water, fossil or otherwise...

"corn typically needs about 24 inches of water, either precipitation or applied, during the growing season; if that yields 220 bushels/acre of corn, the 'depth' of the EtOh (ethanol) produced is 0.022". if we assume just 12" of water was applied to supplement rain the ratio of water/EtOh is 5553:1. when you see a railroad car filled with ethanol go by. think of the five trains of water, each with 110cars, hauling the water necessary to produce one tank car of ethanol." charles a. washburn ........................ so...are biofuels going to save your corvette's fuel injected ass? no...so many problem with the national corn growers' association view of the world that it is difficult to know where to begin...from the overdraft of the ogallala aquifer to grow all that "corn husker" corn in nebraska to the eroei on biofuels the complications are staggering...like that mickey d's burger, fries and coke you bolted down at lunch, biofuel takes an enormous amount of water to produce, this doesn't even touch on the petro-chemical inputs in the form of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fuel for machinery that biofuel production consumes...setting aside the bug and weed killers and plant food ( in the form of haber-bosch process anhydrous ammonia which uses natural gas as feedstock...remind me to tell you the fritz haber story sometime...ironic doesn't quite cover it...but it's the best i can do at the moment) there's the fuel farm machinery consumes...as i write this oil is trading at $109.62 a barrel...not a world's record ( yet ) but With all the noise about iran and the closing the straits of hormuz and placing sanctions on the purchase of iranian oil ( which just leaves more for china and india ) it will go as high as the speculators can drive it...anyway...you get the idea...oil as a resource is facing a limited and increasingly expensive future ( no arguments about hubbert's peak and when it is..or was...in this post anyway ) so what's going to replace it as fuel in farm machinery? biofuels?...if you start to use a fuels a s water prohibitive as ethanol to produce ethanol you could have a problem...not to mention the fact that ethanol is only one quarter as efficient as petroleum based fuels so you may end up expending more energy to make ethanol than it returns (eroei returns to bite techno optimists on the ass again)...there's always a catch...water...fuel...fertilizer...malthus hasn't cashed his check yet...time to dust off wes jackson's "new roots for agriculture" and steve brush's "farmer's bounty"...buffalobird woman could give you some useful ideas about feeding yourself too.