Land for Biofuel

Earlier this month, in our post “Biofuel’s Potential,” we compared the best case biofuel yields today – about 10,000 barrels per square mile per year – to the best case biofuel yields in the future according to many biofuel experts – about 50,000 barrels per square mile per year. To summarize, the difference between 10,000 barrels per square mile per year and 50,000 barrels per square mile per year is the difference between a supplemental fuel of some economic value, and a scaleable, viable fuel alternative that could literally replace petroleum.

For some time we’ve been looking for a way to present quantitative cases using interactive spreadsheets, and a new company in Sweden, SpreadsheetConverter, has finally delivered something that we can work with.
Unfortunately, their software won’t function in the WordPress environment, at least not yet. But if you click on “LAND FOR BIOFUEL CALCULATOR” you can do your own math. The cells highlighted in yellow are input cells – if you don’t like our assumptions, enter your own.

The interactive table we’ve constructed, “Land for Biofuel,” calculates how much land and water a typical American suburb requires, then calculates how much land and water would be required to supply that city with biofuel for 100% of the automobiles in the city. The default case is for a city with 100,000 people, using corn ethanol that requires irrigation. All of the values in the yellow highlighted cells are based on yield and consumption data we’ve checked, but the beauty of this table is you can enter your own assumptions if you don’t like ours.

To view the results, you need to click the curser on a highlighted cell, then move it away and click again. This is a workaround, but again, this is the best interactive online spreadsheet we’ve ever found.

And the results are interesting.

EcoWorld