Is corn ethanol a net energy loss and polluter?
If you’ve read about ethanol, you’ve probably heard it before–apparently, corn ethanol’s energy content is “negative,” due to the amount of gasoline and other energy sources consumed in its production. But the 1995 USDA report cited [3] for this discovery has since been very decisively corrected. The original authors of the 1995 report published in 2002 a second USDA study which reversed the results, showing that even from conservative estimates (excluding energy credits from reselling CO2, for instance), ethanol was a net energy gain–for every Btu used for ethanol production, 1.34 Btu of ethanol energy is created.[8] Furthermore, liquid fuels actually make up only 17% of the energy used to produce ethanol; for every 1 Btu of liquid fuel used, 6.34 Btu of ethanol energy is produced. The Pimental studies of ethanol as “subsidized food-burning” have been similarly disproved, with the inaccurate results attributed to data 20+ years old.[9] Two studies published in early 2008, in Science
