Re: Agriculture and Energy

Bluestem Associates (bluestem@webserf.net)
Fri, 03 Sep 1999 15:15:45 +0100

On Fri, 03 Sep 1999 08:27:20 -0400, tabeles wrote:

>There is a very large body of literature in this arena starting with efforts in
>the early 70's with the first energy crisis or even going back before WWII with
>the usda effort on alcohol.

Divid Pimentel of Cornell did some work about ten years back looking at
the energy economics of ethanol. If I remember his results correctly,
he found that when you include the energy required to grow the corn,
handle the corn, and deliver the corn to the ethanol plant --- as well
as ferment and distill the corn into ethanol --- it takes about 130,000
btu to produce one gallon of ethanol.

Said gallon of ethanol contains 76,000 btu of energy. Ooops.

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