Posted on 05/27/2008 9:53:19 AM PDT by Winged Hussar
"In terms of renewable fuels, ethanol is the worst solution," Patzek says. "It has the highest energy cost with the least benefit."
Ethanol is produced by fermenting renewable crops like corn or sugarcane. It may sound green, Patzek says, but that's because many scientists are not looking at the whole picture. According to his research, more fossil energy is used to produce ethanol than the energy contained within it.
Patzek's ethanol critique began during a freshman seminar he taught in which he and his students calculated the energy balance of the biofuel. Taking into account the energy required to grow the corn and convert it into ethanol, they determined that burning the biofuel as a gasoline additive actually results in a net energy loss of 65 percent. Later, Patzek says he realized the loss is much more than that even.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
For later. Thanks.
Lower Ethanol Mileage Means Biofuel Users Buy More Gas
Isn’t it the case that whatever is used to make fuel will increase in price, at least in the short term? If there were a way to make cars run on milk, then milk prices would go up. What is the answer? Seems to me that there is going to be a cost increase somewhere no matter what an alternative fuel is made from. I don’t know if expensive gas or expensive food is worse, but isn’t there going to be some tradeoff for any fuel alternative?
Ah yes. Patzek. An adherent of Pimentel’s idea that the food that farmers eat is an “energy input” into corn production.
There are two names that simply are not credible on ethanol, corn or modern farm practices: Pimentel and Patzek.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that if we’re smart about it, nuclear power plants may be the lesser of the evils when we compare them with coal-fired plants and their impact on global warming,” he says.
Even this Bezerkely lib gets it.
Open up more areas to drilling for oil and natural gas!
Could you, you know, kinda back up your assertions with some evidence? You may be right, but I find it hard to accept someone’s bald comment without some solid evidence. Thanks in advance.
With the current plan we have both expensive gas AND expensive. Why do we have to have an alternative RIGHT NOW? The US is so rich in natural resources that we won't run out of coal for hundreds of years and we have more untapped reserves of natural gas and oil tar sands and underground oil than we could use in 3 lifetimes.
If Congress passed a bill to open ANWR and the coasts for drilling, the price of oil would plummet by $40 or more a barrel overnight. Let's get the price of gas down by drilling ANWR and off the coasts and work at a good pace to eliminate our dependence on oil.
Anyone you recommend as being credible?
Would have been helpful if how many units of energy are consumed to produce gasoline or diesel was included in article to compare.
Anyone know?
From a Cornell study (I believe in 2001):
You need about 140 gallons (530 liters) of fossil fuel to plant, grow and harvest an acre of corn. So, even before the corn is converted to ethanol, you're spending about $1.05 per gallon.
The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented. The corn has to be processed with various enzymes; yeast is added to the mixture to ferment it and make alcohol; the alcohol is then distilled to fuel-grade ethanol that is 85- to 95-percent pure. To produce ethanol that can be used as fuel, it also has to be denatured with a small amount of gasoline.
Example based on the above:
Toyota Camry makes trip LA – NYC: 2,774 miles
Gas - 30 mph @ $1.40 gal. (2001 price)
Ethanol - 20 mph @ $1.74 (2001 price)
= ½ acre of corn and cost of processing corn to make the above trip (26.1 lbs. of corn per gallon).
(1 gal. gas = 1.5 gallons ethanol).
The farmers aren’t buying it, either. I live in an area of Indiana that grew a HUGE amount of corn last year. There are literally thousands of acres that were knee-high in corn this time last year lying fallow. I drive past them every day.
bookmarking this thread for the answer
Yep. It will need to be a multi-facetted action plan. It is a real crisis and it is in our faces and ignorant government policy and inaction let it happen. The real solution lies in attacking the problem from various directions. Allow me to provide details...
Explore and drill, east and west coasts and Alaska. And yes, that includes YOU Californians. You ain`t nothing special, except maybe "special-ed." Besides, you need the money because your state is going bankrupt from all the illegal aliens you won't get rid of.
Develop the rather massive oil reserves contained in the Bakken Formation
Build modern technology refineries
Build modern technology Nuke power plants
Build modern technology clean-coal power plants
Open the clean coal deposits Klinton “closed” which contains 62 BILLION tons of environmentally safe low-sulfur coal from the Kaiparowits Plateau in Utah.
