I don’t know if you’ve ever read ‘twilight in the desert’ but the contentions in that book are enough to scare any fair minded person out of their complacency. Peak Oil has well and truly come and gone, and we must be prepared very quickly if we’re to avert an economic catastrophe.

It’s also enough to make my mouth water re: the opportunities approaching for the sugar industry.

I actually first joined the sugar industry 10+ years back because of my passion for alternative energy - I could see massive potential there. Unfortunately it’s a bit difficult for a researcher / engineer / scientist like myself to maintain a career path / obtain a good income within the research arm of the Australian sugar industry so I’m now putting that passion aside and moving to the mining industry.. ironically.

I read the Khosla website and are familliar with their work. Personally I feel that producing ethanol from maize is a ridiculous waste of resources and tantamount to environmental vandalism when C4 plants like sugarcane can do a much better job with far fewer inputs and greater yields.

I’m leaving the industry with the knowledge that it’s likely that we have a massive future.

At times I wonder whether that future will be realised within the industry.

It seems to me that the last 100 years has been spent breeding a top-heavy beauracracy (within the milling and growing sectors) with inertia, stonewalling and complacency as central tenets of their management philosophy - that’s frustrating when you just want to get things done, and it’s the reason that we’ve been losing good people in droves.

M

in regard to the comparison of burning fossil fuel vs biofuel. The important thing is the ratio of carbon below ground level to that above. Once its above ground level, it is metabolised, burnt or what have you into CO2, whether its in forests or whatever. Biofuels are about no net increase in the carbon above the ground in the carbon cycle. Biofuels also encourage the growth of plants which are the most efficient transformers of CO2 into biomass. (changes to biodiversity another issue).

Starving people are not starving because of a lack of food. Its a lack of food in the right place. When the average body mass index in Australia drops to 18-25, then start telling me there is not enough food or sugar. Just legislate the max sugar in soft drinks from 11 down to 5%. Expensive sugar will do our health no end of good.

Matt

Thanks for your comments!

I’m not an expert on mill technology - but that does seem sensible (after all my hypotheticals above ignore the fact that mills need steam to run). What do you reckon the relative usable energy output would be?

Matt

With the right rhizobial innoculants such rotational cropping systems can produce pretty much all the nitrogen a cane crop needs, at least in tropical agriculture.

But I agree, nitrogen fertilisers put a significant spanner in the whole CO2 / energy balance equation (here in Aus the majority of N fertilisers are produced using natural gas as a feedstock).

Realistically I think we’re pretty much stuffed long term whichever way we go - if we want to be able to keep driving around in the little social cocoons we call cars, we’re gonna have to realise the true value of that luxury pretty soon.