Part of the confusion of those charts are that they also use the energy contained in the gasoline as part of the “cost” of the energy. Technically correct but misleading when people associate it with energy that must be spent to produce it.
Right — understood. But I’m still unclear on whether those ethanol “total BTU” charts include solar or not.
Also, NB that almost half of studies on page 3 that show ethanol “below the line” are from one guy - Pimental. He’s well known for his absurdly incorrect energy balance computations, whereby he includes the energy in the food the farmer eats and the energy used to make the steel in his equipment into the “energy balance” for ethanol.
Then there’s Patzak’s studies. He’s funded by the oil industry and he uses Pimental’s methodology in his studies on energy balance.
When I look at ethanol energy balances, I toss out any studies by those two sources, because their methodology is quite simply wrong, and absurdly so. The only way to remove the energy consumed by the farmer would be to kill the farmer, because he’s going to be consuming that food whether he’s raising corn for ethanol or pushing paper in an office. The issue of producing ethanol has no bearing on the farmer’s food as an “energy input.”
Likewise, the steel used in the farm equipment is most often already a sunk cost. The farmer had the equipment a priori; he did not buy the equipment just to grow corn for ethanol. He will use the exact same equipment to grow anything else on the farm; again, this “input cost” should be excluded from the energy balance.