Assuming a gallon of gasoline ( a great compact energy source) is roughly equivalent to 1 gallon of biodiesel, which is invalid to start off…
2007 US gasoline consumption estimates are ~390 million gallons/day
1 million acres of camelina produces 100.0 million gallons of biodiesel
So we would need to convert ~4 million acres of crop land a day to biodiesel.
Total farmland in 2002 was 938.28 million acres, of which 434.16M acres were cropland.
Which means we would need > 1,400 million acres of camelina cropland. Sounds like a lot…
So we would need to increase domestic cropland by 3 times to replace oil used to produce gasoline to wean ourselves completely off oil for our cars and not compete with existing cropland. Dual use synergies are not factored into this simplistic analysis.
This also doesn’t include oil consumption from other uses.
(Note: Values are pulled from a variety of sources I just googled that seemed fairly official, government estimates, etc.)
Mr. Trucksess talked a little about infrastructure, but using existing infrastructure will prove difficult if we roll this out gradually, as we must. Also, what kind of cold weather limitations apply to biodiesel?
I think broad spectrum solutions will be best. Industry appears to be taking us there. What role should government take or should it stay entirely out of the way?
