Reply #59: Some Facts

[Robert Rapier]

It never ceases to amaze me that: 1). Those who are really pushing ethanol don't seem to know that much about it, but 2). They are quick to get hostile when you point out the facts to them. It's like you have just told them there is no Santa Claus. The worst are the ethanol investors, because they are just trying to make money and they don't care anything about energy balance, sustainability, etc. But I am continually amazed that people who claim they care about the environment don't really care to honestly evaluate ethanol claims.

First, I have proven out my statements with facts. My blog entries are all highly referenced. What I do is take the numbers out of the USDA and Argonne reports and show you how they got them. I refute them with their own reports, showing how they are doing creative accounting to come up with the numbers they do. Feel free to look at any of my essays and find an unsupported claim, or one that isn't well-referenced.

Second, my graduate thesis was on cellulosic ethanol. I spent years working on the process. You needn't lecture me on it. As of now, it's not there yet, and it may never be there. I am hopeful on this front, but it still suffers one of the major problems of grain ethanol. You have to distill a solution that is primarily water to get the ethanol out. That is incredibly energy intensive, and is done with fossil fuels (mostly natural gas, but lately trending toward coal).

Finally, you don't seem to understand that energy return is critical here. If your energy return is not substantially better than 1.0, then you really aren't keeping any fossil fuels in the ground. You are taking oil, natural gas, and coal and turning them into ethanol. Now, you can get away with turning coal into ethanol, but it is neither clean nor sustainable. It doesn't make too much sense to turn natural gas into ethanol at a poor EROI, because you could just use the natural gas in a more efficient manner directly as a transportation fuel. This would bypass the mining of the soil, as well as the negative environmental aspects of expanding corn farming to make a marginal fuel.

Finally, it isn't up to me to address Dale's claim. As written, it is wrong. He is probably saying the same thing that I addressed below: That for some value of liquid fuel input, you get a multiple of ethanol input. But it ignores the rest of the fossil fuel inputs. Dale introduced a special metric. You have quoted him. It is your responsibility to support that claim when challenged on it. As stated, it flies in the face of every published report on the issue, and it flies in the face of my first hand knowledge on the subject. It is as if you drive a car that gets 20 mpg, and every published report says it gets 20 mpg, but suddenly you read a quote from someone who claims the car actually gets 200 mpg. You wouldn't take that claim seriously, because you know better, and you would probably expect the person making the claim to support the claim.

RR