U.S. farmers are on track to grow their biggest corn crop ever, an astonishing 12.8 billion bushels,

[kansasblue]

Record corn crop expected on ethanol demand

There will be enough corn," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said. "It looks to me ... some of the pressure went off."

"It's just incredible," said USDA chief economist Keith Collins of the possible huge crop and the prospect of a larger corn stockpile


http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/29/news/economy/bc.usa.acreage.reut/index.htm?postversion=2007062915

[PSPS]

1. Yet we're importing corn gluten (with poison)

[Pavulon]

2. Biodiesel and Ethanol time

As we demand this crop for fuel, the demand to grow it will spike. I would happily pay more for farmers to gain. even to ADM. Without oil money the petro states (or the ones we choose not to buy from) collapse.

[madrchsod]

3. the land can`t take that level of production

corn is NOT the answer...when the hot winds blow the dirt from the fields in the midwest we will see the folly of thinking corn is the answer... it was`t that long ago when snow was renamed "snirt" and the following springs see the hot winds blow dust storms where i lived...

[KittyWampus]

5. Indeed, that level of production is using artificially produced fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides

and fungicides all of which is poisionous.

And high-till farming which uses more water.

And GMO crops which uses more water and weakens our ability to withstand blights/pestilence.

[JohnyCanuck]

28. In a nutshell, "modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable."

Eating Fossil Fuels

by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.


SNIP

To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock.⁹ According to The Fertilizer Institute (http://www.tfi.org), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer.¹⁰Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels.

Of course, this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture.

In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold.¹¹ Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.

SNIP

Soil, Cropland and Water

Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. Technologically-enhanced agriculture has augmented soil erosion, polluted and overdrawn groundwater and surface water, and even (largely due to increased pesticide use) caused serious public health and environmental problems. Soil erosion, overtaxed cropland and water resource overdraft in turn lead to even greater use of fossil fuels and hydrocarbon products. More hydrocarbon-based fertilizers must be applied, along with more pesticides; irrigation water requires more energy to pump; and fossil fuels are used to process polluted water.

It takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of topsoil.²¹ In a natural environment, topsoil is built up by decaying plant matter and weathering rock, and it is protected from erosion by growing plants. In soil made susceptible by agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65% each year.²² Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate.²³ Food crops are much hungrier than the natural grasses that once covered the Great Plains. As a result, the remaining topsoil is increasingly depleted of nutrients. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from U.S. agricultural soils every year.²⁴ Much of the soil in the Great Plains is little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops.

Every year in the U.S., more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging. On top of this, urbanization, road building, and industry claim another 1 million acres annually from farmland.²⁴ Approximately three-quarters of the land area in the United States is devoted to agriculture and commercial forestry.²⁵ The expanding human population is putting increasing pressure on land availability. Incidentally, only a small portion of U.S. land area remains available for the solar energy technologies necessary to support a solar energy-based economy. The land area for harvesting biomass is likewise limited. For this reason, the development of solar energy or biomass must be at the expense of agriculture.

Modern agriculture also places a strain on our water resources. Agriculture consumes fully 85% of all U.S. freshwater resources.²⁶ Overdraft is occurring from many surface water resources, especially in the west and south. The typical example is the Colorado River, which is diverted to a trickle by the time it reaches the Pacific. Yet surface water only supplies 60% of the water used in irrigation. The remainder, and in some places the majority of water for irrigation, comes from ground water aquifers. Ground water is recharged slowly by the percolation of rainwater through the earth's crust. Less than 0.1% of the stored ground water mined annually is replaced by rainfall.²⁷ The great Ogallala aquifer that supplies agriculture, industry and home use in much of the southern and central plains states has an annual overdraft up to 160% above its recharge rate. The Ogallala aquifer will become unproductive in a matter of decades.²⁸

We can illustrate the demand that modern agriculture places on water resources by looking at a farmland producing corn. A corn crop that produces 118 bushels/acre/year requires more than 500,000 gallons/acre of water during the growing season. The production of 1 pound of maize requires 1,400 pounds (or 175 gallons) of water.²⁹ Unless something is done to lower these consumption rates, modern agriculture will help to propel the United States into a water crisis.

