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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room
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To: Think4Yourself who wrote (67919)7/24/2006 9:10:07 AM
From: ChanceIs  Read Replies (2) of 206092
 
The ethanol vice crude battle.

What I find....well...specious about the ethanolistas, is that they love to compare the production of ethanol with gasoline or crude on a raw input by raw input basis, as if they were "isolatable." For example, they will point out that it might take 20 gallons of diesel to drive a drilling rig for fifteen minutes (just guessing BTW) and distribute that rate over the total production of the well to arrive at an energy cost to produce a barrel of oil. Then they will acknowledge that it does take some diesel to drive a tractor to harvest corn, but as far as I know, they look at only the heat content of the refined product and DO NOT include the heat content required to drive the drill string to bring the diesel to market as diesel. I have to confess that I haven't gone through any of these studies with a fine tooth comb. I know that no ethanol gets produced without some diesel for tractors, some natural gas for fertilizer, and some coal or NG for distillation.

Comparing the energy input or water input to make ethanol vice gasoline justs smells like a red herring to me.

I am waiting for the day when the government puts two rows of razor wire around a 600 acre farm with a still on campus, sends in a few FBI types and a team of energy economists and engineers to carefully monitor the energy balance of the whole full scale operation. For the $8 billion or so (old numbers now) that ethanol is supposed to cost the consumer at the pump, I think that that would be a worthwhile management exercise. This isn't rocket science. There should be no opportunity for debate.
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