Plan B

Plan B is living on the same amount of energy that we use today, but not from petroleum sources. It won't work.

Specifically, here are the things that won't work:

Ethanol (e.g. from corn)

• There is not enough arable land in North America to both feed us and make any significant amount of fuel (see the calculation for biodiesel below.) So we will have to choose between cheap food, and cheap fuel.
• For more information about the impracticality, google for "corn ethanol energy yield" to see how much energy comes out of an acre of corn after you take out the energy cost of making the fertilizer, growing the corn, fermenting it, and distilling it into alcohol.
• Also google "nitrogen fertilizer" to find out how all agricultural nitrogen fertilizer is made, or read this article.

Biodiesel From Oil Crops

From oil based crops like canola or sawgrass. Converting this calculation for biodiesel to Canadian numbers:

• Canada: Arable Land: 45,660,000 hectares
• Oil yield: 3.4 metric tons (T) per hectare per year = 155 million metric tons
• 97% conversion of seed to oil = 150 million T
• 1136L / T = 170 billion litres per year, or 1 billion barrels of oil per year.
• Canada: Barrels of oil used per day: 2,193,000 * 365 = 0.8 billion barrels.

So - Canada has more than enough to convert the entire country to monoculture (sawgrass or rapeseed etc) but we would have to import all our food.

Biodiesel From Used Fat

From used deep fat fryer fat:

• this is not discarded already - it is already re-used to make e.g. cosmetics and pet food
• even if it wasn't, it would only provide a tiny fraction of a percent of the energy we use.

Hydrogen

• Made from what? The currently abundant, cheap petroleum? Or the currently abundant, cheap electricity?
• Hydrogen is problematic to store as H2 is the smallest molecule – it slides through most seals. It is also difficult to ship via pipeline – so even if we make it using solar or wind power it is not practical without a change in storage technologies. Popular Science etc. are promising crystal storage methods coming Real Soon Now but even if they were here - see the first point.

Tar Sands / Shale

• It takes a vast amount of energy to get the oil out of the sand or shale; it takes the equivalent of two barrels of oil in energy to make three barrels of conventional oil from oil sands.
• You have to add hydrogen to the resulting product to turn it into something like conventional oil (see Hydrogen above) and
• getting the ore and extracting the oil generates huge environmental disasters.

Other

All of these schemes fall into the TILT category -- Terrific Imaginary Low-carbon Technology. All of the TILTS involve discovering some previously unknown source of energy and making it commercial in just a few years, something that has never happened. Google for it for more info.

References

• http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2004/10/tar-baby-oil-sands-and-peak-oil.html