Re: Energy Cost of Ethanol
- From: Earle Jones <earle.jones@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:46:44 -0700
In article <44A01C02.4060002@xxxxxxx>,
Greg Hansen <glhansen@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Reviving the topic of Habshi's subject line, and hoping to avoid the
topic of the content, what is the energy cost of producing ethanol?
Does anyone have some solid references?
*
If you Google on 'energy from ethanol' you'll get a lot of data.
I would tend to discount the obviously biased sources -- for
example, the Iowa Corn Farmers Association, Archer Daniels Midland
Corporation, etc. -- just use your head.
Here's a sample from the Salt Lake City Tribune newspaper:
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_3996312
Energy illusions: Time to end subsidies for ethanol pipe dream
Tribune Editorial
*****
A national mindset that has never quite abandoned the illusion that
America can drill its way out of its energy woes is now drifting
closer to the idea that we might grow our way out.
The idea certainly has its appeal. Deriving motor fuel from corn
- or, someday, from otherwise useless agricultural by-products -
could reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil and could
provide us with a replacement for gasoline that burns cleaner and
will never be exhausted.
Yet that dream has been no more than that for some three decades.
It is a dream that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars with no
discernible return on investment, unless your investment has been in
Archer Daniels Midland stock.
Expensive new fuels are a better idea than conservation only if
they pay for themselves, if they don't give billions of tax dollars
to agribusiness giants such as ADM to reward them for making
something we barely use - ethanol - out of something we have way too
much of - corn.
We don't make ethanol from corn because it is efficient. Brazil
does a lot better making it from sugar. And we don't use corn
because it is environmentally friendly. Growing it sucks up huge
amounts of energy and water and leaves tons of chemicals adrift in
the ecosystem.
We make ethanol mostly out of corn because it is astoundingly
plentiful, thanks to decades of heavy federal subsidies.
Cheap corn, and the federal tax credit of 51 cents a gallon to
ethanol brewers, have made it worth ADM's while to make ethanol. And
The New York Times counts 39 new ethanol plants under construction.
None of this is market-based or ecologically driven. It has been
calculated that growing corn for fuel is a net loss of energy, given
all the fossil fuels burned in growing, treating, irrigating,
fertilizing, shipping, drying and refining the crop.
It has also been figured that fueling large parts of the American
economy with corn-based ethanol would suck up half of the nation's
viable farmland as it raised the price of groceries.
The energy saved by serious conservation measures will far
outpace any energy gained through subsidized, uneconomical
technologies. Even those that seem as natural as pouring corn in the
gas tank.
*****
earle
*
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