Oil, or Lack Thereof

This morning’s New York Times has an interesting article about the international shortage of oil. Cooking oil, that is. Food issues like this are really the other T’s turf, but since she and E-Rock are en route to Philly today for some QT with the Stromers, I’ll give it a go. She’ll probably weigh in with her opinion, or maybe even a solution to this quandary, later.

A cooking oil shortage is important because people the worldwide, especially in the third world, get a good amount of their daily calories from oils. Less oil means hungrier people. The Times says that the shortage in oil for cooking has a few sources. A minor one is the trend in the US to shy away from trans fats, meaning that bakeries and restaurants in the US are importing more oils from around the world, and demand has outstripped supply. The bigger cause for the shortage, however, is the demand placed on the international vegetable oil market by the rise of biofuels, which are increasingly being seen as a greener and more sustainable alternative to oil of the Texas T variety.

I heard an interview on NPR yesterday with Joshue Tickell, director of “Fields of Fuel,” a new documentary about biodiesel primiering at Sundance. Tickell described the benefits of biodiesel, which utilizes cooking oils, like soybean oil or the discarded oil from fast food restaurants, instead of gasoline. Apparently, cars don’t need any upgrades or converters to run on biodiesel; you can just pump it right into the gas tank as if it were crude oil. Several cities, like Portland, Austin, and even Las Vegas, are running municipal vehicles on biodiesel and have even installed some biodiesel pumps. Tickell said that domestically, it makes the most sense to use soybean oil for biodiesel, since we grow lots of soybeans, and because apparently you can extract the oil from soybeans but then still eat the beans, so there’d be no concommitant food loss in using soybeans for fuel. Sounded great. I really want to see the movie, which will be making its way across the country after Sundance.

The Times article today, however, points out the (inevitable) ugly side of the biofuel movement. Apparently, palm oil is the most used oil for biofuel, and 1 acre of oil palms yields as much oil as 8 acres soybeans would. No part of the oil palm, however, is edible. Segments of the US and some countries in Europe have already made the switch to biofuels, and as a result, farmers all over the world–from Borneo to Malaysia to Mumbai–are growing oil palms at the expense of food-producing crops. Oil plantations have popped up and tropical forests are being cleared to make way for oil palms, to the detriment of rhino and orangutan populations (this makes me especially sad because “Orangutan Island” is my FAVORITE new show). Of the vegetable oil that is produced, less and less of it is making its way to the kitchens of the world because it will bring a greater profit as fuel for cars and industry.

So despite all this I’d think that biofuels are still superior to crude oil. It seems that domestically, it makes much more sense to pursue energy from soybean oil rather than ethanol. First, you can eat the beans, so there’s no food waste, whereas ethanol uses the starch of the corn for energy, meaning there’s nothing left to eat. Ethanol also requires converters in fuel tanks, so the transition to ethanol seems more difficult. Yet, soybeans were down 18% in the US last year. Hmm.

I’d still be interested in knowing more about these biofuels. Like, what’s the comparison of acrage needed to produce the same amounts of energy from corn and soybeans? And what are the emissions from biofuels like? Dangerous? And what about these places that produce large amounts of palm oil–are we looking at the possibility of tyrannical and unstable regimes arising around their production?

Anyway, good article. And I really wanna see that movie.