A glimmer of hope, perhaps?

Their water usage (5 gallons per gallon ethanol) is higher than ours (3) because midwest US water is generally not as pure as Columbia river water. The largest use of water in an ethanol plant is used for cooling. It is evaporated. This is what creates the clouds coming out of a plant.

The water that does not evaporate becomes saltier. If it gets too salty, then it clogs your pipes. This limits how many times you can run it through an evaporation cycle, and so places that have nasty water use more of it.

In addition, some plants recycle their waste water, others do not. Recycling is accomplished by making it into a syrupy concentrate plus distilled water using an “evaporator”. Not doing this will increase a plant’s water consumption maybe 25%. Of course this works better if your plant’s water is more pure. In general, the more modern a plant, the less water it uses.

Most of the people fighting against ethanol either know nothing about it. The backbone of the fight is by people who want to eliminate all “factory farming”. For them, the concept of the world being covered by farms growing fuels is a nightmare of wall to wall industrialization.

Their preferred solution is to reduce consumption. Drive a bicycle. Live with a smaller footprint. They can’t imagine that any solution could possibly involve a huge machine built from glistening stainless steel and will fight against it. And getting back to water usage, here’s some photos of our beautiful stainless steel evaporator (water distillation / purifier) being assembled.

As a side note: This part of your article reminded me of a short story by Isaac Asimov titled /The Martian Way/. You should look it up if you haven’t read it already–and if you have a taste for Sci-Fi. He wrote it quite a while back, so the science is dated. Still, a good story.

And as you hinted, counting things up in BTUs is silly because you can’t put corn or natural gas into your car.

For our plant, Pimental’s calculations do not apply in many ways. First, our plant is being built from used industrial equipment. Therefore it’s cost, both in dollars and to the environment, is much lower than a plant built from all new steel. Second, we are permitted to run on barley as well as corn. Barley is a dry land crop that can be grown on idle farm land all over Washington State without irrigation. So the costs of fertilizer and water do not necessarily enter into the cost of the feedstock of our plant.

Perhaps the best argument against the idea that the only way that ethanol pays its way is through US agricultural subsidies is to note that corn is turned into ethanol in many of the other countries that produce significant amounts of corn: Canada, China, South Africa, and France. Are US corn subsidies being copied all over the world? And in Europe, various other grains are turned into ethanol for fuel, barley, wheat, and rye as well as sugar beets (which we are considering, but to use it, we’d have to get a modification of our air and water ecology permits).

No. It’s very simple, really. As corn prices stay relatively low (i.e. under $6 per bushel), and oil prices are relatively high (i.e. over $100 per barrel) turning corn into fuel is quite profitable.

the padzyk (sic) (stanford)/pimental ‘thermodynamic’ fuel cycle articles are not convincing (since they are mostly cluttered with irrelevant discussions (which look technical) but they raise these points; science magazine had a better review which concluded the efficiency was about 1.3 gallons ethanol for 1 gallon oil (or maybe other fuels).

one can also get into global warming.

Different methods of storing energy have different economic values so counting BTUs is an amusement for academics but not of any real use.

Ethanol is a very valuable fuel because it can be used in a standard gasoline internal combustion machine. The same cannot be said of natural gas nor electricity, which are the two major energy inputs of an ethanol plant, nor can it even be said of diesel used on farms, or the electricity used to pump water for irrigation.

To see if there is economic value in converting corn to ethanol is easy. Just compare their prices.

I have seen the conclusion of Pimental’s paper printed so many times that it proves Barnum’s Law.

Any idea on the true BTU cost of a gallon of ethanol? I have seen around 50,000 BTU’s used or 25% net gain as well in many publications.

Thanks