Slowly but steadily increase the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)
Tax breaks to companies developing bio-diesel techniques that create fuel from cheap waste.
Tax breaks and investment perks for moderate temperature geothermal ORC power plant technology that operates off industrial waste heat / geothermal applications to generate power directly and run at 90% efficiency, without impacting oil and gas production.
At 400kW per unit you just line up as many as you need for a small community. Quiet and extremely clean.
Just how can we do this the simple, easy, smart way? How do we get away from the ignorance of ethanol? And from CORN no less?
The President must lead.
If the President were to announce this program tomorrow and clearly state that due to the necessity of averting a disaster to the economy and a threat to National Security he will emplace Executive Orders that will not only immediately initialize this overall program but exempt it from excessive or unnecessary environmental regulatory agencies rules where do you think the hedge fund speculators will go, thus dropping the market price of crude by roughly 50 bucks?
They will go straight to that new market of energy production and the companies that will build it, the new technologies that will emerge, as a well functioning "new energy industry" SHOULD be that inviting. Not only will the price start to drop immediately, the very nature of new industry gains and emerging technologies will keep the price down. And, as always, when other nations began to utilize the new and more efficient (higher profit margin) techniques the overall demand will slow.
BTW, as we move into the future and plan ahead we should think about how we use the energy source. Examples... All future power plants should be Nuke or Clean Coal. Reserve the natural gas for heating homes. That will allow more fuel oil to be used in diesel trucks because it is not heating houses. The natural gas can. You can heat a home with natural gas but you can not get the hauling capacity by trying to run the 18 wheeler on it.
Get the automakers together on a relatively cheap electric car and start building the new technology Nuke power plants to handle the extra overnight charging demand. And get the automakers off the shoebox on a roller-skate designs. Hello GM / Ford / Honda your designs are BUTT-UGLY.
Build these and we will buy.
However, you are going to have to give up on the $109,000 price tag. In return we will come off the 0-60mph in 3.9 seconds thing.
Ethanol, the Complete Energy Lifecycle Picture
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/program/ethanol_brochure_color.pdf
Iam sure NASA is working on it they have done so much.
I agree completely.
E85 is 105 octane. Higher octane allows you to run higher timing without detonation. Unfortunately, you have to run much richer with E85 to get similar amounts of energy from the fuel.
I’m thinking of reworking the throttle bodies on my Corvette to run E85, but I’ll probably drop from 10MPG to 6. However, I can accept that if I can get another 30 HP.
Moral: if some third-worlder starves to make my Corvette faster, it really must suck to be him.
The masses were given "Bread and Circus" this weekend.
I’ll repeat it again: the CHEAP way to produce ethanol (and FRESH AIR!) is from natural gas (ethane) and ozone: C2H6 + O3 = C2H5OH + O2 Q.E.D. (But, why not just DRINK it???)
Google on phrases such as “Patzek debunked” or “Patzek discredited” or “Patzek disproven” or... you’ll have no trouble.
Ethanol: The solution that not only increases the cost of food, but increases the cost of fuel.....Brilliant. Only a Democrat could come up with such a plan.
If you examine what the Brazilians are doing...they don’t use corn as the product to produce ethanol....they use sugar beets or sugar cane....which are two and three times more productive....but then you can’t grow those in Kansas, Iowa and the midwest. Sugar cane and sugar beets can only be grown in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This entire “corn-only” racket is the amusing part of ethanol and the push by big-Ag to be the major crop to use. Talk to any agricultural expert and they all cast doubts on choosing corn as the choice...and it has more to do with politics than with actual ethanol production.
The additional joke about this entire game is that Cuba is sitting there with the potential to produce sugar cane and sugar beets twelve months out of the year and could produce vast amounts of ethanol...but then they aren’t on the US-friendly list. They could produce at least two crops a year, and become a major ethanol exporter....but only if the US got real friendly with them and got into a different mentality.
Leftist solutions don’t work, and when leftist solutions don’t work, leftists demand more of the same failed solutions.