In the last two decades, the use of hydrocarbon-based pesticides in the U.S. has increased 33-fold, yet each year we lose more crops to pests.³⁰ This is the result of the abandonment of traditional crop rotation practices. Nearly 50% of U.S. corn land is grown continuously as a monoculture.³¹ This results in an increase in corn pests, which in turn requires the use of more pesticides. Pesticide use on corn crops had increased 1,000-fold even before the introduction of genetically engineered, pesticide resistant corn. However, corn losses have still risen 4-fold.³²

Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. It is damaging the land, draining water supplies and polluting the environment. And all of this requires more and more fossil fuel input to pump irrigation water, to replace nutrients, to provide pest protection, to remediate the environment and simply to hold crop production at a constant. Yet this necessary fossil fuel input is going to crash headlong into declining fossil fuel production.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html

[KittyWampus]

4. the stupidity of ethanol is mind numbing. Expend energy growing a crop that must then be

processed and then distributed.

Rather than using WASTE in every neighborhood to fuel their own local needs- thermal depolmerization.

The reason the fascists want ethanol is because it keep energy production and availability centralized and under control of a very few people.

Recycling our own waster into usuable fuel on the local level makes so much sense.

[Raskolnik]

6. A fair number of non-fascists favor ethanol production as well.

I'm not arguing the actual merits of ethanol vs. alternative energy production, but I don't think supporting ethanol production has its roots in fascism.

[Pavulon]

7. Brazil uses it

I would rather ADM, Monsanto, and the oil companies take their cut and kick down to the farmer than the current slime take their cut and kick down to Saud's and tinhorns.

All about redirection of wealth.

Biodiesel is a great thing. Cut the commercial fleet over to b50 and phase out coal in favor of pb and breeder reactors over 10 years. Should be a simple cross isle issue.

We keep our money we pay for energy here. I dont care if it is inefficient, it is viable.

I have no patience to wait around for fusion, solar power, wind or any other flash in the pan.

Nuclear power is used in France for over 60% of grid power, it works.

[spoony]

11. Hear hear

I would love for us as a nation to act for change rather than hope for it, for once.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

13. I just can't agree with any of that.

GM crops are poison to the whole ecosystem. Monsanto especially has a horrible record of inferior or dangerous crops, legal actions, and claiming farmer's crops because of cross-pollination. Giving your money to them is no better than giving it to the Saudis.

Bio-diesel is not the answer. Mexican poor are rioting in the streets because the price of tortillas has doubled. All that corn is now being turned into fuel instead. We are headed for another dust bowl if we continue to use corn at this rate, the land just can't take it.

Keeping our money here makes sense, but settling for 'inefficient' is not in my nature.

Talk about bout waiting around... It takes 20 years and a few billion dollars to bring a nuclear plant online. I can get a windmill up and running in 1 year (huge waiting list I hear) or solar panels installed inside of 6 months.

[Pavulon]

17. Regulations make it take 20 years

it takes 3 years to bring a nuke plant online, without the bullshit red tape. The crops that are tilled under can grow beans that can be harvested and the rest of the plant can still be used to rotate fields. Castor beans make the same biodiesel as soy.

Tobacco is declining, the goverment bought out the quotas. So that land can be used for renewable energy. We can use the land just fine.

You can not smelt aluminum or run industry on wind or solar, now or in the next 5 years.

Westinghouse and ge make advanced multi megawatt reactors that can provide safe power now, and the navy has created thousands trained in their operation.

Monsanto does not fund radical islam. They kick down to farmers in the us, saudis do not.

[MadHound]

23. If you bring a nuke plant online within three years, cutting out the "bullshit red tape"

I would almost guarantee you that very same plant will have a major problem within a decade and have to go offline, perhaps permanently. The regulations are in place for a reason, and that is to prevent the corporate greed factor from using cost saving shortcuts on a nuclear plant.

