the Energy Bulletin article you refer to mentions the copy produced by Ted Patzek a known shill of the Oil and gas industry. Patzek used to work for Shell Oil. He set up a front organization to better receive funding (i.e. the funding goes to the organization rather than directly to him.) from major oil producers. NOte at the time he created this front organization he worked at University of California. THus the name UC Oil Conortium was intended to imply some sort of linkage with or support from the University of California (UC). The UC does not stand for ANYTHING!
YOur reference to the university of texas article is again a reference to bullshit produced by Patzek.
the referencee to the SF gate article is again a reference to Patzek bullshit.
the Feinstein page is the best it refers to copy produced by Patzek (and believe it or not) Pimental .. a retired professor of entomology who decided to boost his retirement income writing about the energetics of ethanol production to make money.
Both Patzek and Pimentel have been universally panned in the scientific community. No sensible person refers to the bull they have written. the criticisms have gone into their stuff in detail which I really don't want to repeat here.
Here is a good over-view of the criticism of Patzek and Pimentel:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x48327">Vociferous Critics of Ethanol (Pimentel & Patzek) widely discredited
"Maybe the problem is Pimentel is an entomologist instead of an engineer," Corzine said, adding that Patzek was a longtime employee of Shell Oil Company and founder of the UC Oil Consortium, which has counted BP, Chevron USA, Mobil USA, Shell and Unocal among its members. Patzek also is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers" (more)
...I will point out that Patzek and Pimentel earned universal disdain in scientific circles for not even counting the co-products that are made when ethanol is produced in their calculations of the efficiency of ethanol production form corn. All the protein from the corn is recovered and sold as a high nutrient, high protein feed supplement for cattle. The coproducts should recieve their part of the energy inputs to arrive at a valid computation of the efficiency of the ethanol production process which also generates these coproducts.
Here is an article from BusniessWeek.com that also mentions Mr. Patzek: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_40/b4052052.htm">Big Oil's Big Stall On Ethanol Mark N. Cooper, research director at the Consumer Federation of America, authored a recent paper characterizing the situation as "Big Oil's war on ethanol." The industry, he writes, "reacted aggressively against the expansion of ethanol production, suggesting that it perceives the growth of biofuels as an independent, competitive threat to its market power in refining and gasoline marketing."
The industry collects the subsidies, but didn't lobby for them—Congress created them to encourage a larger ethanol market. While oil reps say they aren't anti-ethanol, they are candid about disliking E85. Says Al Mannato of the American Petroleum Institute (API), the chief trade group for oil and natural-gas companies: "We think makes an effective additive to gasoline but that it doesn't work well as an alternative fuel. And we don't think the marketplace wants E85."
One prong in the oil industry's strategy is an anti-ethanol information campaign. In June the API released a study it commissioned from research firm Global Insight Inc. The report concludes that consumers will be "losers" in the runup to Congress' target of 35 billion gallons of biofuel by 2017 because, it forecasts, they'll pay $12 billion-plus a year more for food as corn prices rise to meet ethanol demand. The conclusions are far from universally accepted, but they have been picked up and promoted by anti-ethanol groups like the Coalition for Balanced Food & Fuel Policy, made up of the major beef, dairy, and poultry lobbies. Global Insight spokesman Jim Dorsey says the funding didn't influence the findings: "We don't have a dog in this hunt."
Academia plays a role as well. There is perhaps no one more hostile to ethanol than Tad W. Patzek, a geo-engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley. A former Shell petroleum engineer, Patzek co-founded the UC Oil Consortium, which studies engineering methods for getting oil out of the ground. It counts BP (BP ), Chevron USA, (CVX ) Mobil USA, and Shell (RDS ) among its funders. A widely cited 2005 paper by Patzek and Cornell University professor David Pimentel concluded that ethanol takes 29% more energy to produce than it supplies—the most severe indictment of the biofuel. Michael Wang, vehicle and fuel-systems analyst at the Energy Dept.'s Argonne National Laboratory, says among several flaws in the study is the use of old data and the overestimation of corn farm energy use by 34%. Pimentel defends the study. In a recent update, he and Patzek hiked the estimate of ethanol's energy deficit to 43%.
(more)
Consumer Federation of America's report here:
http://www.consumerfed.org/elements/www.consumerfed.org/file/Ethanol.pdf">Big Oil vs. Ethanol - Consumer Federation of America
As far as industry funding of pseudo scientific bullshit on ethanol goes, we can't overlook the $100 million grant EXXON MOBIL made to Stanford University - with the unprecendented requirement that EXXON have a seat on the board that decides what research projects get funded!
And then there was the $450 million grant from BP to the University of California Berkeley. This kind of money buys a lot of influence. NOw, as far as actual scientific inquiry into this matter, all the legitimate studies have concluded that the energy balance for ethanol is positive and climbing.
the USDA is a source of legitimate empirically based information on ethanol. Their data and studies are available for review. The Argonne National Laboratory (a part of the Dept. of Energy) has provided a great volume of scientific studies of the energetics of ethanol. Argonnnes' Michael Wang created the GREET Model for evaluating different fuels for GH emissions which is used by thousands of actual researchers in industry, government and the academia.
Segundo and Dale published their study in 2002
http://ethanol.org/pdf/contentmgmt/MSU_Ethanol_Energy_Balance.pdf">link that concluded ethanol's energy balance was 1.76 to 1 which independently confirmed USDA's conclusions of 1.67 to 1, about the same time.
As pointed out in OP, that number keeps rising as shown in USDA's latest findings.
University of Illinois at Chicago, published a study showing that the ethanol industry's efficiency is improving significantly:
http://www.ethanol.org/pdf/contentmgmt/Ethanol_production_efficiency_U_of_IL_spring_2010.pdf Simply put their is no credible, scientific, empirically based research that hasn't concluded ethanol production from corn has a positive and climbing Net Energy Balance (or Net Energy Gain).
This does not mean there may not be better ways of producing ethanol in the future. But the key words here are "in the future". We want to move on to more efficient ways of producing ethanol but these ways do not exist now and in light of the relentlessly rising price of petroleum and our economy's dependence upon and vulnerability to price rises in that commodity, in lieu of dreaming about what
might be, it might be better to do what is possible now - while we work on more efficient means of producing renewable fuels(including making starch based ethanol production more efficient). This would seem a practical approach.