But in The West Wing, Toby Ziegler stated that it takes more than a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol.

(Before anyone gets all jumpy, I'm not saying the West Wing is an accurate source of facts. In fact I'm saying the opposite. Hence the research.)

So, after a bit of research:

From http://egj.lib.uidaho.edu/egj09/youngqu1.html

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Crops such as corn are converted to alcohol. In the case of corn to ethanol, it is energy negative. It takes 71% more energy to produce ethanol than is obtained from the ethanol. Also, using grain such as corn for fuel precludes it from being used as food for humans or livestock. It is also hard on the land. In United States corn production, soil erodes some 20-times faster than soil is formed. Ethanol has less energy per volume than does gasoline, so more gasoline has to be purchased to make up the difference. Also, ethanol is not environmentally friendly, as advocates would like to believe. Pimentel (1998) states: "Ethanol produces less carbon monoxide than gasoline, but it produces just as much nitrous oxides as gasoline. In addition, ethanol adds aldehydes and alcohol to the atmosphere, all of which are carcinogenic. When all air pollutants associated with the entire ethanol system are measured, ethanol production is found to contribute to major air pollution problems." With a lower energy density than gasoline, and adding the petroleum energy used to plow, plant, cultivate, and transport the corn for ethanol production, ethanol does not save gasoline nor does it's use reduce atmospheric pollution.

A comprehensive study of converting biomass to liquid fuels by Giampietro and others (1997) concludes: "Large-scale biofuel production is not an alternative to the current use of oil, and is not even an advisable option to cover a significant fraction of it."

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But then of course you have this, from www.ethanol.org (or, "Americans for Ethanol")...

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Fossil fuel-based gasoline is the largest source of man-made carcinogens and the number one source of toxic emissions. Ethanol is a renewable, environmentally friendly fuel that is inherently cleaner than gasoline. Ethanol reduces harmful tailpipe emissions of carbon monoxide, particulate matter, oxides of nitrogen, and other ozone-forming pollutants.

Ethanol is used in reformulated gasoline (RFG) as set out in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. This standard requires an oxygenate, like ethanol, to be added to gasoline to help it burn more completely. Reformulated gasoline is required in areas that violate carbon monoxide and/or ozone quality standards.

The use of ethanol-blended fuel helps reduce the environmental and economic impacts of gasoline consumption on our society.

Ethanol Clean Air Facts:

Ten percent ethanol blends reduce carbon monoxide better than any other reformulated gasoline blend – by as much as 25%.
Ethanol-blended fuel shows a 35-46% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and a 50-60% reduction in fossil energy use.
Ethanol contains 35% oxygen by weight, making it burn more cleanly and completely than gasoline.
E85 has the highest oxygen content of any fuel available, making it burn even more cleanly and even more completely than any other fuel.
E85 contains 80% fewer gum-forming compounds than gasoline.
Ethanol is highly biodegradable, making it safer for the environment.
The Argonne National Laboratory found that:

In 2003, ethanol use in the United States reduced CO 2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 5.7 million tons, equal to removing the annual emissions of more than 853,000 cars from the road.

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Not that these sources are exhaustive, of course.

Most ethanol is made from corn, and corn is a very heavy feeder, requiring plenty of nitrogen fertilizer, and lots of water.

Nitrogen fertilizer is itself a heavy feeder in that there is a large amount of natural gas used in its manufacture.

The cost of irrigation also has to be factored in, and who knows how much that is?

Ethanol has to come from the fermentation of corn, potatoes, whatever. That gets you to between 10 and 15%, maybe 20% if you're lucky, before the yeast start dying on you.

To further concentrate the ethanol takes distillation, and that's energy-intensive. To make things worse, ethanol has a 95% azeotrope with water, which means you cannot separate ethanol from water to better than 95% without destroying the azeotrope.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
Chemical engineering weighs in.

Ethanol has to come from the fermentation of corn, potatoes, whatever. That gets you to between 10 and 15%, maybe 20% if you're lucky, before the yeast start dying on you.