Furthermore, even with breeder reactors and pebble bed reactors, you face the same old set of problems, what to do with the waste and the inability to eliminate human error(the largest factor in nuclear accidents and incidents). Until you fully eliminate those two problems, nuclear power isn't a viable long run operation.

As far as wind power goes, a 1991 DOE survey found that there is enough harvestable wind energy in Texas, Kansas and North Dakota, all by themselves, to fill our nation's electrical needs, factoring in growth, through the year 2030. Clean, cheap, renewable power for all. And this is using '91 wind tech. Generators have gotten more efficient, tip speeds have been lowered and other improvements have happened since then. Wind can indeed power this country.

Ethanol is a chimera. You are putting virtually the same amount of petroleum into a gallon of ethanol, in other words it is simply a switch with no net gain in energy:shrug: In addition, corn is hard on the soil, and will deprive the ground it grows in of necessary minerals that plant life needs. If you grow year after year of corn you're going to turn your breadbasket into a dust bowl within a decade or less. Meanwhile you're forcing up the price on the rest of the foods since they are in scarcer supply. In addition, even if you devoted all possible agricultural land to corn for ethanol you would still be nowhere near the amount needed to fill our fuel needs.

Biodiesel is a much better alternative, but rather than grow it on land it should be an aquaculture based crop. Use oil bearing algae as the feedstock and you can grow it across the country. Farmers could grow it in their farm ponds, cities can use it much like they already do, as part of the first stage of wastewater treatment. Michael Briggs, a phycist at the University of New Hampshire, has figured out that we would only need 15.000 square miles of water surface to grow enough algae to fill all of our fuel needs. In addition biodiesel can take the place of petroleum in making many plastics.

We have the clean, renewable alternative energy sources to take us into the future. It is past time to switch our energy infrastructure off of the coal, oil, nuclear paradigm and onto the renewable, clean paradigm. Any other option is simply selling our country short.

[ProudDad]

29. You gonna volunteer to have one next to your house?

"it takes 3 years to bring a nuke plant online, without the bullshit red tape."

The "bullshit red tape" is to prevent more three mile islands or Chernobyls...

and yes, it's also designed to block a dangerous, unnecessary, infant technology...

Solar is READY NOW. It only needs the kind of boost that oil, gas and coal have gotten for a hundred years and are still getting.


We've already gone around about this. I've already refuted your short-sighted, dangerous proposal...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2915557#2916931

[kansasblue]

18. Brazil uses sugar cane to make Ethanhol...it's more efficient.

I was a big proponent of ethanol in the past. But I'm here with an open mind. I've move from proponent to a more cautious attitude.

I would say that it seems to some here to be far worse if your paycheck goes for high food cost, but not bad if that same amount goes big oil. If you spent your money on gas to get to work cheap food isn't that cheap.

[JohnyCanuck]

24. Here's another way of looking at this problem.

By "problem," I am referring to declining energy supplies, or at least an inability to increase energy supplies fast enough to continue fueling perpetual economic growth, a scenario that's becoming of increasing concern worldwide as more people become aware of the implications of Peak Oil.

Faustus and the Monkey Trap

Many centuries ago in southeast Asia, some clever soul figured out how to use the thinking patterns of monkeys to make a highly effective monkey trap. The trap is a gourd with a hole in one end just big enough for a monkey’s hand to fit in, and a stout rope connected to the other end, fastened to a stake in the ground. Into the gourd goes a piece of some local food prized by monkeys, large and solid enough that it can’t be shaken out of the gourd. You set the trap in a place monkeys frequent, and wait.

Sooner or later, a monkey comes along, scents the food, and puts a hand into the gourd to grab it. The hole is too small to allow the monkey to extract hand and food together, though, and the rope and stake keeps the monkey from hauling it away, so the monkey keeps trying to get the food out in its hand. Meanwhile you come out of hiding and head toward the monkey with a net, if there’s a market for live monkeys, or with something more deadly if there isn’t. Far more often than not, instead of dropping the food and scampering toward the safety of the nearest tree, the monkey will frantically keep trying to wrestle the food out of the gourd until the net snares it or the club comes whistling down.

