Isn’t the Energy Balance for Corn Ethanol Better than for Gasoline?
I think most people are starting to accept this as a debunked myth. But let’s review the history, because I do still hear this claim occasionally. A few years ago, Michael Wang from Argonne National Labs invented a metric, which was fossil fuel inputs into both the ethanol and gasoline production processes. This metric was neither an EROEI nor an efficiency, it was a hybrid, and has led to a lot of apples and oranges comparisons between gasoline and ethanol. I have dealt with this claim several times in this blog. I addressed it here in response to a claim from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (which they seem to have since removed): In summary, the finished liquid fuel energy yield for fossil fuel dedicated to the production of ethanol is 1.34 but only 0.74 for gasoline. In other words the energy yield of ethanol is (1.34/0.74) or 81 percent greater than the comparable yield for gasoline. I addressed it here, in response to a letter from a reader in which Michael Wang and Vinod
