Re: [pf] feeding cars, not people.

At 17:19 12/10/2000 -0700, David MacClement sent on (from Planet Ark):

"There's a lot riding on this." Nobody agrees with that more than U.S.
farmers. Currently, most ethanol in the United States is made from the
nation's abundant and cheap corn supplies. In the 1999/2000 crop year,
which ended August 30, an estimated record 570 million bushels of corn were
converted to ethanol. That figure could reach 600 million bushels in
2000/01, the U.S. Agriculture Department said.

David:
   It would be interesting to know how much *net* energy output this
ethanol would provide.
   Farming in the U.S. is fossil-fuel-intensive, both to run the monster
machines and to douse the crops with chemicals, and the manufacturing/
refining process for ethanol probably burns up even more energy.   Apart
from the fact that the corn surplus is already there (corn that probably
shouldn't have been grown in the first place and corn that is no doubt
heavily subsidized), is it possible that the whole process winds up adding
nothing to U.S. energy supplies?
   Seems unlikely, of course.  They couldn't be that stupid, could they?
 Or could they?
   I remember a similar topic being discussed (perhaps in one of Herman
Daly's collections of essays) in connection with oil exploration: the
argument was that fossil fuel use will have to cease not when the last
barrel of oil comes out of the ground but rather when the point is reached
that it takes more than a barrel of oil in total energy expenditure to find
and extract a barrel of oil from the ground.
   I imagine, if anyone's doing the figuring, that oil sands extraction as
is being done in Saskatchewan is pretty close to this 1:1 ratio.

-- Ron


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