The trap works because monkeys, like the rest of us, tend to become so focused on pursuing immediate goals by familiar means that they lose track of the wider context of priorities that make those goals and means meaningful in the first place. Once the monkey scents the food in the gourd, it defines the problem as how to get the food out, and tries to solve the problem in a familiar way, by maipulating food and gourd. When the hunter appears, that simply adds a note of urgency, and makes the problem appear to be how to get the food out before the hunter arrives. Phrased in either of these terms, the problem is impossible to solve. Only if the monkey remembers that food is of no value to a dead monkey, and redefines the problem as primarily a matter of getting away from the hunter, will it let go of the food, get its hand out of the trap, and run for the nearest tree.

SNIP

The same dilemma on a larger scale underlies current efforts to deal with the imminent decline of world oil production by finding something else to pour into our gas tanks: ethanol, biodiesel, hydrogen, you name it. Our petroleum-powered vehicles – not just cars, but the trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft that make our current way of life possible – are the food in the monkey’s hand and the pact that binds Mephistopheles to Faustus’ service. The problem of peak oil, as many people even in the peak oil community see it, is how to find some other way to keep the fuel tanks topped up. This seems like common sense, but that’s what the monkey thinks about getting the food out of the gourd, too.

Approached as a question of finding something to fill our gluttonous appetite for highly concentrated energy, the problem of peak oil is just as insoluble as the monkey trap when that’s approached as a question of getting food. The discovery and exploitation of the earth’s petroleum reserves gave human beings a fantastic windfall of essentially free energy, and we proceeded to burn through it at an astonishing pace. Now that the supply of petroleum is beginning to falter, the question before us is not how to keep burning something else at the same pace, or how to find some other way to power a civilization of a sort that can only survive by burning extravagant amounts of energy, but how to scale back our expectations and our technology drastically enough to make them fit the much more modest energy supplies available to us from renewable sources.

Expecting some other energy resource to provide energy on the same scale and level of concentration as petroleum, just because we happen to want one, is a little like responding to one huge lottery win by assuming that when that money starts running out, another equally large win can be had for the cost of a few more tickets. This is close enough to today’s consumer psychology that it’s easy to imagine somebody in this position pouring all the money he has left into lottery tickets, and throwing away his chances of avoiding bankruptcy because the only solution he can imagine is winning the lottery again. And this, again, is exactly the mentality of current attempts to fuel industrial society by pouring our food supply into our gas tanks.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/03/faustus-and-monkey-trap.html

[KittyWampus]

31. my point is that using local waste- ANY WASTE- is almost 100% more efficient.

Thermal depolymerization :)

[donsu]

8. and the weather is constantly ruining corn crops

the yield may not be as high as expected.

some suits are going to make huge bucks off this summer's corn 'product', and what they do with it.

just another scam to rake in the bucks.

[JacquesMolay]

9. The farmer's margin is going to be eaten up, too...

... by rising fuel prices and the glut that's been produced. What did Marx say - "The more you produce, the poorer you become"?

[phildo]

10. History has shown Marx to be mostly clueless, no?

Not that I am any sort of Corporate Capitalist.

There is not a likely glut, as it is already set to be completely sucked up and has been pre-sold on the futures market.

Ethanol production is not just ADM and co. There is a huge home-brew (yes, all legal) building in the US.

But even running at max, Ethanol will only handle 30% of current fuel demand. There is not a present top to the market.

But overall, I agree that waste source is much better, or algae grown from CO2 recapture from industrial processes.

[GliderGuider]

12. Ethanol will not supply anything like 30% of fuel demand.

From my article Biofuels: Use With Caution:

How much oil-equivalent biofuel could we actually make if we turned all the world's major grain and oilseed crops into automobile fuel, leaving none whatever for food? In other words, what are humanity's relative energy requirements for food and transportation? Would their scales of use allow us to easily and effectively substitute a portion of our food energy use for transportation fuel?

