The
Research of Late Professor David Pimentel
This industry simply would not exist without government subsidies, to illustrate the inefficiency of this industry one researcher, the Late Professor David Pimentel, who was the first agricultural researcher to call for the banning of the toxic DDT insecticide did the math. He tallied up all of the inputs for the production of ethanol including the seeds, labor machinery, fuel fertilizer insecticide, water electricity & transport and he found that to produce one liter of fuel grade ethanol would require an energy input of 6600 kilocalories, we have one major red flag right from the stairs, one liter of ethanol only contains 5130 kilocalories of energy, this process takes 29% more energy than it provides.
This is an energy negative process, if it was energy neutral, the energy we extracted from sunlight using photosynthesis would match the total energy we input to get a usable product. Imagine an ancient farmer working the soil without machinery irrigating his plants removing weeds, harvesting the grain only to have spent more calories than they received they would starve. This is not agreen technology; the reality is photosynthesis is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight into usable energy. The energy efficiency of photosynthesis is usually under one percent for plants meaning on average plants can only capture and convert about one percent of sunlight humans can now do that with cheap solar cells that can achieve between 12 and 20 percent efficiency. Corn is even lower than the plant average at 0.25% if humans could eat electricity we would growing plants for food is a necessity growing food for power is completely and utterly irrational. It's not just wasteful in energy; it's wasteful in water, an incredibly scarce resource in this modern world compared to fossil fuels and renewable energy sources like solar biomass energy uses substantially more water. On an average biomass crops have a water footprint 72 times higher than fossil fuels and 240 times more than solar over 80 percent of our fresh water usage already goes to agriculture increasing biomass energy crops would push this even higher putting more strain on an already limited resource 240 times more water than solar and 48 times less efficient at converting sunlight into energy.
How Green Is
Sugarcane Ethanol?
What’s the deal here? Why is the government subsidizing this industry? when that money could be going into actual renewable technologies like solar wind batteries and hydrogen fuel? The reality is this industry exists because it represents 300000 jobs and those jobs are represented by one of the biggest lobby groups in the United States. Any responsible scientist or engineer would see this industry should not exist and we should be investing in alternative technologies. There are better versions of bio-fuel sugarcane derived ethanol is energy positive but its success in Brazilian agriculture is helping drive the destruction of the Amazon. One researcher found using satellite imagery to estimate the exact percentage of farmland expansion into forested areas in brazil that it would take 20 years for the carbon released due to deforestation to be reclaimed by the reductions in emissions from the use of sugarcane bio-ethanol and that does nothing for the losses in biodiversity if our break-even point is 20 years in the future what's the point surely we should be aiming to not be using fossil fuels in cars at all in 20 years time, by the time we pay off the carbon we sunk into the endeavour.
Part - I : The Truth Of The Bio-Fuels : Part I
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