Could Vegetable-Based Oils Free Us From Petroleum Dependency?

Years ago I read that a desert-growng bush (guayule?) contains an oil that is capable of being burned in diesel engines. During WWII, the Japanese were able to distill a gasoline substitute from pine trees. Now, with genetic engineering, suppose we could breed a plant species that would yield a good hydrocarbon liquid that could replace gasoline. Would we be able to stop using fossil fuels? I know about the experiemnts with alcohol-it doesn’t work. (Corn-based alcohol production uses more energy that it creates, due to the need to distill the alcohol).
Given our capacity (in the USA) to grow huge, market - busting surplusses of agricultural coomdities, why not farm our fuel?
Seems like such a program would make more sense than permanently stationing 200,000 US trops in the Middle East!

Actually, you can run a diesel engine on normal vegetable oil, without much modification. The problem with growing our fuel like that is that it would require an enourmous amount of land area, AND modern agricultures is already an oil intensive process. I will try to dig up cites as to exactly how much are would be needed. I know this cite http://sharpgary.org/RenewableE.html claims that biofuels are not truely renewable, taking more energy to grow than you get out of them.

Now, one promising technology that could replace petroleum is http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization Thermal depolymerization. Basically, it is a process by which you can turn any hydrocarbon source into useable oil; unlike earlier methods of doing the same thing, this one is much more efficient; they are claiming in the neighborhood of 85%.

Could people be a hydocarbon source?

Sure. Soylent Amoco Gold?

Petroleum is essentially such biofuel that has been aged and collected over a HUGE period of time. We’re essentially tapping energy from the sun that has been stored in chemical bonds. The efficiency was probably very low, but it’s been accumulating for millions of years.

Using fuel that we grow is much more limited – you can only soak up so much solar energy in a year, the process has its own inefficiencies. And, as noted above, we use energy and petroleum products in growing crops – you have to make and distribute fertilizer, run the tilling equipment, etc.

You can certainly grow your own fuel, but I seriously doubt that’s it’s going tyo be competitive with fuel out of the ground until we start running short.