To answer this question I considered ethanol from corn, wheat, rice, sugar cane and sugar beets, and biodiesel from soybeans and rapeseed (canola), plus palm&sunflower oils. In each case I converted the entire world crop into fuel, discounted the ethanol by 1/3 for its lower energy content, and converted the annual production in litres to the oil-industry standard measure of millions of barrels of oil equivalent per day. Here are the results:

(snip}

The total from turning virtually all of our food into fuel is 12.8 MBOE/day - only 15% of the current world oil consumption of 84 million barrels per day. To make matters worse, it takes a lot more energy to make biofuels than it does to simply pump oil from the ground and refine it. A rough estimate is that it takes at least twice as much. Accounting for this necessary energy outlay reduces the available net energy of our biofuels to less than 8% of the world's oil consumption.

We are being systematically oversold on the potential utility of biofuels, and this is creating unreasonable expectations of the degree to which biofuels will be able to replace petroleum. The hope is that such substitution will address both climate change and dwindling post-peak fuel supplies.

Every percent of petroleum we replace by crop-sourced biofuels implies a 12%+ reduction in the food supply. While this might be acceptable in very small, localized applications, it will not (must not) be part of the global solution set if we begin to see multi-percent declines in fossil fuels. Trying to make it play such a role would amount to doing what some farmers were forced to do in the depths of the Great Depression: burn their seed corn for heat. We need to be aware that at some point in the deployment of biofuels we might cross the line from "small-scale petroleum extender" to "burning the seed corn". We need to be aware of the issues surrounding biofuels so we can resist crossing that line, because the pressure to cross it will become enormous.

This is one of the reasons why using crop-sourced biofuels for transportation is such a horrifically bad idea. We strip mine our top soil, we deplete our water tables, we starve everyone and we still have only an 8% solution. We all - individuals, countries and our whole civilization - need to be very, very cautious in promoting the use of biofuels, lest our thirst for transportation fuel overrun our common sense.. And we must always remember to crunch the numbers.

Paul Chefurka

[phildo]

14. Thanks, Paul. I will look over your numbers.

The 30% was from numbers I ran with a couple of RE (renewable energy) groups two years ago when I wandered into the RE field from the electrical side (I R an EE).

I do see a couple differences on the modeling assumptions -- we were looking at US v. US (US max production v. US consumption) and also see that you are using the (older) assumptions that Ethanol production methods must be based on traditional (very energy intensive) methods.

My interest into it all was as an application of the large amounts of waste heat the solar electric (boiler not PV) designs I am working on. Turns out the output waste temperatures are optimal for Ethanol production -- about 200 to 190 F. Is useful for both distilling and cooking.

One last difference I see off-hand is the assumption that Ethanol engines produce less energy than gasoline -- that is true for conventional gasoline engines, which are relatively low compression. Engines that are optimized for Ethanol (much higher compression) get comparable outputs.

It also does not consider algae produced ethanol, but as that is still experimental as an industrial CO2 scrubbing method, I do not tend to include it yet, either.

But in all that, please understand I am in no way advocating any attempt near that 15 or even 30% replacement. It is just a way of declaring an upper bound and awareness that even the upper limits of production is WAY below consumption.

My present future fantasy would be a near total electric conversion of ground transportation. How an EE would see the world, huh? :) Trains, trucks, autos -- all pulling their power source from a grid based system -- but that is a whole other topic -- with a whole lot more other numbers. :)

In some post-petroleum future and barring some radical technology breakthrough, the only applications I have seen that liquid biofuels are optimal for are:

Aircraft (depending on overall demand)
Emergency vehicles,
Extreme offroad and some military vehicles, and
Backup and emergency electrical generation.

With biofuels of:

Ethanol, Bio-diesel, and Butanol (a 4 carbon alcohol that behave much like gasoline)

[ProudDad]

30. What makes you think this?

"History has shown Marx to be mostly clueless, no?"

His analysis of capitalism is still the most cogent and widely recognized...even among capitalists...

