In this week’s Economist, Chevron is running a series of ads on alternative fuels and sources of oil that are absurdly out of touch with reality. The first opens with this ‘amazing’ factoid:

"With current technology, one acre of soybeans yields 60 gallons of clean-burning biodiesel fuel."

Let’s think about this. Say I’m a farmer and I’m growing 100 acres of soy beans. If I turn them into fuel I’ll end up with 6000 gallons of biodiesel. At 55 gallons to the barrel, I’ll have 110 barrels of fuel. At $75 bucks a barrel I just spent an entire growing season to realize a gross of $8250. before any expenses. This makes no business sense at all unless the government is subsidizing this farmer to grow soy for fuel, which in fact is what’s going on. We’re paying huge amounts of money to generate fuel so we can sell it at a huge loss and declare ourselves to be dedicated to ‘alternatives’. Bunk!

The next ad is about Oil Sands as a source of fuel. They gloss over the fact that it not only costs more to produce than its worth, but also that it is extremely destructive to the environment.

At least British Pretroleum pays lip service to conservation and true alternatives like wind and wave power. However I don’t buy that line either.

These oil companies are not our friends, whatever they say.