Rescuing Stranded Wind, Reducing Food Miles Traveled
Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 12:02:41 AM PDT
First we must state that we are perfectly safe, so you can stop dialing 911. We are talking about that other sort of Stranded Wind. Briefly, what we mean is this:
Stranded wind is wind energy available in an area that has neither the population and industry to use it nor transmission lines to transport it elsewhere.
We mean, through our efforts here, via our web site, and through other outreach, to make the phrase stranded wind as well known as the hydrogen economy or Canadian tar sands. Below the fold we give reasons which we hope will encourage you to help us in this pursuit, in this case ways and means to reduce fossil fuel use in agriculture, food transportation, and increase food security at the same time.
Our assumptions:
Today the average meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to table and there is a national movement of people reducing the food miles in their diet. This is all well and good, but there are other inputs to the farming process which are of even greater concern than the farm to table loop.
First, an aside on the difference between a liberal and a progressive. A liberal has fine ideals and is not so good at math. A progressive respects these ideals, but will do a quick back of napkin calculation when a scheme to reach this or that ideal is proposed.
We like the idea of organic food. We despise the efforts to reduce the standards in this area to a set of Wal-Mart friendly buzzwords. Some of us won't shop anywhere but organic stores. All well and good, but this is not scalable at this time. If we ever get to the laudable goal of having an entirely organic food system it will be an evolution rather than a revolution, and in the mean time people still need to eat. We suggest only progressive goals rather than ones that might be characterized as liberal.
Our existing farming methods must be maintained or we face certain disaster.
Significant inputs to industrial scale farming:
Large scale corn farming in the United States requires an application of about 125 pounds per acre of anhydrous ammonia in order to reach current yields. Anhydrous ammonia is formed by the Haber-Bosch process and uses about 3% of the global natural gas supply at this point.
Large scale corn farming takes a lot of diesel fuel, somewhere between five and ten gallons an acre. Transport to market also requires diesel fuel for the trains which transport the grain.
Global oil production peaked in May of 2005 and global natural gas production will peak in the same fashion somewhere between 2010 and 2012. If we don't make our current farming practices renewable very quickly we will face serious food shortages in the United States as these geological certainties make themselves known.
What can be done to protect ourselves?
Stranded Wind is a fine tool which we can easily wield to shield ourselves from these troubles. We should proceed at once in a three pronged attack consisting of wind driven ammonia as a fertilizer, wind driven ammonia as a farm fuel, and wind driven rail electrification.
Ammonia: fertilizer & fuel of the 21st century
We have written extensively twice before on the use of ammonia as a farm fuel. One poster will always say "This is too dangerous to use in cars". Obvious, we say, hence the label farm fuel. Our farmers are already trained to handle the substance and they receive annual safety refresher courses.
Our ammonia fertilizer supply is in grave danger. Currently over 50% is made over seas and shipped to the United States. Given that the dollar is crashing, natural gas will be peaking, and oil has already peaked we may find ourselves outbid for a product we can't afford to transport here even if we could afford it. To put this in perspective, the people of the United States need air, water, ammonia, and then crude oil products and natural gas. If our farm yields fall the wheels come off the rest of it very quickly.
Rail electrifcation:
Siberia has electric rail all the way across and has for a few years.. We're still stuck with diesel engines for our trains.
Had we spent one tenth the price of Bush's adventure in Iraq turning 25,00 miles of our national rail system to electric drive we'd have broken our imported fossil fuel dependency. Thanks to the Worst. President. Ever. we must now accomplish this rail electrification with seven more years behind us and the dollar losing its status as a reserve currency.
Stranded wind can help here, at least in the upper Midwest where the grain trains roam. There is a pretty strong correlation between where the rail is, where good wind is, and all that is needed is a stabilizing tax policy to encourage the railroads to invest in electric infrastructure. Their right of way will in many cases be all the land that is needed for the turbine placement to drive their locomotives. This process will also drive the creation of new electricity transmission corridors, freeing stranded wind in a way other than through these various relocalization strategies that we propose.
Conclusions:
The wind power needed to free our corn crop from dependency on a soon to peak natural gas supply for fertilization should cost roughly twenty billion dollars. The rail electrification will require about seventy five billion dollars to complete nationally.
We offer no cost estimate on the fossil farm fuel replacement component of this proposal; it needs more analysis before we can say anything other than we believe it to be a good idea. That twenty billion mentioned above would only develop one eighth of the wind in Iowa alone, so there is plenty more available for renewable fuel use, we just don't know what the requirement is yet.
The price of failure:
We watch with more than a little concern the progression of events in Mexico, as we believe it will qualify for the dreaded failed state label, perhaps as soon as this year. The experiences of the Mexican people, facing 400% staple food cost increases with declining income and infrastructure being torn up by various rebel factions are likely a good proxy for what will happen in the United States should our moves not be swift and sure in shielding ourselves from peak oil/gas and the attendant food security concerns.
(UPDATE #1
We are pleased to see well thought out responses favoring organic approaches to fertilization. The responders, however, suffer from that liberal vs. progressive problem we site above: How does one get from point A to point B? If you've got a plan, round up a lawyer, a banker, some investors, and get with it. If policy changes are needed to support these efforts then make them. If that doesn't happen you have a theory rather than a plan. We suggest that if this is the case you may find refuge in a research position.
We are quite hurt by the insinuations that our plans for renewable fertilizer and fuel are business as usual. Do as we suggest and it breaks the back of big oil.
We found this quite amusing:
Also, I think it's absurd to suggest that the US will suffer food shortages because we won't be able to afford the energy and fertilizer inputs. Please site any sort of numbers to support this.
That this will come to pass is so painfully obvious that even tired old industry guard dogs like the EIA have admitted there is trouble. You will find much discussion of these concepts if you begin digging here.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/...
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(UPDATE #2
NRG Guy assumes we're going to continue what Leanan, editor for The Oil Drum's daily Drum Beat segment calls "our happy motoring lifestyle". We assume that SUVs will be melted down, producing roughly 80' of steel rail each, and their glass will be used for train windows and greenhouses. Given this assumption, more closely grounded in reality than any one person/four wheels fantasy, the electrification of rail coupled with a significant collapse in driving would break our dependency on foreign oil.
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