Australia's green delusions: A diesel in the shed

A Diesel in the Shed. You can have your solar panels and your turbines on the hills; You can use the warmth of sunshine to reduce your heating bills.

You can dream you’re self-sufficient as you weed your veggie bed; As long as you make sure to keep A diesel in the shed.

Ah, but where do you get your vege oil. Biofuel has a very high carbon footprint. Tractors and pesticides to grow the crops, trucks to haul the crops to the factory, power to operate the processing machinery, and trucks to ship the product to your home all utilize “non-green” energy sources. I suppose if you happen to live on a farm you could grow your own corn, peanuts, etc. and invest in the equipment to extract usable quantities of oil, but the cost would be higher than buying it a quart at a time at the supermarket. If one takes a systems approach, all of the so-called “green energy solutions” are not particularly green, not energy efficient, nor are they cost effective.

If all the machinery needed to process or deliver was run on vege oil that carbon footprint would be a lot smaller. P.s.high mileage diesel engines at this time use less fuel.there are lots of oil sources...jatropha and algae are good sources..this wont be grown for food...so pesticides may not be necessary unless they destroy the crop.

Again, where do you get all that vege oil? If we somehow manage to replace all petroleum based fuel with vegetable base fuel, the cost of that conversion will be astronomical. The process to convert the plant matter to usable fuel on an industrial scale is not particularly efficient. Even plants that have a high oil, or sugar (for conversion to ethanol) content require large volumes of material to processed for the quantity of useful fuel produced.

Any hydrocarbon containing material can be converted to fuel, but algae has not proven practical for industrial production. You invest too much energy and effort removing the water, to make the final product cost effective.

As for jatropa the following is from Wikipedia “However, despite their abundance and use as oil and reclamation plants, none of the Jatropha species have been properly domesticated and, as a result, their productivity is variable, and the long-term impact of their large-scale use on soil quality and the environment is unknown. 2009 research found that Jatropha biodiesel production requires significantly more water than other common biofuel crops, and that initial yield estimates were high.”

From a self-sufficiency standpoint, I like the idea of possessing a diesel generator and/or vehicle because you can grow your own fuel, but barring some sort of dire situation, I just can't envision bypassing readily available and comparatively cheap diesel fuel to do so. But then, I honestly do not care about "green" as it's currently defined. Sure, minimizing pollution of air, soil and water matters but in this country at least, we blew past that years ago and now have an armed bureaucracy attempting to enforce what amounts to hair-splitting.

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