Re: Energy Cost of Ethanol

On Thu, 28 Jun 2006, glhansen@xxxxxxx wrote:

cnctut wrote:

Certainly there are many side issues with corn to ethanol. Greg
Hansen's original post was aimed at a statement seen on the web
frequently--"1.5 gals petrol needed to make one gal ethanol." We could
have used any variety of crops to address that statement from beets to
cellulose--but since corn issues are in the news, I chose that product.

The article said that figures range from 1.4:1 to 1:1.5, so whether
corn fuel even breaks even still seems to be in dispute. Too bad it
didn't have citations. There are other, more distant approaches, like
breaking down cellulose. But one at a time.

The economics are interesting, too. Like the price of ethanol going
from (what was it..?) $2.45 per gallon to $4.60 per gallon when it
started being added to fuel. Something similar would surely happen to
the price of sugar of whatever origin if it became the common feedstock
for fuels. But that's not "Would it reduce our reliance on fossil
fuels?", it's "Is it worth it?"

Given that ethanol can be bought for $0.35/litre or so, and people are making money from it, $0.35 worth of fuel input is an absolute upper limit. (Btw, my earlier sugar-based upper limit should have been about $0.70/litre - I used the higher $500/ton white sugar price rather than the lower $350/ton raw sugar price. Yeast is not that fussy.)

There are two separate components of the fuel input: that required to grow the corn/sugar/beets etc, and that required to convert it to ethanol. The first can be estimated from the prices for corn, sugar etc - generally the farmer is making some money from it, so the cost of fuel used can't exceed the selling price. Apparently ethanol prices are driven mostly by supply and demand of ethanol, and are quite resistant to changes in corn prices (where made from corn); this suggests that the cost of corn isn't that large a part of the overall final price.

--
Timo Nieminen - Home page: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
E-prints: http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/person/Nieminen,_Timo_A..html
Shrine to Spirits: http://www.users.bigpond.com/timo_nieminen/spirits.html

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