[mmonk]

15. We're now a net importer of agricultural products.

Good to see we have some corn.

[1932]

16. A lot of it is going to corn syrup for soft drinks too, and the federal gov't subsidizes it

so that coke and pepsi have cheap corn syrup and high profits.

[Retrograde]

27. and all the other stuff HFCS is in these days

ever read the labels on packaged foods? Why would anyone put high-fructose corn syrup in peanut butter? Or most of the other stuff it's in?

[SoCalDem]

19. and cereal costs more than ever..

ADM and the other agri-giant companies are making money hand over fist because of the bio-diesel speculation..driving corn prices higher and higher, yet the production of the fuel uses MORE energy than what's produced..and the side effect is that food products will only cost more....Sounds like "sound-agriculture" hah!

Or course from a grower's perspective, I can understand it. Wouldn't you grow a crop that you can sell for a high price? (The sad thing is that the small farmer gets very little )

[phildo]

20. The consumes more energy than it produces is some (bad?) outdated infromation from Pimentel, right?

It has been debunked fairly soundly in the industry.

However, that does not mean much more energy optimized methods do not exist compared to the standard industrial practices.

But if you think about it a minute -- if it costs more energy (and since 1973 energy has become money) to produce -- the economica end would make the system collapse after the first or second cycle of the money.

The food costs are very valid. Locally (Texas) and to the South the Mexicans are very much less than pleased with the cost of tortilla raw materials increasing. Part of all that is inflation, as well. (currency devaluation in the current US dollar case -- makes thing look like they are going up when the truth is the currency is going worth less).

Wheat is up as well -- $6.20 a bushel compared to around $4 a year ago.

Corn is showing $3.68. Since a bushel of most any grain converts to an energy value of a little over 2 1/2 gallons of Ethanol ($2.08 a gallon) it is still profitable to keep the process going depending on production costs.

(All numbers are Friday's close on the CBOT.com)

[SoCalDem]

21. "..the industry..." ? I'm not so sure I trust their numbers

They DO have a vested interest, now don't they? And their "numbers" have been biting us on the ass for many years now.:)

[phildo]

26. No math-a-magic in there, just basic ciphering and goes-ina's

Story Problem:

Part 1 --

If anyone is paying $3.70 a bushel for corn

And

That bushel of corn produces 2.5 gallons of ethanol

What is the raw grain material costs per gallon?

Answer:

$3.70 / 2.5 gallons = $1.48 per gallon.

Part 2 --

If Ethanol is selling for $2.08 per gallon

And

If corn costs $1.48 per gallon, what is the max production cost per gallon to maintain operations?

Answer:

$2.08 - $1.48 = $0.60

Total production cost (Equipment + energy + return on captial + labor + etc.) must cost less than 60 cents.

==============

Too simple for the real world, but that is the underlying math.

Other considerations -- this year alone, I think corn has varied from around $2.50 to over $4.00 a bushel. Ethanol has been over $3 at times. It all shifts daily and can make it all a risky business.

Shipping costs tend to cancel each other -- and like you observed, by the time it hits retail, the whole game can turn into F You, Very Much. :)

[ThomWV]

22. And after we export most of it we'll still owe money

[IDemo]

25. The latest studies show a positive energy balance for ethanol

From the USDA’s Office of Energy Policy and New Uses,
and the Center for Transportation Research, Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratory:

We conclude that the NEV (net energy value) of corn-ethanol is positive
when fertilizers are produced by modern processing
plants, corn is converted in modern ethanol facilities,
and farmers achieve average corn yields. Our NEV
estimate of over 21,000 Btu per gallon could be
considered conservative, since it was derived using the
replacement method for valuing coproducts, and it
does not include energy credits for plants that sell
carbon dioxide. Corn ethanol is energy efficient, as
indicated by an energy ratio of 1.34; that is, for every
Btu dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34-
percent energy gain.

The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update (pdf)

[lpbk2713]

32. I'll have to see it before I believe it ...

if the projected figures came from BushCo. They are the biggest liars to ever hit DC.