...no wonder you don't like government intervention.  The worst part of the tale is putting pensions into Imperium -- I remember many years ago being blown away at the level of resources in pensions (was 1 trillion, now much more), and it seemed to some of us that that money could be best used to resuscitate the manufacturing sector.  As it is, I think pension funds have been used mostly to destroy the manufacturing sector, even from industrial union funds, financing the outsourcing process.  Looks like Seattle gave our idea a bad name!

not food crops themselves?

The options of taking farmland and planting Switchgrass,
or mixed prairie plants,
or minimum rotation input-dependent monoculture coppice,
or sustainable moderate rotation polyculture coppice & standards,
all share a crucial weakness:- that of removing farmland from food production.

Yet the last option, Coppice & Standards, as it does not require mechanized treatment or harvesting,
has traditionally been established on land too steep &/or too poor for agriculture.

Given this distinction, the diverse fuels that can be refined from Coppice feedstock
maybe warrant a new and distinct title, being:
"Sylvifuels" ?

Regards,

Bill

I've done a bunch of work for those people on the waterfront, such as ships and terminal equipment, and Seattle went nuts on bio-diesel.  I mean nuts!  I tried to lay it out, that there was six or seven kinds of bio-diesel in varying proportions of diesel mixtures, each with different effects on NOx and CO2, but they had no patience.  I took my money and ran.  Worst client ever.  Bunch of crazy assholes, they were.  /sammie

Onward through the fog

In my previous post, I should have added the word "oil" after "Rapeseed (canola)" in the table. That is to say, the prices refer to "Rapeseed (canola) oil", not rapeseed.

Pangolin - some good news for you -

Hazel is an excellent coppice tree, and was traditionally the staple material for many vital rural artifacts -
While most deciduous trees will regrow from the stump, some, like Sweet Chestnut, Ash & Hazel do so really well and will gain wood about 20% faster than a normal specimen,
thus improving the methanol + TP-charcoal  feedstock yield /acre /year.

We have many Ash & Hazel on the farm here in the Cambrian mountains of Wales,
but the very damaging Canadian Grey Squirrel invaded the UK so we eat rather more squirrel than Hazelnuts.

Hazelnut as a flammble oil source is a novel idea to me, and adds to the goal of eradicating the greys in favour of the native red
(not least to allow the production of Hazlenut butter, which puts peanut butter in deep shade).

It's very good to see that a scientist of Crutzen's renown makes the point of distinguishing between the best and the worst of biofuels :-
"...the production of commonly used biofuels, such as biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn (maize), can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings. Crops with less N demand, such as grasses and woody coppice species have more favourable climate impacts."

Traditional coppice of course requires no chem fertilizer inputs.

Grey Flcn -

I can't follow your critique of nitrogen fixing plants -
As I understand it, the problem Crutzen addresses is particularly with agricultural fertilizer nitrogen ending up as NO2 outputs.

So how does atmospheric nitrogen being fixed naturally in the soil by plants,
thus greatly reducing or even ending fertilizer demand,
become a problem ?

Many thanks for the link to "Growing Solutions"

Regards,

Bill