The masses were given "Bread and Circus" this weekend.
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 ...
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.)
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