It’s fun to see how the government analysis of favored fads differs from reality:
“Ethanol, touted as an alternative fuel of the future, may eat up far more energy during its creation than it winds up giving back.”, according to UC Berkeley geoengineering professor Tad Patzek. He calculated that up to six times more energy is used to make ethanol than the finished fuel actually contains.
“The fossil energy expended during production alone”, he concluded, “easily outweighs the consumable energy in the end product.”
Patzek believes that those who think using the “green” fuel will reduce fossil fuel consumption are deluding themselves — and the federal government’s practice of subsidizing ethanol by offering tax exemptions to oil refiners who buy it is a waste of money.
Patzek began an exhaustive analysis of his own — one that painted an even bleaker picture of the ethanol industry’s long- term sustainability.
“Taking grain apart, fermenting it, distilling it and extruding it uses a lot of fossil energy,” he said. “We are grasping at the solution that is by far the least efficient.”
Patzek’s report also highlights the potential environmental hazards of ethanol production.
“When you dump nitrogen fertilizer on corn fields, it runs away as surface water, into the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico,” he said.
The excess nitrogen introduced into the water causes out-of-control algae growth, creating an oxygen-poor “dead zone” where other marine plants and animals cannot survive. Ethanol releases high levels of nitrogen oxide, one of the principal ingredients of smog, when burned.
One gov’t scientist differs: “His (Patzek’s) figures are accurate for older nitrogen fertilizer plants, but newer plants use only half the energy of those that were built 35 years ago,” he said. He also cited the increasing popularity of no-till farming methods, which can reduce a corn farm’s diesel usage by 75 percent. (That’s still not even close to break-even!) “With hydrogen fuel, people are willing to say, ’25 years from now it will be good.’ Why can’t we also be forward-looking when it comes to ethanol?” (Because it will waste a trillion dollars?)
Cornell University ecology Professor David Pimentel, however, sides with Patzek, calling production of ethanol “subsidized food burning.”
“The USDA isn’t looking at factors like the energy it takes to maintain farm machinery and irrigate fields in their analysis,” he said, adding that the agency’s ethanol report contains overly optimistic assumptions about the efficiency of farming practices. “The bottom line is that we’re using far more energy in making ethanol than we’re getting out.”
Government loves to prop up fraud with subsidies. They never last:
“If government funds become short, subsidies for fuels will be looked at very carefully,” he said. “When they are, there’s no way ethanol production can survive.”
