On a journey in the car the other day I was looking at all of the Oil Seed Rape grown in the British country side. Diesel cars can be run with minimal modifications on straight vegetable oils. I wondered how much land we'd need to be self-sufficient on car transport.
We fill the car with fuel roughly once a week. So that's 40 litres a week or 2000 litres a year. Looking on wikipedia I found the yield is about 1000 litres per hectare. So for our purposes we'd need at least 2 hectares (about 5 acres or 2 rugby fields).
There are 24 million hectares in the UK. However there are 38 million registered vehicles (and some of them will be using a great deal more fuel than we do). That's without any allowance for the energy use in growing and pressing, land use for other crops or housing, or suitability for crop land. And that's just transport not the various other energy requirements we have.
I'm not sure what the point was but it made me quite sad.
We fill the car with fuel roughly once a week. So that's 40 litres a week or 2000 litres a year. Looking on wikipedia I found the yield is about 1000 litres per hectare. So for our purposes we'd need at least 2 hectares (about 5 acres or 2 rugby fields).
There are 24 million hectares in the UK. However there are 38 million registered vehicles (and some of them will be using a great deal more fuel than we do). That's without any allowance for the energy use in growing and pressing, land use for other crops or housing, or suitability for crop land. And that's just transport not the various other energy requirements we have.
I'm not sure what the point was but it made me quite sad.