Reply #27: Please people, look at who is doing the study.

[Chemical Bill]

Patzek is head of an oil industry sponsored group in California. I've actually seen the study, not just an article about it. They count the workman's lunch as energy input. The figure that the farmers need to buy new tractors all the time, then count the energy needed to make the tractors. They load up the energy input with unbelieveable numbers to get these results (IIRC, they count sunshine as energy needed). The government (dept of Agriculture, or Energy, I forget which) has found that corn ethanol returns 1.34 times the energy that is needed to produce it, and soy biodiesel returns 3.4 times the input. And the input energy doesn't have to be petroleum, it often is electricity. Tractors can be run on biodiesel, you know. I'll see if I can find the government numbers, but I'm pretty sure they are at biodiesel.org if I can't make it back.

Bill

Edit: here's one response:
http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/pressreleases/gen/20050721_pimentel_response.pdf

National Biodiesel Board, DOE, USDA Officials Dispute Biofuels Study Pimentel/Patzak study deeply flawed, researchers say

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The National Biodiesel Board (NBB) today condemned a recent study that claims biodiesel takes more energy to produce than it yields, citing instead more thoroughly conducted, peer-reviewed studies that show biodiesel actually yields more than three times the amount of energy it takes to produce.

The study that says biodiesel has a negative energy balance was conducted by David Pimentel, an insect specialist at Cornell, and Tad Patzek, a former oil company employee who is now director of the University of California Oil Consortium.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1998 performed the prevailing life cycle study of the energy balance of biodiesel. This is the most comprehensive, credible and thoroughly peer-reviewed study available on biodiesel produced from soybeans. It found that for every one unit of fossil energy used in this entire biodiesel production cycle, 3.2 unit of energy are gained when the fuel is burned, or a positive energy balance of 320 percent.

“As a researcher with more than 10 years of experience in this area, I find the Pimentel/Patzak paper unconvincing,” said Jim Duffield, USDA senior agricultural economist and one of the original authors of the DOE/USDA study. “It lacks depth and clarity compared to previous studies published on this topic that clearly show biodiesel has a positive energy balance.” Duffield said the report offers no explanation for unorthodox assumptions. “Including calories as energy inputs is highly unusual. Even though the calories consumed by farmers can be converted to energy equivalents, most researchers do not treat the calories as fossil energy.”