Swimming against the Grain

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/27/MNG1VDF6EM1.DTL

http://www.agriculture.com/ag/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/ag/story/data/agNews_050719crETHANOL.xml&catref=ag1001#continue

Though his work has been vetted by several peer-reviewed scientific journals, Patzek has had to deflect criticism from a variety of sources. David Morris, an economist and vice president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has attacked the Berkeley professor's analysis because he says it is based on farming and production practices that are rapidly becoming obsolete. "His figures (regarding energy consumed in fertilizer production) are accurate for older nitrogen fertilizer plants, but newer plants use only half the energy of those that were built 35 years ago," he said. He also cited the increasing popularity of no-till farming methods, which can reduce a corn farm's diesel usage by 75 percent....
Hosein Shapouri, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has also cracked down on Patzek's energy calculations. "It's true that the original ethanol plants in the 1970s went bankrupt. But Patzek doesn't consider the impact new, more efficient production technologies have had on the ethanol industry," he said. Shapouri's most recent analysis, which the USDA published in 2004, comes to the exact opposite conclusion of Patzek's: Ethanol, he said, has a positive energy balance, containing 67 percent more energy than is used to manufacture it.

Inevitably, the government doesn't like to include all energy inputs when calculating net energy. They also tend to do unreasonable projections based on mass production. If there is a market for Ethanol, it will create itself. The fact that the government has to spend millions to support it indicates a problem. We must also remind ourselves that whatever savings Ethanol presents to us now, it is based on the presence and use of oil which has a larger return on energy input. At the price oil is now, it still is the better fuel...by far.