According to the Congressional Research Service the Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides subsidies for ethanol, making corn farmers very happily:
Sets forth renewable energy initiatives that address: (1) renewable energy resources and production; (2) renewable content of motor vehicle fuel; (3) federal agency purchasing requirements for ethanol-blended gasoline and biodiesel fuel; (4) a sugar cane ethanol program; (5) an advanced biofuels technology program; (6) a biomass commercial utilization program; (7) geothermal energy enterprises; and (8) hydroelectric power projects.
So what's up with ethanol? Good idea? Bad idea? Somewhere in-between?
From SignOnSanDiego.com comes a very readable article by "Richard A. Lovett , a freelance writer in Portland, Ore., has a Ph.D. in natural resource economics" that has an answer: Turning Corn into Ethanol May not be Worth It:
According to scientists in New York and California, it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get back in fuel savings. More precisely, says David Pimentel of Cornell University, it takes the equivalent of 1.29 gallons of gasoline to produce enough ethanol to replace one gallon of gasoline at the pump. Instead of making the nation more energy self-sufficient, ethanol production actually increases our need for oil and gas imports, Pimentel says.
He goes on to provide a detailed description of the ethanol production process (e.g., this caught my attention: "Ethanol is produced by grinding corn, mixing it with water, and fermenting it in a process similar to that used to make beer or wine."), its too high costs according to Pimentel, and the opposite view from USDA researchers (and a peek at what sounds like a fun little spat).
And then any good free lance economist-writer will throw in the "no free lunch" creed of the dismal science:
In his 1966 novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein coined the slogan TANSTAAFL – short for There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. If there is any single thing that the ethanol dispute reveals, it's that in the search for alternative fuels, Heinlein's motto is depressingly correct.
Even [the USDA's} Shapouri's figures show only a 67 percent return on the energy investment needed for ethanol production. But many other forms of energy suffer from the same problem, including drilling for oil and mining coal, which require a lot of energy for drilling, transportation and digging.
"That's the thing," he says in an echo of Heinlein. "If you want to produce energy, you have to spend energy."
That's the thing.
