The Angry White Guy

The Great Ethanol Scam

Posted May 18th 2009 at 5:34 pm by AWG

I posted this some months ago on a forum but a story out today concludes pretty much everything I concluded all those months ago.

The Great Ethanol Scam

I was out looking not seriously at E85 (85%ethanol 15% gas) 1 ton work trucks, E85 is about 60 cents a gallon cheaper than gas around here, but the truck is only $45,000.00 so after driving about 800,000 miles I’ll see a saving provided I live that long or the truck last that long. So I’m not buying a new truck. the math just doesn’t work for me.

Anywho, the Gov’munt wants us to start producing ethanol so we can get off the crack oil. Well let us take a look at the benefits of these miracle fuels. I thought I’d educate myself to the savings and benefits of ethanol over gasoline. As I do make a effort to be sensibly green, I’m just not going to cut my nose off to spite my face and go crazy wacko overboard. So you know I’m all for reducing fossil fuel use and finding cleaner, renewable energy that WORKS, REALLY WORKS and is cost effective, but you have these folks in Washington on both side aisle touting the benefits of ethanol, most of these folks are in corn growing states. I wonder why? Have they ever researched the facts? I think not.

Ethanol doesn’t work mathematically in money and numbers.

Ethanol is made primarily from corn, corn is used to feed cow, chickens, hogs, people and used in 1000′s of food and other products. The less corn used to make foods and feed animals the higher to cost at the grocer and many other corn based products will be. That’s a no brainer, so from corn flakes to golf tees that are made from corn will go up in cost. The government would like 25% of all cars on the road to run on ethanol according to a resent report, ok that’s great BUT that would require dedicating 270,000,000 acres or 13% of the US’s land mass to corn production just to make ethanol alone. Where are we going to grow food to eat? The remaining 87% is not all tillable remember part of that is mountains and icy tundra of Alaska. Basically most of the continental United States from be a corn field.

But that’s not the worst of it, oh no so lets get technical…

Ethanol can produce 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but requires 98,000 BTUs per gallon to produce that’s a net loss of energy amounting to 22,000 BTU’s. Hardly a path to energy independence wouldn’t you say? It also requires over 1700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol and this is from the government that forced us to switch to low flow toilets that clog up to save 1.4 gallons of water.
For the record gasoline contains 116,000 BTUs per gallon and requires 22,000 BTUs to produce, a net gain.
Net gains are good, net losses are bad in my world.

Containing less BTU’s also means it is less fuel efficient and you will need more ethanol to travel the same distance on a gallon of gas. 35% more to be exact, so if I can drive a work truck that gets 10 miles to the gallon a 100 miles on 10 gallons of gas, I’d need 13.5 gallons of ethanol. These negates any savings at the per gallon cost.

What about the other stuff you can make it from? Well corn ethanol, switchgrass ethanol, and wood ethanol consume 29%, 45%, and 57% respectively more BTUs of fossil-fuel energy in their production, than they produce when they’re burned as fuel.

In short a bushel of corn sales for currently $7.62 it can produce 2.5 gallons of ethanol (USDA) now that’s $3.04 a gallon just for the raw product prior to converting it to ethanol and getting it to the station, so why does ethanol sell for less than gas? Well, tax dollars at work that’s how, the taxpayer subsidizes ethanol at the rate of 51 cents a gallon according to the USDA, however, Corn ethanol subsidies totaled $7.0 billion in 2006 for 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol. That’s $1.45 per gallon of ethanol … not a bargain and a tad more than 52 cents the government claims.