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This Pimentel guy is just full of B.S. He says we can only get 7110 pounds of corn from an acre, so he's putting production at less than 130 56 pound bushels per acre. He says we can only produce 328 gallons of ethanol from this 127 bushels of corn per acre, which comes out to less than 2.6 gallons per bushel, when in fact now we are able to produce 2.8 gallons per bushel. He says it takes as many as three distillation steps to distill the alcohol. That may be true with an old fashioned pot still but not with modern stills that only require one run to distill it as pure as it's going to get.

He also says it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get from the final product, which is false. Ethanol has a positive energy balance. It does take a lot of energy to produce ethanol, but in the end we end up with more energy than we had to expend to get it, not counting the energy from the sun rain water, and nutrients naturally occurring the soil of course.

He talks about all the irrigation required for corn, when in fact little or no irrigation is required in the main corn producing states. Rain is sufficient in several states to grow corn without irrigation except for in times of drought. He says a car traveling 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol (not a gasoline-ethanol mix), would need about 852 gallons of the corn-based fuel, and that it would take 11 acres to produce this much ethanol. So I suppose he thinks we are all going to be driving huge gas guzzling vehicles that only get 11.74 miles to the gallon. Even though you get fewer miles per gallon on ethanol than you do with gasoline you can do a lot better than that with a decent fuel efficient car. Just checking fueleconomy.gov there isn't a single 2007 car listed yet that gets gas mileage that low on ethanol. Only two 2006 vehicles, the Dodge Durango and the Nissan Titan got mileage on ethanol of 12 mpg or worse. Most E85 compatible vehicles here appear to be big trucks and other not so fuel efficient large vehicles, but there are fuel efficient vehicles that can get 20 miles to the gallon and better on pure ethanol are available in the world and the trend is for all cars to become more fuel efficient. A small E85 compatible car that can get 30 miles to the gallon on gasoline is going to get better than 20 miles per gallon on E85. Depending on how well the engine is optimized to handle ethanol it could get a lot better than 20 miles per gallon.

Moreover, his calculation is way off. Even if we ignore the fact that farmers are able to get more than 127 bushels of corn per acre now, and ignore the fact that ethanol producers are now able to get 2.8 gallons per bushel, and if we ignore the fact that he is using as an example a vehicle that gets ridiculously low mpg, even if we take as fact all the other B.S. he's written, it wouldn't take eleven acres to produce 852 gallons of ethanol. He erroneously claims that we can only produce 328 gallons per acre, but even producing only that it would take less than three acres to produce 852 gallons. And if we plugged in all the real numbers it's only going to take less than two acres to supply the average person all the ethanol they would need to drive 10,000 miles a year.

The big kicker though is his final bullet where he talks about how much land it would take to power every single automobile in the country on pure ethanol. Aside from the fact that all his other numbers have been wrong and his calculation is no doubt incorrect, no one is suggesting that we replace gasoline with ethanol in the first place. Even with new cellulosic technology coming on line it is highly unlikely that we could ever fulfill all of our automotive fuel needs with ethanol. We're still going to use plenty of gasoline, mostly gasoline by a wide margin in fact. The idea is to supplement our dwindling fuel supply with alternative fuels. The days of finding oil just bubbling out of the ground are gone. It's getting harder and more expensive to find, get it out of the ground, and get it refined. Most of the world's reserves that are relatively easy to get at appear to be in the hands of rather unsavory types. Whatever alternative fuels we can produce here keeps money here and out of the hands of these others. Also, the more alternative fuels are produced throughout the world, the longer we'll be able to stretch out our oil supply by supplementing it with these alternative fuels. Ethanol isn't the solution to our energy problems by a long shot, but it can be part of the solution at least for the time being, as can biodiesel, bio-butanol, possibly fuels produced through thermal conversion or thermal depolymerization if that technology works out, fuel from oil shale and tar sands, new wells drilled in this country, and so on. I don't have a dig in this hunt except that I and my family are fuel consumers, but I'd like to see us diversify into other fuels because I know that we aren't going to be able to pump oil out of the ground at current levels forever and I worry about having all of our eggs in one basket with a fuel produced largely by countries run by crazy Arabs and dictators.