Producing ethanol from corn and other crops is not worth the energy…
A Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study states that it takes much more energy to turn plants such as corn, soybeans, sunflowers, switch grass and wood biomass into fuel than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates.
From the Cornell University News Service:
“There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”
Their report is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).
In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:
* corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
* wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
Basically what this is saying is that if the producers of corn (and other crop) based ethanol were only able to use the energy of the fuel that they were producing, they would “run out of gas”. It takes more energy to produce the fuel than they get out of the fuel.
Think of this. The government is mandating the use of ethanol in our gasoline. They are using our food crops. Our food prices are rising and so are our fuel prices. Just producing the ethanol is using more of our fuel than we get back. On top of that we are paying out $billions in subsidies.
So why are we doing this? You tell me!
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