How nuts is this?

The energy policy of the USA (if there is such a thing) is just plain wrong

This post has nothing to do with politics so you who are apolitical can read further without fear of being bored. But read on please. These are the real facts as I, your favorite Chemical Engineer, knows them to be true. I used some data provided on the internet by the professor to make my own calculations. If his information is correct, mine is too.

David Pimental, an agricultural expert from Cornell University, who chaired a U.S. Department of Energy panel that investigated the energetics, economics and environmental aspects of ethanol production several years ago, has done a detailed study of the true cost of ethanol when used as a substitute for fossil fuels.

Here are some of the more troubling conclusions:

An acre yields about 7,110 pounds of corn that can be processed into 328 gallons of ethanol. Planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre. So even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.

The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented. As many as three distillation steps are needed to separate the ethanol from the water. Additional treatment and energy are required to produce the 99.8 percent pure ethanol for mixing with gasoline.

Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU. Gasoline has an energy value of 113,938 Btu per gallon. That’s why producers can’t use ethanol to make more ethanol. The growers and processors can’t afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. (Purification to 99.8% ethanol requires evaporation which requires heat = Btu's). U.S. drivers couldn’t afford it either if it weren’t for government subsidies that artificially lower the price.

The approximately $1 billion a year in current federal and state subsidies (mainly to large corporations) for ethanol production are not the only costs to consumers. Subsidized corn results in higher prices for meat, milk and eggs because about 70 percent of corn grain is fed to livestock and poultry in the United States.

And the news reports yesterday tell us to brace for significantly higher food prices because so much corn is being diverted from food to energy. How about paying $5.00 a gallon for milk?

Here’s a quote from professor Pimentel: "Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning"

Just in case you were wondering, I suppose I ought to include information about relative carbon dioxide emissions. When 1 gallon of gasoline is burned, 20 lbs of carbon dioxide is produced. When I gallon of ethanol is burned, 12.6 lbs of carbon dioxide is produced. But the important thing is the energy – the Btu’s. A gallon of gasoline produces 1.48 times the Btu’s that a gallon of ethanol does. So you have to burn 1.48 times as much ethanol as gasoline to get the same energy. That means that ethanol produces 18.63 lbs of carbon dioxide to gasoline’s 20 lbs of carbon dioxide on the same energy basis. That’s a difference of 7.36% and that’s not a lot when you consider the downside factors mentioned above.

Furthermore, when you consider that the current “clean burning” gasohol (90/10 gasoline/ethanol) produces 0.5% (a half of a percent) less carbon dioxide than straight gasoline does, you’ve got to ask “How many maniac environmentalists can you get on the head of a pin?” And when you consider that the federal government pays about $1.7 billion a year in farm subsidies, very little of it to small farmers and most of it to corporate farmers to keep fields unplowed, you’ve got to ask “How nuts is this?”