An Energy Analyst's Viewpoint on Corn Ethanol
I urge our readers to check out this article that Glenn Doty, an extremely senior energy analyst and frequent commenter here at 2GreenEnergy, wrote on corn ethanol. Glenn asked me to respond, so here goes.
I totally agree. I’m not a fan of biofuels generally, based on the basic thermodynamics. Organisms did not evolve to store lots of chemical energy they don’t need, just so we could harvest it and put it in our gas tanks. This is why the efficiency of solar energy is orders of magnitude greater than biofuels; almost all of the sun’s energy that is absorbed by the plant goes into the organic processes required for survival and growth.
To the degree we still have a civilization here in 100 years, I believe that the people of that day will regard our efforts at biofuels with the same mixture of pity and contempt that we have for those who treated disease with leeches and bloodletting. Future generations will marvel: “The people of the early 21st Century lived in a time when their scientists were telling them three things: a) their population was in the process of quintupling in size to 10 billion in under 100 years, b) demands for energy were exploding far faster than the population growth alone would suggest, and c) climate change was bringing shortages of potable water and food. And they thought it would be a good idea to power their cars and trucks with their vegetables?” (more…)
