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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Ethanol a net energy loss

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  • From: Keith Addison <gha@journeytoforever.org>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Ethanol a net energy loss
  • Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2006 20:42:44 +0900

Hello Paul

Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion into ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make one gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 BTUS. Thus, 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in it. Every time you make one gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTUs. . .

http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm

Yes, David Pimental, sic. Pimentel uses data that's 20 years out of date, he knows it but he keeps on doing it. All other studies show an increasing positive energy gain, there's no net energy loss and hasn't been for quite a long time. The data is analysed here, six charts, you can get the picture in a glance:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/PimentelComments4_5_05.pdf

There's more detail here:

http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol_energy.html
Is ethanol energy-efficient?

http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_food.html
Biofuels - Food or Fuel?

(They're worth a read on their own account, IMHO.)

I'm not flying anybody's flag with this energy balance of ethanol issue. Pimentel gets it wrong and should be asked why. But the people he's attacking are not exactly defensible either - Big Ethanol, Big Corn in the US, ie Archer Daniels Midland and the other usual suspects. For one thing, they're so sharp that they treat the oil in the corn as a waste-product instead of making biodiesel out of it in the same refinery, which could be used to power most of the ethanol process.

One has to ask how it is that someone in Pimentel's position doesn't seem to be aware that there are organic farmers all over the US growing corn without any fossil-fuel based fertilisers and getting the same yields. Some of those farmers are getting it figured out about on-farm fuel too, so that energy input also disappears. In fact the whole issue disappears because corn is not exactly the ideal energy crop anyway (neither is soy). With ethanol, you get the ethanol, and you're left with less carbohydrate and more protein. That's a good deal, on a farm.

We think a small, well-integrated mixed farm can produce much of its own fuel from an ever-changing succession of by-products, with little extra input, and no dedicated land. That's not just ethanol though, that's a whole range of fuels.

We're sort of proving it at the moment at our place here in Japan, though that's not really how I'd describe what we're doing here, hence the "sort of".

David Pimentel makes all the biofuelers cross whenever he does this (every two years). I don't think they need to take much notice though, he doesn't do them any harm. They're burgeoning, making and using millions of gallons of biofuels a year, nobody knows how many millions, with millions of dollars not being spent on fossil fuels, and it all goes right under the radar.

You might say it's just a drop in the bucket, though it's impossible to know, but it has one major advantage: it's made and used on the spot. Why waste energy trucking energy crops to a distant large-scale central processing unit and then waste even more energy trucking the finished fuel all the way back again, instead of processing it and using it right there where it was grown? It's the same as the food miles issue. A lot of local biofuel is made from wastes rather than crops, but the same principles apply to wastes.

Best wishes

Keith Addison
Journey to Forever
KYOTO Pref., Japan
http://journeytoforever.org/


paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
- Wendell Berry





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