To start with:
The studies that Farrell's group reviewed included two produced by longtime ethanol critics David Pimentel, a professor at Cornell University, and Tad W. Patzek, who is also a UC Berkeley professor. Pimentel and Patzek concluded that making ethanol used up more energy than it produced.
Patzek is the head of the UC petroleum consortium, which is a petroleum industry funded group. Start getting suspicious there. These two just released a study about biodiesel that said the same thing, it wasn't energy efficient. The trouble is, they use energy inputs that are beyond reason to come up with the numbers. They count the workmen's lunch as energy input required for the manufacturing. They assume that farmers will buy new tractors every year or two, then count the energy needed to make the tractor. Funny, they don't count the energy needed to invade Iraq in the petroleum column.
Here's a critique of their methods and conclusions:
“As a researcher with more than 10 years of experience in this area, I find the Pimentel/Patzak paper unconvincing,” said Jim Duffield, USDA senior agricultural economist and one of the original authors of the DOE/USDA study. “It lacks depth and clarity compared to previous studies published on this topic that clearly show biodiesel has a positive energy balance.”
<snip>
Leading academics also discredited the work of Pimentel and Patzek. “There is an internationally accepted standard method of doing such life cycle studies. Drs. Pimentel and Patzek don’t come close to meeting the standards,” said Bruce Dale, professor of chemical engineering at Michigan State University. “Their studies don’t meet the International Standards Organization test of transparency—they don’t clearly state where their data comes from nor do they clearly state their assumptions. They cite themselves rather than independent sources for important data all the time. And they don’t submit their work for verification in recognized, peer-reviewed life cycle journals.”
<snip>
Pimentel has used similar faulty data for ethanol for years, also assigning it a negative energy balance when the majority of current research shows it is now positive.
“Pimentel also erroneously reports that our USDA/DOE study concluded that the net energy balance of biodiesel was negative,” Duffield said. “The authors misrepresented our study, which actually concluded that biodiesel made from soybean oil resulted in an energy savings of over 3 to 1. It is the prevailing study cited for biodiesel’s positive energy balance, so it is difficult to understand how it could be misrepresented.”
This from a soybean industry website, but the numbers are from the feds:
http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/pressreleases/gen/20050721_pimentel_response.pdfHaving said that, I agree that corn is not the best crop to use for ethanol. It only returns 1.3 times as much energy as it uses. If ADM had less of an influence and we used common sense, we would grow hemp or switch grass for ethanol.
You know the oil companies are running scared when they bring this shit out.
Bill
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