed to feed seven persons
for the same period of time.
And if we decided to power all of our automobiles with ethanol, we would
need to cover 97 percent of our land with corn, he adds."
