[OneWingedShark]

While Pimental estimated that 131,017 btu's per gallon were consumed, and 21,500 of those were chargeable to co-products) the USDA reports that the consensus from scientific literature is 79,503 btu's by the wet milling method (with 33,503 btu's chargeable to co-products) and 74,447 by the dry milling process (with 28,415 btu's chargeable to co-products).

Given:

1 gallon of ethanol	=	 84,400 Btu

and the listed USDA BTUs consumed per production of gallon of Ethanol we see that:

Wet Milling	Dry Milling
84,400 - 79,503 = 4,897 BTU gained	84,400 - 74,447 = 9,953 BTU gained

Now, how many BTUs are consumed in transporting the fuel? If it is more than 9,953 then even by the more efficient method [dry milling] then there is a LOSS of BTUs from the economy due the production/transport cost-in-BTUs.

It is interesting to note that the base BTU gain of 9,953 [or 4,897] is rather comparable to one-half to one pound of coal.

1 pound of coal	=	8,100 to 13,000 Btu

*

* It would be even better if I had the figures for BTU cost of extraction of 1 pound of coal on hand to perform a similar computation... it might show that coal is actually, BTU-cost wise, a better fuel than Ethanol. :)

[Mr. Lucky]

You’re not subtracting the btu’s chargeable to the co-product. If you’re going to charge all of the energy cost of the distillation to the ethanol, then the CO2, corn oil and distillers grains are all free. (What could be better than a process which produces edible oils and high protein feeds for free?)