Pimentel's Red Herring

Finally, a nagging question (it's been nagging at me anyway) has been answered. This article in the Chemical & Engineering News sets out to answer the question, Is ethanol worth it? 'It' in this case being the environmental and economic costs of producing the stuff.

To even begin to discuss ethanol, however, one has always been obliged to tackle the question of whether or not corn-based ethanol (the dominant form at the moment) represented a net energy gain. The most outspoken and persistent critic of corn ethanol has been Cornell scientist David Pimentel, and he has long maintained the answer is no.

By Pimentel's calculations -- factoring in all the inputs you can think of, from the energy involved in building farm machinery to the energy expenditures on transporting and processing grain -- it takes 29 percent more energy to produce a unit of energy from ethanol than is gained from burning it. The figures are even worse, he says, for cellulosic ethanol, which most eco-visionaries favor. Biomass, he says, involves a 50 percent net energy loss.

Hmm. This always had me scratching my head and wondering how, say, gasoline refined from petroleum would compare if subject to the same analysis. Ditto any other fossil fuel. Thankfully, the article provides some answers, reporting that:

Bruce E. Dale, a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University, backs the USDA numbers and has applied Pimentel's methodology to making gasoline. He found gasoline production has a 45% net energy loss, worse even than Pimentel's charges for ethanol. He also looked at generating electricity from coal and found a net energy loss of a whopping 240%.

Wow! Let's pause for a moment, shall we, and let that sink in ::::::::: Has it sunk in? Okay, moving on: Even Pimentel has to concede the basic point, telling C&EN that,

he recently applied his model to gasoline production and found it takes about 1.2 gal of oil to produce a gallon of gasoline. He also acknowledges that electricity requires about three times more energy to make than it provides. Consequently, he admits that the net energy losses for corn ethanol and gasoline are "close" ...

But apparently unwilling to admit defeat, he goes on to argue that corn is still a bad feedstock for ethanol as it erodes the soil, uses scarce water for irrigation and requires massive nitrogen inputs.

"Corn is the prime cause of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is the size of New Jersey," he says, referring to an area off the coast of Louisiana that is depleted of oxygen due to high levels of nutrient-rich agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River. "These are serious problems," he says.

They are indeed, so how 'bout we focus on those problems instead of this red herring regarding net energy loss?