John sent a link to this interview of Tad Patzek - of Pimentel and Patzek fame - one of the prominent critics of biofuels. He and Pimentel have claimed that it takes more fossil fuel energy to make ethanol than it yields when used as fuel. The hurrier you go the behinder you get with biofuels. There has been a flurry of papers claiming that ethanol does have a net gain in energy, though slight. The dispute boils down to how the calculations are done.

Well, we are stuck on this little argument and it basically boils down to throwing numbers across fences that is how I call it. The listeners have to realize that in fact there is a little simplistic model of reality, which is called this net energy balance, which is not a balance at all, by the way. It is a manipulation of certain inputs and outputs to the corn ethanol cycle from which there comes a number called the net energy ratio. If you do sort of a more thorough job of balancing things and you could read this in this real biofuel cycles paper that is on the web on my website, you will find out that in fact it is not only the fossil fuels, but it is also the environment that we consume while we are producing these biofuels.

His paper The Real Biofuel Cycles is Patzek's number toss. Both he and Pimentel find that ethanol costs more than it yields when all the costs are counted and only the real benefits attributable to ethanol are counted.

A main difference between Patzek's view and that of ethanol advocates is environmental considerations. The use and degradation of land and water, the loss of biodiversity, and associated pollution increases the costs of ethanol and decreases net yield.

Let us start from the agriculture because that is the first link here. The agriculture in Midwest is basically a desert paved with monocultures of greedy plants, which we bred to be standing in great crowds, very close to each other, and which need to survive. They need lots of fertilizer and lots of human intervention. Then these plants produce a lot of an industrial commodity, which is the #2 yellow corns while using the soil and polluting one-half of the area of the United States and the coastal waters and the rivers and what have you, okay? So, the whole notion of that agriculture is in fact completely unsustainable. That is a completely unsustainable transient state of agriculture supported by fossil fuels. . .

The soil nitrogen, for example, cannot sustain these plants so you have to put a lot of fertilizers, let us say 200 kg of nitrogen per hectare of a cornfield. This nitrogen is actually methane pure and simple with added energy. You do that and you obtain your corn grain. Then that corn grain has inside starch. Starch is nowhere close to the desired product, which is ethanol, which chemically means you need to put a lot of energy to get from one to the other. If you look again what you can do to that starch, you can liquefy it with enzymes, then you can ferment it with yeast, and then you distill the beer that you obtain to obtain 96% spirit containing 96% of ethanol and then you exclude the last 4% with molecular sieves and then you add gasoline to it as a denaturant and that is your final product. . .

The problem with this is that if you as you go through this process you in fact use on average seven times more energy per unit input energy, which is your corn grain, than you would in a normal petroleum refinery and the reason actually is very simple, corn is not ethanol. Crude oil is very close to gasoline and diesel fuel. It takes in fact much less energy to transform crude oil into gasoline and diesel than corn into ethanol.

It's a highly politicized subject so we can expect no resolution to this dispute. Even if Patzek is right and ethanol is a net loss the numbers will be fudged and the practices defended. Even if, as he claims, we end up using more fossil fuels than before the illusion of action has such political benefits that those increased costs will be concealed with accounting hacks. In essence that's Patzek's complaint now. The numbers are being massaged.

But he does some massaging too. One of his major issues is fertilizer. The claim that "nitrogen is actually methane. . . with added energy" is technically false as well as misleading. Nitrates can be made, and were made in the past, with no fossil fuels at all. Nitrates are made from nitrogen and oxygen and the manufacturing process requires hydrogen. It is the hydrogen from methane, CH4, that is of value. It's just a cheap source of hydrogen in today's market. In the past nitrates were made using hydro-electric power, water and air. They could be made that way again if the cost of fossil fuels rise enough to make them competitive. Any energy source will do. Geothermal, wind, solar and nuclear sources have all been considered for fertilizer production power. With energy, water and air we can make all the nitrates we want.

His work makes sense as a critique of current practices. If those practices change, as seems likely to me as the cost and availability of fossil fuels rise, then some of his complaints will go away. What remains as the hard core of his concern is the environmental costs - the use of land and water, and the consequences of vast monocultures.

But, we have that now. A major increase in biofuels will make a bad problem worse, but we already have the bad problem. Even if the advocates said never mind, that was a dumb idea and we won't do it anymore, we still have the environmental and land use problems. Even if agriculture used no fossil fuels at all, even for transportation and tillage etc., we'd still have these problems. Agriculture is one of the problems we need to solve, not a solution to our energy needs.

When you dig into Patzek's other works a bit and get some notion of his focus you find someone pretty disgruntled with the present world. He can't see a way to do right because there are too many of us. To live well takes lots of energy so he concludes that population decline is the only option. I think he has a failure of imagination. The only ready solution to the problem is nuclear power but other solutions seem likely to develop in the near future - solar is getting much better for example - and others will develop as well once they are no longer priced out by fossil fuels. Energy is precious and so will be more expensive, but you can do some very interesting things with energy, information and not much else.