To further concentrate the ethanol takes distillation, and that's energy-intensive. To make things worse, ethanol has a 95% azeotrope with water, which means you cannot separate ethanol from water to better than 95% without destroying the azeotrope..

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You can't depend on that with solar, although an electrically heated reboiler is childishly easy to nail at a particular set point. It's just that hydrocarbon fuel for a reboiler is more dependable, and by controlling the flow of the fuel you can set the temperature the way you want it.

The problem with that 5% water is that it may contribute to rusting of car parts and that sort of thing, although I admit I don't know what studies have been done on this.

Additionally from a pure energy-efficiency standpoint of ethanol use in a car, it's a waste to have 5% of your fuel be an uncombustible liquid that just gets boiled off and chucked out the exhaust, getting a free ride from the heat generated by the other 95%.

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^* Although an ingenious heat-recycling system from the view of thermodynamics is to use the water warmed up by a heat exchanger in the condenser and recirculate it through the reboiler. The challenge here would be to avoid transferring heat the wrong way. Perhaps a two-stage process; a "pre-reboil" stage where heat from the condenser is dumped into the liquid coming off the bottom plate, then dump the slightly heated liquid into the actual reboiler.

A very careful energy balance would have to be done to see if this would be worthwhile or if it would just be better off to distribute the hot water out of the heat exchanger in the condenser to the hot water tanks in the tower for human use.

Behold the distillation tower. It's from an old chemical engineering class I did; as you can see, I spruced it up a little.

[ 16 March 2005: Message edited by: DrConway ]

There was a time when farmers would make their own fuel. Government weighed in to put a stop to that, at the behest of the Seagrams and Standard oils. All in the name of the free market, of course.

Cars will all run on 95percent ethanol with minor changes in carburation or jetting. A big problem up here is alcohol's poor cold-weather starting.

Alcohol may increase rust, or more likely, destroy rubber and plastic parts, but with our salty winters, it really wouldn't be much worse.

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Originally posted by Jingles:
With the atrocious heat efficiency of an internal combustion engine, a lot of unburned gasoline goes up the tailpipe too. (Granted, today's computer controlled engines have reduced that considerably)

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It won't matter; you can never get better than the efficiency quoted by the temperature difference between the core of the engine and the ambient air, so that's somewhere on the order of 70% (take 800 degrees C for the engine, 25 degrees C for the air, change to Kelvin, and then apply the Carnot efficiency formula).

Have fun!

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There was a time when farmers would make their own fuel. Government weighed in to put a stop to that, at the behest of the Seagrams and Standard oils. All in the name of the free market, of course.

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Originally posted by Cougyr:
Has anybody asked farmers the important questions? I don't mean looking at charts and stuff. I mean talk to farmers.

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Well, I'll take this as an indirect swipe at me, but I'll respond anyway: I think it's idiotic to use corn that can be grown for human consumption to make ethanol.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
Well, I'll take this as an indirect swipe at me, . . . .

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No, it wasn't. I was thinking of those ivory tower people in their white lab coats pontificating about all kinds of stuff they know nothing about.

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Originally posted by Cougyr:
Whenever the scientific schemers come up with a method of solving our energy needs by brewing some farm crop, they always seem to forget to ask the farmers some basic questions. A few years ago, the idea was to ferment surplus hay. Turns out there was no surplus hay. Farmers use it all. So, here we are with corn. Has anybody asked farmers the important questions? I don't mean looking at charts and stuff. I mean talk to farmers.

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I think farmers would be happy to plant corn or soy or whatever if the price of those commodities rise with the introduction of new uses, like for ethanol, bio-diesel, etc., since currently, farmers are saddled with a tremendously low price for commodities.

The slop from the fermentation process is also an excellent animal feed, which not only saves energy in feed production, but might help solve the problem of people sneaking animal proteins into cow feed.

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post by LaGitana:
As far as I am aware, ...(y)ou do not grow corn specifically for ethanol purposes, it is a by-product of what you have leftover from a different use.