When I did that, I found roughly equal numbers of sites such as university science blogs in which Patzek and Pimental present arguments against ethanol and biofuels and sites from organizations like the National Corn Growers Association and an outfit called "peakoil.com" who appears to have a philosophical interest in promoting biofuels, solar energy, and wind energy (as well as a philosophical opposition to nuclear, oil, and gas as energy sources). So, from a cursory review of the sources of the "Patzek debunked" crowd, I'm not so sure the debunkers have any more credibility than the ones they claim to have debunked.
The also didn't address their energy independence by focusing only on ethanol; they drastically increased their domestic oil production at the same time.
Sugar cane and sugar beets can only be grown in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi.”””
I know a woman in Wyoming who has grown sugar beets for years. She works over 600 acres, and I am pretty sure she isn’t the only one in her area.
Sure. Here’s a USDA comparison of several studies on the subject:
http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/aer-814.pdf
See p. 3 for discussion of why Pimetel’s results are out of whack with the others cited.
There have been others estimations of ethanol’s net energy balances. There are some that are too rosy, there are some cluster around a 1.29 return, and then there’s Pimentel and Patzek who are off the histogram trend line by quite a bit.
These two authors have been using the same methodology of finding every possible “input” into farming and putting that into the energy balance; the food that the farmer eats, the energy used to make the steel in the tractors you name it.
The only way to not expend the energy in the food the farmer eats is to kill the farmer. As long as he’s alive, he’s using that energy, whether he’s growing corn for ethanol, corn for food, or pushing papers in an office in town.
The steel is a) fungible and b) on many farms, it is a sunk cost regardless of whether they’re farming corn for ethanol or any other crop. Farmers don’t buy equipment JUST for corn and JUST for ethanol - any more than a shop keeper buys a cash register to make sales to an individual customer.
I’ve seen copies of Pimentel’s original work in print and the errors of methodology just leap off the page if you’re reading it with a critical eye. For every “input” into this process, we should be asking “OK, and if we’re not raising corn for ethanol, or corn at all, does this input go away?” If the answer isn’t at *least* “maybe,” then it isn’t an “input to ethanol.”
If we are to evaluate oil in the same way, then we’d:
1. Count all the food eaten by oilfield workers, oil company executives, etc.
2. Count all the steel’s energy costs for steel in oil drilling rigs (the equivalent of farm machinery like tractors), trucks, and then the steel in well casing, pipelines, etc. I’ve never seen an oil energy balance study like this.
3. Then count all the energy expended in fuel drilling and producing oil, not just at the refinery, but all the fuel spent by drilling rigs, exploration rigs, you name it.
Here’s another guy taking after the dynamic duo:
http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/etcfc/docs/pr/MichaelWangResponse~7-19-05.doc
The point I’d like to hammer home is that people have to READ THE PAPERS being cited in the press. Because you simply cannot trust the press, most of whom have no education in science, math, engineering, agronomics, whatever, to report the issues in the papers accurately. They’re simply too stupid and they’re not getting any smarter.
Ethanol doesn’t have a huge energy gain, but it is a net positive energy balance when properly analyzed. Could we do better with other feedstocks? Yes. Is it going to replace oil? Heck no. Could it improve mileage in cars? Well, if we could get some automotive engineers to consider the possibilities of the increased octane in ethanol, perhaps.
There’s plenty of beets grown in the Big Horn Valley, west of Sheridan and east of Cody. Look around Powell, down into Worland.
Plenty of beets.
This implies he is counting the solar energy.
You’ll forgive me for saying so, but there is no support for Patzek or Pimental in the literature of any other scientist. The Princeton blog, which I suppose is the one you are referring to, doesn’t support either one of the gentlemen, but claims that the answer depends upon how energy is expended in farming, a subject that Freepers such as NVDave know a little about and which Professors Patzek and Pimental know nothing about.
This is why I tell people to read the actual papers. Put aside the stuff from one advocacy group or the other. Go read the papers. I have, as a result of moving, I have the .pdf’s packed up on another computer and not on my shiny new laptop.
Just go read Pimentel’s papers for the start of the idea of how to count every possible energy input. Then read Patzek’s papers. Then NB now Patzek refers to Pimentel as a “world famous ag researcher” when Pimentel is really a “bug guy” — a insect PhD. Sure, Pimentel has done lots of research of insect pests in ag situations, but not in agronomy, engineering, etc. Pimentel started stacking the energy balance, and Patzek picked up this methodology and ran with it.
