I think it is more damning when one considers in addition the costs to get the product to the pump as well.GIThruster wrote:Dan, here's an example of good cost analysis concerning this issue. This is an old analysis and it is for ethanol, but you can begin to start to understand from it, just why bio-fuels cannot compete with fossil fuels on a even basis.
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David Pimentel, an agricultural scientist at Cornell University and one of the foremost critics of ethanol, has conducted numerous cost analyses on ethanol production. He's made a name for himself mostly by driving the ethanol industry raving mad. From its very beginnings, when hoe enters soil, ethanol production has not changed much since the nineteenth century. Pimentel found that one acre of U.S. corn field yields about 7,110 pounds of corn, which in turn produces 328 gallons of ethanol. Setting aside the environmental implications (which are substantial), the financial costs already begin to mount. To plant, grow, and harvest the corn takes about 140 gallons of fossil fuel and costs about $347 per acre. According to Pimentel's analysis, even before the corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock alone costs $0.69 per gallon of ethanol.
More damning, however, is that converting corn to ethanol requires about 99,119 BTUs to make one gallon, which has 77,000 BTUs of available energy. So about 29 percent more energy is required to produce a gallon of ethanol than is stored in that gallon in the first place. "That helps explain why fossil fuels (not ethanol) are used to produce ethanol," Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. U.S. drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't for government subsidies that artificially lower the price." All told, a gallon of ethanol costs $2.24 to produce, compared to $0.63 for a gallon of gasoline.
and here's a more recent treatment of this issue:
http://cornellsun.com/node/34938
This is the 'Elephant in the Room' the Green Revolution tends to ignore. The fundamental costs and resources expended to be green tends to be higher than not being green which invariably include significant fossil chains in the processes required. To be successfully green, we need green that completely sidesteps the driving issue, which is fossil usage. So far, not so good, with the arguable exceptions of Nuclear (The Horror! exclaim the Greens), Hydro (Gasp! go the Greens) and Geo-Thermal (look of consternation on the Greens). I did not list Solar on purpose.