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Not so. The commercial ethanol plants use regular grain corn, just as the beverege alcohol distillers do. See this article on the impact on the Ontario corn market

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]Meeting the demand for the Commercial plant will be a job for Casco, Ontario's leading wet miller, producing starch and sweeteners.

Casco will be purchasing virtually all the corn going into the 15-million-bushel-a-year plant, thanks to the sourcing agreement it signed with Commercial Alcohols.

The agreement creates a fundamental change in the Ontario corn market.

For the first time in history, Ontario's corn market is going to be dominated by a single player, holding the power to inflate or strangle corn prices.

Casco's London office will buy corn for the ethanol plant, plus 16 million bushels for the London wet milling facility and about nine million bushels for Port Colborne. The company's Cardinal desk will buy 17 million bushels for the company's plant there, and another eight million bushels of freighter corn for Port Colborne.

"We're going to be watching," says Brian Doidge, economist for the Ontario Corn Producers Association. "That isn't a threat. It's recognition that they have huge market clout."

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Right now you have to use the grain, which is not only questionable food supply-wise, but by the time you've planted, harvested, and distilled you've burned more energy than you've produced. Being able to use waste from the food prodution process instead of the grain negates all that.

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And ethanol has been produced for centuries, long before oil-dependent crop inputs (it's just good old booze after all), so there's no reason why it shouldn't be feasible to switch over to it eventually.

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That may be so, but why did people switch over to gasoline in the first place?

I suspect because it is a lot cheaper to make.

By the way, when the oil is gone, there won't be enough of an industrial society left to make all the equipment needed to make ethanol.

Part of the problem with many 'alternative' fuels, is precisely that - they require a pre-existng industrial base.

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That may be so, but why did people switch over to gasoline in the first place?

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Because city people couldn't make alcohol. And because the government made the production of alcohol illegal.

Farmers target ethanol plant

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One week after the “One Voice March” to Toronto, hundreds of angry Kent, Essex and Lambton farmers gathered in Chatham to protest against the use of U.S. subsidized corn at Commercial Alcohols Incorporated’s Ontario tax dollar subsidized ethanol plant.

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Once again farmers get the short end of the st ck.

[ 20 March 2005: Message edited by: Grant R. ]

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Originally posted by Grant R.:
Did I answer the question?

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Originally posted by Reverend Blair:

Hemp is allegedly a magic crop when it comes to bio-fuels. I always seem to read about it in magazines that celebrate getting stoned as the solution to everything though, so I don't know how true that is.

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Originally posted by Reverend Blair:
I can't find a link though, so I have no idea how far away this is from actually being used. It seems to me they were talking in the very near future, in the next couple of years but I'm not sure.

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You are talking about Iogen. Petro Canada and BP have invested in them.

They were talking about building a plant in Killarney, MB in 2003 but seemed to have moved on. They are looking for a large chunk of change, to build their first commercial plant. see www.iogen.ca

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Patzek's ethanol critique began during a freshman seminar he taught in which he and his students calculated the energy balance of the biofuel. Taking into account the energy required to grow the corn and convert it into ethanol, they determined that burning the biofuel as a gasoline additive actually results in a net energy loss of 65 percent. Later, Patzek says he realized the loss is much more than that even.

"Limiting yourself to the energy balance, and within that balance, just the fossil fuel used, is just scraping the surface of the problem," he says. "Corn is not 'free energy.'"

Recently, Patzek published a fifty-page study on the subject in the journal Critical Reviews in Plant Science. This time, he factored in the myriad energy inputs required by industrial agriculture, from the amount of fuel used to produce fertilizers and corn seeds to the transportation and wastewater disposal costs. All told, he believes that the cumulative energy consumed in corn farming and ethanol production is six times greater than what the end product provides your car engine in terms of power.

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How do you convince consumers that what's bad for you is good for you? You feed them a load of bull, and hope they don't catch on. So it is with the Ontario and federal governments, which are spinning their pro-ethanol campaigns as consumer-friendly solutions to our energy and environmental problems.

