As a boy, I remember how, year after year, my dad would plow under the stubble left from cutting that year's grain (oats and barley in our North of Scotland pre-global warming environment). And every year the bugs in the soil would decompose it. If those dumb little Scottish bugs (aided no doubt by earthworms and fungi) could digest that stuff, why is it taking so long to figure out how to do it industrially?

...but this was still a good piece, Andrew.

It's been clear for a very long time that energy efficiency and conservation are the only real mid-term delaying-tactics we have. Nothing can substitute for the energy *density* of oil. Not even close. Nuclear can generate electricity, but it's expensive, and we better start building the plants while we still have relatively cheap energy to build with.

Coal will probably be the back-stop solution, but we will chew through our coal at a really phenomenal rate as oil becomes more dear...and that coal processing and burning will have profoundly terrible environmental consequences.

In short, energy efficiency is one way to stave off the bad day of reckoning. But we'd be staving it off only. Much of our "efficiency" (that is, oil saved) will just go to China and India. So..quite possibly, we won't stave off the bad day at all. Not enough attention is given to this issue of energy fungibility. Just because we in the US "conserve" doesn't mean the oil won't go somewhere else: it will.

Here's a brief 'crash course' for anyone interested in our energy future and our future in general, as given by people far more intelligent and eloquent than I am. I wish everyone who could would read and think hard about this.... When you begin to grasp the big picture all this talk and 'debate' about cellulosic ethanol, etc. etc. starts to look tragically laughable.

Start here for a basic primer on the math involved:

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461

Then this, for why we're unlikely to 'control' ourselves:

http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html

An analysis of what is likely to come:

http://energybulletin.net/3917.html

And a rather radical and depressing, but at the same time strangely optimistic take:

http://www.foundation.bw/TheEndOfTheWorld.htm

Sure, there are a lot of arguable points along the way, but the overall picture is both compelling and distressing. Switchgrass, yeah ok....

The fact that the GAO is going to conclude that Peak Oil is now is an absolute bombshell. The president should be on the air the next day telling the people what a crisis this is and that we have to to mobilize the nation to wean ourselves off oil ASAP. Of course, he can't do this because people will put 2 + 2 together (2 being peak oil, the other 2 being Iraq). With Mexican oil production collapsing be prepared to see a massive flood of refugees crossing the border that will make the current immigration problem look like a trickle.

I'd just like to plug switchgrass and other crops for use as a solid fuel to replace oil for heating applications (and possibly cogeneration).

Here's a link: http://www.reap-canada.com/bio_and_climate_3_2.htm

The energy balance for pelletized fuels is much better than liquid fuels, as it skips the inefficient part of the process (conversion to ethanol).

Of course, pelletized grass is limited to stationary applications, but there's still a lot of oil being burned for such purposes.

Unfortunately, pelletizing grass doesn't get the producer a nice fat subsidy like ethanol conversion does...

Andrew, what is the best information you can get on when cellulose-breakdown enzymes will be available on a mass scale? 3 years? 6? It may be ignorant on my part, but I would think that this would be a fairly simple bio-engineering problem. You might have already gone over this, but what are the main hinderances to the technology, and/or the reasons given for why enzymes are not so easy to design?

Cheers,

You ask a good question, and I'm hoping to interview soon a plant biologist at Stanford who has been offered the job of director of the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley on this very topic.

A story I was looking at today said "five years."