Zell, Chris wrote:
All that matters is the price per BTU, without subsidy for either gasoline or ethanol.
Ah. Well, if we apply that standard the ethanol industry will disappear overnight. It is heavily subsidized directly and indirectly. That is say, farmers are subsidized for growing corn, and then the ethanol industry is subsidized for making the fuel. Back when gasoline cost $0.60 per gallon, ethanol was subsidized directly at $0.87 per gallon. Adjusting for the difference in energy content, and adding in the cost of the horrendous and totally uncontrolled pollution caused by ethanol production, and the cost worked out to be roughly $2.55/gallon. God only knows what it would be now.
Basically, ethanol can be viewed as a scheme to rob the taxpayers and wire transfer the money to Saudi Arabia.
That is the valid determinant, not the pessimism of prejudiced academics.
The academics in this case are the only objective people whose analysis make any sense. If ethanol production made economic sense the government would not have to be subsidizing it for billions of years for decades. (Of course they subsidize all forms of fuel, and they give the most to coal and oil, so without some subsidy it would not survive, but not 75% of the cost!)
As to efficiency, studies done of Amish farming showed good profitability during the '70s, when farm failures were commonly reported - despite little use of pesticides or energy intensive methods.
That would be economic efficiency. That is a different story. I said that US farmers have the best efficiency measured in man-hours versus output, because they use mechanization and so on. That does not mean they make a profit. On the contrary, if they were not heavily subsidized by the Feds most of them would go out of business.
Nor does the growth of cellulose necessarily need lots of fertilizer or pesticides compared to other products. - and tractors can run on ethanol, too.
Sure, but no one in the ethanol business runs any of their machines on the stuff. They are not fools. They sell it to the government for four times what is worth, instead. As Pimentel pointed out, if ethanol production made any sense, obviously ethanol factories and tractors would run on the stuff. The fact that they do not tells you all you need to know.
Perhaps in the future a breakthrough in something like bioengineering will allow much more efficient production of ethanol. If that is what we are aiming for, we should stop subsidizing present-day production of ethanol with existing methods, and redirect the money to basic research instead. Paying billions to farmers and the owners of obsolete factories today contributes nothing to progress. Those farmers and factory workers are not going to make any breakthroughs in bioengineering. If they could have increased the efficiency with conventional methods they would have done so years ago.
- Jed