Ontario's new ethanol pamphlet is a masterpiece of creative propaganda. The pamphlet is to be distributed at gas stations between now and January, when gas containing 5-per-cent ethanol -- that's the law -- arrives at a pump near you. The ad features a little girl in a pink sundress. She's frolicking in a green field and carrying a butterfly net. "Feel better about filling up," the ad says. The inside pages promise that "Cleaner air is on its way" because putting corn-based ethanol in your tank will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by some 800,000 tonnes a year.
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Thanks to Consumer Reports and other publications, Americans are starting to get the message that ethanol is a dead loss for consumers, a disaster for taxpayers because of the endless billions in subsidies and, at best, of marginal benefit to the environment. Yet in Canada, you will not find a politician who will even discuss ethanol's shortcomings. Ontario is diving head-first into an ethanol market of its own creation. The feds are next, with a national 5-per-cent renewable fuels (read: ethanol) requirement slated for 2010. Suncor and the corn farmers are beaming at your expense.

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Suncor and the corn farmers are beaming at your expense.

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I quite like the idea... Keep gauging consumers at every turn! Think theres ever a point where we finally question our consumption instead of the pretty bows on what we consume?

[ 19 September 2006: Message edited by: Noise ]

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Yet countries wanting to follow Brazil's example may be leery about following its methods. Military and civilian leaders laid the groundwork by mandating ethanol use and dictating production levels. They bankrolled technology projects costing billions of dollars, despite criticism they were wasting money. Brazil ended most government support for its sugar industry in the late 1990s, forcing sugar producers to become more efficient and helping lower the cost of ethanol's raw material. That's something Western countries are loath to do, preferring to support domestic farmers.

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The WSJ may be leery about government using its muscle to force change, but they conviently overlook the massive subsidies to corn producers, sugar producers, and the billions and billions of dollars and astonishing destruction that supports the oil industry.

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Originally posted by Jingles:
Brazil's ethanol economy

The WSJ may be leery about government using its muscle to force change, but they conviently overlook the massive subsidies to corn producers, sugar producers, and the billions and billions of dollars and astonishing destruction that supports the oil industry.

This is something Alberta should be doing. Taking the windfall oil profits and actually building an industry in this wasteland of a province that'll do some good.

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About Brazil's ethanol economy: Is there any sort of comprehensive study or report looking into exactly how this economy functions. I mean, if these guys aren't using any actual petroleum to fuel ethanol production and the rest of thier economy, it would be obvious proof that an ethanol based economy can work in some countries, despite what various reports say.

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Originally posted by West Coast Greeny:
Some conflicting evidence here.

About Brazil's ethanol economy: Is there any sort of comprehensive study or report looking into exactly how this economy functions. I mean, if these guys aren't using any actual petroleum to fuel ethanol production and the rest of thier economy, it would be obvious proof that an ethanol based economy can work in some countries, despite what various reports say.

In any case, its quite clear that if our economy is going to survive over the next 50 years, a massive shift in what fuels the economy will have to be performed. Hopefully, it wont take a dictatorship to do it.

Oh how I wish I knew about organic chem (wouldn't touch the class with a 90 foot pole though)

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What is the usual corruptor is the corporate capitalist economics at work. While it's true that ethanol produces far lower CO emissions, as well as generally lower toxic emissions overall, it still produces a series of dangerous emissions, some of which are suspected of being carcinogenic, that if emitted in large quantities in a specific area, like an urban setting, can produce similar, albeit perhaps somewhat reduced, results.

As to the studies showing it takes more gasoline to produce ethanol than the energy ethanol produces, that's obviously true given current industry and market conditions.

But if the oil industry was to retool to mass produce ethanol, that ratio might be reduced, depending on economies of scale. Again, I'm not sure if this would be the case, and I haven't seen any studies on this scenario.

The problem is, of course, that Suncor and other corporate eco-frauds are promoting ethanol as some sort of super-clean salvation, when it is not. It's merely an option, not a long-term solution.