It seems that with the High price of oil people are beginning to turn to Biofuel as a way to beat the pump price of oil. This also has its share of problems. The more people use, say Rapeseed oil instead of diesel the harder it is to buy it. It seems that the market for Rapeseed has gone through the Roof, where as even a few months ago farmers were still wondering what to do with all the Oil they produced.
A friend of mine as been running his van on rapeseed for the last 2 years. He is now finding it harder and harder to get rapeseed as a lot of local farmers have run out. It seems that supply cannot keep up with demand and its going to get to a stage that it might only be a few cents cheaper than Diesel….
According to an article in the Irish Times we use “183,000 barrels of oil per day”
I wonder how much land it would take to generate 183,000 barrels of oil a day, so that our economy can keep on ticking.
Considering that “One acre of rapeseed yields 115 gallons of biodiesel” That equivalent to 1591 acres, roughly 6 square kilometers. It take between 6-7 months to grow, (plant in march and harvest in September/ September to march). It is a very bad idea to have a mono crop so the land would have to grow other crops for the rest of the year. So we use on average 66,795,000 Barrels of oil a year. (70% for transport).
So to supply all the Biodiesel for Ireland for one year, if we could! it would take 2350 Km/2. But because we can only grow the crop in rotation and some time the land would have to be left idle(good farming practice, IANAF). so 3 to 4 times this amount of land would have to be set aside. So taking maybe 3x2350km/2 = 7051km/2 which isn’t a small patch of land by a long shot, Cork County is 7457km/2 in size. So providing Irelands need in Oil for one Year using Biofuel is huge undertaking and I don’t think that it is even possible to do.
What’s left for Ireland to do? Reduction would be a start! Increase the use of public transport, that is alot easier to say than to implement. I think for the foreseeable future Ireland will depend on Oil. Unless there is a radical shift in Goverment policy!