Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of
dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but
a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they
produce.

Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner
than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers
another market to sell their produce.

But researchers at Cornell University and the University of
California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn
corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For
switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains
and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more
energy and for wood, 57 percent.

It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel
and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to
sunflower plants, the study found.

"Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's
energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment,"
according to the study by Cornell's David Pimentel and Berkeley's Tad
Patzek. They conclude the country would be better off investing in
solar, wind and hydrogen energy.

The researchers included such factors as the energy used in producing
the crop, costs that were not used in other studies that supported
ethanol production, said Pimentel.

The study also omitted $3 billion in state and federal government
subsidies that go toward ethanol production in the United States each
year, payments that mask the true costs, Pimentel said.

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Perhaps not at the current gasoline prices, but wait until it hits
$4/gallon and let's see how those ethanol costs start looking.

Doesn't hydrogen also reqire more energy to produce than it contains?

Investing in wind and solar power would be great- they'd provide an
additional energy source to make ethanol for cars. How much money has
been spent trying to make a practical electric car with little to show
for it?

My energy policy: Build enough fast breeder nuclear power plants at a
single remote location to meet all our needs and wants. Equip it with
army reserves and anti-aircraft missles. Use some of the power to
produce hydrogen for transfer to other areas of the country, and ethanol
for cars. Switch most home uses to electricity. Tell the Saudis and
other countries that hate our guts to go fuck themselves...

As far as producing ethanol from electricty, I know US farmland is
underutilized; I simply don't know if we have enough capacity to grow
enough crops to produce enough ethanol for all our vehicles. Perhaps if we
stopped growing crops that are traded with oil producing countries?
Otherwise, limited use of electric cars (for fleets and the second vehicle
in the family), or if fuel cells become practical.

--

I think there is a more efficient ethanol bearing crop to be grown, or
starch-producing hybrids to be developed.

As you have said, it takes more energy to make Ethanol than it releases
as a fuel. This implies that EtOH production for use as a primary fuel
doesn't make sense except as a way of turning one kind of energy into
another (such as turning the energy from grain plus energy from a
fission or fusion plant into liquid fuel).

I guess with Ethanol.. we're talking about the
fossil fuel used to grow, harvest and process
but is the assumption that fuel-burning
vehicles and processing must use fossil
fuel vice ethanol itself ... or does it mean
that it would take more ethanol to fuel
the production than the production would
generate - more likely - right?

and same deal with hydrogen as far as I
can tell. The primary 'feedstock' for hydrogen
seems to be natural-gas and then of course
the energy required to extract the hydrogen.

If you want to know how viable (or not) a
particular new "method" is... don't pay
attention to Popular Science, et al - pay
attention to Wall Street - where people
tend to find the bottom line  - money -
much quicker.  :-)