Many of the grass plants being considered for agrofuel are very invasive. The use of sterile cultivars seems to be a minimun requisite to decrease widespread escape from production areas.

Local varieties of miscanthus have naturally invaded millions of acres and all other vegetation ceased to exist on good farm land in many African countries.

OTOH, this current disaster (huge unused land areas) could be regularly harvested for biofuel feedstock to feed our gas guzzlers for a few generations. We could even pay the local people a few cents a ton to hand cut and back carry to mobile agrofuel plants.

A few thousand acres would have to be transformed into gardens to feed the workers. Alternatively, we could use surplus American food.

With minimum machinery, pollution and GHG would be minimised.

"a few cents a ton"!!! What a miser. The Africans should be paid at least the cheapest coal price which is over $10/ton. Then they could buy food from local farmers and keep more money in their local economies.

So we face different options:
- We could use invasive rhizomatous perennial grasses to feed some portion of vehicle fleet for some decades and leave a heritage of smaller biodiversity and more weeds that are probably impossible to get rid of (examples abound).
- We could use sterile cultivars to feed smaller portion of vehicle fleet (assuming lower yields and/or more inputs, I could be wrong) for some decades and have a risk that the genes find a way to spread either by human error or by jumping, in which case we would have a heritage of smaller biodiversity and more weeds.
- We could use local varieties of perennial grasses or cultivars, which are likely to have smaller yields, but should not pose serious risks to ecosystems, except for the land they would be cultivated in.
- We could try to accelerate transportation substitutions that would help us to get rid of the internal combustion engine.
- These could naturally be combined.

My guess is that we'll end up doing all of them and getting all the good and all the bad things. It is too difficult to control the interests in these options to be able to block the ones with bad consequences.

The reason I presumed only few decades of biofuel use in the previous post, is that I don't believe that getting energy from biomass is a wise thing in the long run. Land is too valuable resource to be used for that in a world full of people, when there are options that produce much more energy per square meter of land used: solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, waves. Some energy could be harvested from cellulosic residues of food crops, but even there one needs to be careful to put the nutrients back into the ground. Nuclear and fossil fuels would also have much smaller land print, but I don't count them as long term options either.

In a world of unreliable rainfall, soil nutrient depletion and insect invasion anything that still grows should be exploited. Add to that the need to reduce brushwood in fire prone areas. Bullhog type machines could cut the surplus plant growth which could be rendered in skidmount pyrolysis units. Some charcoal could be spread back on the soil or pelletised as a fuel. The oil could be taken to a central refinery perhaps next to a garbage dump. The borderline economics could improve with experience.

Hi Tom...Miser!? Harvey's acting in the best European-American tradition of tribal desecration.

Tom:

$10/tonne to cut useless tall weeds. You'll end up with a huge weed surplus within a few weeks.

Good business practices would offer the lowest price possible, starting with 50 cents/tonne and try to keep the price there as long as possible. (16 tons and another day older etc) That's about what coal miners used to get. Of course, weed cutters will have to be fed. Most of the land being fairly fertile, it should not be a major challenge.

One good weed cutter should be able to feed five to ten large gas guzzlers. Do the maths, 1 million weed cutters could feed 5 to 10 million gas guzzlers and so on.

Sooner or latter Peak Weed would be reached but by that time we could be driving 3-tonnes BEVs.

Eventually weed price would go way down. People would stop cutting. Weed fiels would return to normal.

I say we go ahead and plant the elephant grass in the Texarkana area and see what happens. Of course we may need to import some elephants to deal with the stray vegetation but we need help controlling kudzu anyway. I'm sure african elephants can pull kudzu vines out of trees. Dried elephant dung would probably be ideal feedstock for pyrolysis and conversion to agrichar for soil improvement.

Then we might need a few lions to control the elephants.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.........

Pangolin, no need for lions, since elephants are also an excellent source of ivory, meat, leather, and head mount wall trophies. I'm sure some of the well armed and entrepreneurial Texarkana residents would be able and more than willing to make the best of the situation.

Though these developments are taken as positive for the property end- user, there are many who apprehend that foreign money would push property prices up in sky. Investment groups eye Indian markets for its wealth building potential and they are not concerned about the end- user, they say. Property development costs may come down for the developer but it is no guarantee that they will pass on the benefit to its customer, given the pressure of generating returns for its investing partner.