Posted 7/17/2005 05:09:00 PM by Douglas

If the blog dies in its sleep tonight, it will die happy. Cornell and Berkeley have finally released a study showing the absurdity of ethanol as a renewable energy source.

Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce.

It's about damn time someone said it, because I was beginning to annoy myself.

Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers another market to sell their produce.

That's probably all true, but when the government is the one paying the farmers (or more specifically, ADM) to grow the corn and soy beans, it doesn't come out with a net positive, financially, or thermodynamically.

But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent.

It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to sunflower plants, the study found.

The researchers included such factors as the energy used in producing the crop, costs that were not used in other studies that supported ethanol production, said Pimentel.

The study also omitted $3 billion in state and federal government subsidies that go toward ethanol production in the United States each year, payments that mask the true costs, Pimentel said.

If the corn is rotting in the silo anyway, then you might make some money turning it into ethanol for fuel. But when you figure in the $3 billion in production costs, it makes Saudi oil cheap by comparison.

Q.E.D. I will officially shut up about this topic.

Labels: ethanol