Quote:
Originally Posted by AzTeK
Exactly. The thing is, current crops used for making ethanol directly compete with crops used for food - corn being the most known one. Most of the land that you can grow corn on very well is already taken, so everytime a corn plantation is used to make corn for ethanol, you are sort of taking the corn away from the food supply. With switch grass this is not really the case, since as Caltex said it grows anywhere and does therefore only marginally compete for land with foodcrops. And it doesn't need any fertilisers either.
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A basic truth of energy is there is no free lunch. Switch grass is subject to the same economic basics as any other source of energy; return on investment. What is the net energy gain in converting switch grass or any other alternative into a usable fuel? Until the last several decades conventional oil wells often returned 100 barrels of oil for the equivalent of each barrel of oil invested to extract it and convert it into a usable product. Today it is closer to 10-to-1. Switch grass may be easy to grow, but it still requires an investment of energy and technology to harvest, store, transport, refine and distribute. In the end the net energy gain is very small. This means that companies are reluctant to invest a lot of money into a process that has margnal profit return. There is also the issue of volume. It would take an enormous amount of switch grass to make a significant dent in our total consumption of liquid fuels.