The Importance of Oil to our Food Supply
The concerns about our oil supply hit home when we have to stop at the gas pump and fill up our cars at over $3.00 per gallon. This is a hard hit to our pockets and it’s not likely to end soon. Above and beyond the many political theories as to why this is happening are the facts. The era of cheap oil is over. The effects of rising oil prices are felt most directly in the rising cost of the oil we use to heat our homes, the gasoline we use to run our cars and the electricity to power our lights. Oil companies like, Western Pipeline Corporation, are using new technologies to further develop existing producing wells to maximize output to offset the effects of high oil costs.
There is much less awareness of how heavily our food system relies on cheap oil. Oil fuels our food from fertilizer to pesticides. It fuels the tractors on the farm and the trucks that take it to market. The markets are everything from your local grocer to the huge food processing plants. Oil fuels the food processing plant, the food packing plant and the truck that hauls its remains away to the landfill.
Only 21 percent of overall food system energy is used in agricultural production, 14 percent goes to food transport, 16 percent to processing, 7 percent to packaging, 4 percent to food retailing, 7 percent to restaurants and caterers, and 32 percent to home refrigeration and preparation.
Since the 1950s, crop production has relied on fertilizers to replace soil nutrients. Nitrogen fertilizer production relies heavily on natural gas to synthesize atmospheric nitrogen. Oil is needed as well to mine, manufacture, and transport these fertilizers around the world. China is now the top consumer of fertilizer with use rising beyond 40 million tons in 2004.
World grain production has tripled over the last century. New grain demand has been met primarily by raising land productivity through higher-yielding crop varieties in conjunction with more oil-intensive mechanization, irrigation, and fertilizer use, rather than by expanding cropland.
Processed foods now make up three-fourths of total world food sales. A two pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its baking. Processing breakfast cereals uses about five times as much energy as is contained in the cereal by itself. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.
In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year research was done), that ratio was 1:1. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten. Not only is it costing us more to get the oil we are also getting much less energy in for form of calories out of the oil.
Bob Jent is the CEO of Western Pipeline Corporation. Western Pipeline Corp specializes in identifying, acquiring and developing existing, producing reserves on behalf of its individual clients.
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