There has been no attempt by either one of which I’m aware (esp. Patzek, since he’s in petro engineering at UCB) to apply the same methods to gasoline or diesel production - ie, throw every possible energy expenditure in the life cycle of a gallon of gasoline into the energy balance.
“Moral: if some third-worlder starves to make my Corvette faster, it really must suck to be him.”
If this is not said satirically, then you are one despicable excuse for a human being.
You’re wholly free to buy as much corn as you want and send it to the Third World hellhole of your choice.
You mean instead of going out and drilling for more oil, of which we have a large sufficiency in ANWR, Wyoming (I think, or Montana) and off our coasts? Is THAT what you mean? Or does the Left’s plan, which amounts to the same sort of murder as banning DDT did years ago, fit so well with you? I mean, I KNOW there are supposed to be too many people on the planet and all, but come on, now. I had the (apparently) silly notion that this was a CONSERVATIVE site, not a Greenpeace one. (Furthermore, it is NOT the fault of the people left on their own to starve to death that these third-world nations are the hell-holes they are. It is the fault of the despots in charge of them and often THE U.S. GOVERNMENT (and the UN, of course) which sends them “foreign aid” and keeps them in power. Mainly by furnishing food aid to them so that they can feed their sycophants and use their ready cash to buy arms to keep the rest in line. Or even by furnishing the arms directly in some cases.)
The farmers aren’t buying it, either. I live in an area of Indiana that grew a HUGE amount of corn last year. There are literally thousands of acres that were knee-high in corn this time last year lying fallow. I drive past them every day.
Even the no-til equipment for soybeans leaves traces that I would notice. The fields surrounding the Evansville Regional airport haven’t been touched. That totals about 3000 acres. There’s about 1500 more along Green River road north of Lynch to Booneville-New Harmony road and about 1000 more just east of US 41 on B-NH rd.
It’s interesting that whenever there is a suggestion that a collectivist response to a perceived need is called for, it’s always someone else’s wealth that should be collected.
Corn last year would normally rotate into beans for this year, but the window for planting beans is much later in the spring than corn. The tenant will plant the bean field after he has all his corn planted. With $13.00 beans, no one leaves prime land fallow.
You’ll have to excuse me for asking just what in the he!! you are talking about, since I KNOW I did not suggest any sort of collectivist response. It is COLLECTIVISM that is creating 90% of our problems and ethanol is primarily another collectivist response, which SOME on this board are eager to embrace. I am trying to get you to embrace a FREE MARKET solution instead. Which would have the extra advantage of NOT depriving the poor in third world hell holes of food they need. Of course part of MY solution would entail getting rid of crop subsidies across the board, stopping all government contributions to foreign aid and the UN, and getting rid of the UNCONSTITUTIONAL restrictions on people drilling for oil wherever it can be found, while at the same time encouraging (tax incentives or just the “bully pulpit”) development of fiscally responsible alternatives.
So kindly explain to me just where I called for a “collectivist” solution to the situation. Else ask that your comment be removed as totally inappropriate.
When you advocate for below market prices for farm commodities so that “we” can feed the third world, you’re advocating for the confiscation of either the farmer’s or the taxpayer’s wealth.
And just where did I do this? I advocated doing away with crop subsidies, not enacting below market pricing. I advocated getting rid of the ethanol mandate that is artificially DRIVING UP prices for food (of ALL sorts, because feedstocks of corn for animals is more expensive and reducing acreage devoted to OTHER crops is being reduced to grow more subsidized corn). So just exactly HOW do you come by your conclusion?
Or are you referring to my response to that jackass, Liberty 275? Because if he, she or it is serious in that post, about letting someone starve to death because food that could be sold (at market prices) to that country is being diverted through government mandates and subsidies to ethanol production to give Liberty 275’s corvette an increase in horsepower, you’ve got the cart and horse mixed up real bad.
The US exported more corn last year, even with the surge in domestic ethanol production, than it did the year before without the ethanol production. If the subjects of Third World satrapies are starving, it’s not the fault of American farmers.
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