Corn ethanol requires almost as much hydrocarbon energy for tillage, fertilizer, cultivation, pesticides, harvest, transportation, fermenting, distillation, and transportation as it contains when it arrives at the refinery for blending.
It’s basically a process for turning crude oil and natural gas into ethanol.
Sugar ethanol from Brazil is a little more efficient.
Corn ethanol requires almost as much hydrocarbon energy for tillage, fertilizer, cultivation, pesticides, harvest, transportation, fermenting, distillation, and transportation as it contains when it arrives at the refinery for blending.
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Bing!
It’s just like saying let’s all drive electric cars. Electricity is magic and appears out of thin air!
Biofuel isn’t going to be cheaper to produce this year. Just the opposite.
The ONLY reason Brazil produces so much ethanol from sugar beets is because they do not have much petroleum. Unlike, say US for example. What little petroleum Brazil has is 12 thousand feet deep under the Atlantic Ocean. Making it expensive to extract.
Also, they can grow sugar beets year round because their country is on the Equator. They grow sugar beets cheaper than anywhere else in the world.
It is the biggest Iowa boondoggle in the Department of Energy that we turn our feed corn into ethanol when we have such huge reserves of petroleum available. Just because their first in the nation caucus.