Originally posted by Angus
Jackal, you're in one haggling mood.
Here's something for your info.
The Egyptians are mostly playing with the Nile, and definately using machinery as well.
To make agriculture in warm areas like there, you would need some 10% of the land to create all the machine energy you'll need.
10 is a rough number, but has still a good foot.
For planting and cropping oil seed in a country like ...Denmark, you'll need roughly 5 hours with 150 hp x 15 litres of diesel => some 75, - hell, let's say 100 litres.
A very good crop seed is 3 tonnes. That leaves the biomass of the stick & leaves. Very much of the 3 tonnes is oil, the rest is protein food.
Levels out quite nicely.
A barren sand ties up no CO2 at all.
Hehe! Here we go again. That`s just fine if you want to have a starting point beginning in the middle or near the end of the process.
I believe you left out a few things in your equation Angus.
Machinery takes iron/metal to make and produce. Iron ore has to be mined/refined. ( More C02 output) This is not even considering the machinery used and C02 output produced in the exploration end of it.(Machinery) Factories have to be built and in production. (More machinery, more C02 output) Once built, the machinery has to be shipped. Whether by land or sea, it equals more machinery , more C02 output.
Your theory would pan out if the machinery magical appeared on location.......possibly.
Don`t work like that.
Your theory and figures are also based upon perfect scenarios just like the sceanarios used by global warming theorists. A sterile/absolute environment, if you will. Hardly if ever works out that way in reality due to the unknown factors that can`t be predicted.
A sidenote I had to add:
Some years ago , the Farmer`s Co-Op in our area hired four supposedly top notch cattle feed formulation experts. Wallpaper running out their yazoo. Degrees, degrees and more degrees. Damn near career students of higher edumuncation.
They got their heads together and came up with what they proposed as a low cost/high protein range cube formula.
With laptops, and sheets of written formulas in hand, they presented this formula to my Dad.
To use my Dad`s words. ..he told them "It won`t work cats."
They went into a dither of showing and reshowing the formula and kept stressing the protein content. Dad told them that yea it had protein, but didn`t mean you could make a cube out of it in reality. He also told them that he could get protein from a bois d` arc tree, but that didn`t mean he could make a cube out of it.
He agreed to a test run. When the range cubes came out of the cube die they were slick and pretty and nearing perfection. The
experts were picking them up and showing them to Dad with chests puffed out with their superior knowledge.
Dad told them "Good enough. Now let`s go one floor down to the cooling bin."
They went down and when the cubes exited the conveyor out of the cooling bin they had exloded and puffed up to the point of unrecognizable.
Reality sometimes gets in the way of things in formulas and predicted results from sterile scenarios.
In the majority of cases, good ole common sense will prevail. 
