3 ms·

I'd much rather they finish getting the lead out of aviation first. The amount of fossil fuels input to agriculture is about 10x the energy output in the food

I'd much rather they finish getting the lead out of aviation first. The amount of fossil fuels input to agriculture is about 10x the energy output in the food supply, it might be possible to reach parity when you're not worried about shelf appeal, etc... but that ignores the fossil fuels used as chemical feedstock for fertilizers that are required for industrial agriculture.

PaulHoule 4y ago
It's definitely a problem for corn used to make Ethanol, as the special attribute of corn that makes it such a popular crop is that it produces a huge amount of food if you feed it large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer. I don't think anybody is talking about feeding commercial fertilizer to Miscanthus, but Miscanthus and some other grasses have been talked about for years as feedstocks for "advanced biofuels" (as in that paper) but "ethanol from cellulosic biomass" is on that long list of energy technologies ("carbon capture and storage", "integrated gasifiers", ...) that have been talked about since the 1970s that never seem to make any real progress.