Yet more realism on biofuels for Carl Pope and other fluffers

Professors James Jordan and James Powell provide some of the best commentary yet on why biofuels simply cannot be a major part of getting us past the petroleum transportation economy.

Even if all of the 300 million acres (500,000 square miles) of currently harvested U.S. cropland produced ethanol, it wouldn't supply all of the gasoline and diesel fuel we now burn for transport, and it would supply only about half of the needs for the year 2025. And the effects on land and agriculture would be devastating.

And, of course, that would leave no cropland left to grow, er, crops. The two James then address the other side of the coin — biofuels just can’t deliver on the energy content side.

It’s difficult to understand how advocates of biofuels can believe they are a real solution to kicking our oil addiction. Agriculture Department studies of ethanol production from corn — the present U.S. process for ethanol fuel — find that an acre of corn yields about 139 bushels. At an average of about 2.5 gallons per bushel, the acre then will yield about 350 gallons of ethanol. But the fuel value of ethanol is only about two-thirds that of gasoline — 1.5 gallons of ethanol in the tank equals 1 gallon of gasoline in terms of energy output.

Moreover, it takes a lot of input energy to produce ethanol: for fertilizer, harvesting, transport, corn processing, etc. After subtracting this input, the net positive energy available is less than half of the figure cited above. Some researchers even claim that the net energy of ethanol is actually negative when all inputs are included — it takes more energy to make ethanol than one gets out of it.

And, it’s not just corn that’s limited, the authors make clear.

Similar limitations and problems apply to growing any crop for biofuels, whether switchgrass, hybrid willow, hybrid poplar or whatever. Optimistically, assuming that switchgrass or some other crop could produce 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre, over twice as much as we can get from corn plus stover, and that its net energy was 60,000 Btu per gallon, ethanol from 300 million acres of switchgrass still could not supply our present gasoline and diesel consumption, which is projected to double by 2025. The ethanol would meet less than half of our needs by that date.

Anyway, I’ve quoted more than enough of their column to show you that Carl Pope is just plain wrong about the so-called “enormous promise” of biofuels.

Carl, there is no royal road to cutting our petroleum usage.