The Strange Energy Budget of Ethanol Production 200
joeflies writes "The San Francisco Chronicle published an article regarding research on how much fuel is required to make Ethanol. The results indicate that it make take 6 times more energy than the end product delivers."
The real future is not in corn (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
The TFA also disregards the uses of the rest of the byproducts of ethanol production (distillers grain and industrial gases).
The useful thing about ethanol and biodiesel is that we already have an infrastructure available and ready to use it as a vehicle fuel now. With Hydrogen fuel we don't. Same with Fuel Cells.
Re:comparisons? (Score:5, Informative)
People seem to forget that we don't pump oil out of the ground and into our gas tanks, it requires some serious refining. I've also heard that ethanol processing essentially removes the sugars from the corn, leaving a high-protein slurry that can be used as animal feed. Since it's high in protein and low in carbohydrates it's a more efficient feed and causes lower emissions from the cows. Heh.
Re:comparisons? (Score:3, Informative)
Scenario A: You dig up 1 barrel of oil. You burn the oil, VROOM-VROOM!
Scenario B: You dig up 6 barrels of oil, you use the oil to make 1 barrel of Ethanol, VROOM-VROOM!
What the article is saying is that wasting 6 barrels of oil to create one barrel of ethanol doesn't make any sense. And they are right - though you can argue whether their study is more valid than the USDA study which stated the opposite. I would look at the relative biases (the USDA gets money if they say ethanol is good), and look at the differences in the numbers (the USDA study did not include maintenance on the equipment, etc.) to see which one to believe.
Personally, I think the truth lies somewhere between the two - but is probably a net negative. Plants are horibly inefficient solar cells! (If it was simple, we would be burning trees instead of oil!)
Re:not particularly relevant... (Score:3, Informative)
Fossil fuels != oil. Coal can be (and is being) used to fire ethanol plants. We have a larger supply of coal readily available - in the United States - than oil and essentially converting it to a liquid fuel (in the form of ethanol) would be useful for weaning the economy off of foreign oil.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
No, they won't. Farmers don't grow corn they don't intend to sell, and manufacturers don't make fertilizer they don't intend to sell. Both have increased production expressly for this purpose. Without the ethanol market, the farmers would cut back to keep prices under control. Same for the fertilizer.
Flashy headline misses Meat of the article (Score:3, Informative)
Checking Slashdot's Sources (Score:3, Informative)
I agree, this did smell funny. So I went out and did some research.
It seems that the "scientist" in this story, Tad Patzek (a geologist), has been working for the oil industry quite a bit over the last [lbl.gov] few [berkeley.edu] years [ilcorn.org]. Odd that he should suddenly be switching his interest to agriculture and begin attacking Ethanol.
Or perhaps it all makes sense if you look at it from the correct prospective.
Ethanol for $13/barrel (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why talk about energy, talk about money! (Score:3, Informative)
1: This is more complex than is seems. Ethanol has less energy than gasoline. (~70BTU vs ~109BTU) However ethanol is also about 108 octane (pump gas is 87-92 depending on the grade). If you assume you will never run on gas you can increase the compression, and get almost as much useable energy out of ethanol, even though your input is less.
No. It will be less (even if you up the compression as I suggested above). However even with standard compression, ethanol burns more efficient than gas, so it won't be 30% less. This assumes that your car was designed to run ethanol. If it wasn't your mixtures will be wrong, and you will blow your engine before you get statistically valid results.
3: I'm not sure. I think less, but I don't know. Gas is pretty volatile itself, and its vapors are more harmful.
4: They are close enough.
5: Not really. Oil for many years was cheaper. In the 1890s gasoline was a byproduct they dumped into the lakes to get rid of (litterally), after separating it from what they wanted. Gas engines were designed to use that waste. Henry Ford designed the model T to use ethanol, but gas really was that much cheaper then that it didn't make sense. Gas is more expensive now (and we know about the environmental effects), so it is time to revisit ethanol.
6: Right now the ethanol market is glutted, and farmers are building more plants. You can assume that if more people used it prices would go up. I estimate that the entire US could move to 25% ethanol over the next 10 years, with little effect on price. Farmers build ethanol plants because they don't need to make money on the plant, so long as they don't loose too much. The additional market for corn makes up for it. Not to mention they need more high protein animal feed, which is a byproduct of ethanol production. 25% ethanol would be enough that the US could stop all imports from OPEC.
Re:This is flawed. (Score:3, Informative)
Also: Brazil isn't really a big cocaine producer. Brazil imports its cocaine from Peru. I honestly can't tell you why there isn't a big home-grown cocaine industry in Brazil.
Sorry for being pedantic. Your ultimate point is actually a solid one: "Hey, farmers around the world, maybe you can make more money growing fuel than growing drugs." Wouldn't that be nice? I dunno if it works out economically, but it's certainly worth research.