The Cost of Being Green
The latest mantra of the Greens is Bio-Fuels and Ethanol as gas substitutes, and naturally being Greenies they neglected to figured the total energy cost associated with these miracle fuels, but someone else has!
Go figure that it take more energy to produce these alternative fuels than they actually produce. Wait until the Greenies find out that they are going to burn more oil than their miracle fuels will save, they are going to have fit!! I just LOVE the irony of it!!
Mr Minority
ALBANY, N.Y. -- Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce.
Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers another market to sell their produce. Gov. George Pataki said last year he wants to "make New York's biofuels industry one of the strongest in the nation."
But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent.
It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to sunflower plants, the study found.
"Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment," according to the study by Cornell's David Pimentel and Berkeley's Tad Patzek. They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy.
The researchers included such factors as the energy used in producing the crop, costs that were not used in other studies that supported ethanol production, said Pimentel.
Go figure that it take more energy to produce these alternative fuels than they actually produce. Wait until the Greenies find out that they are going to burn more oil than their miracle fuels will save, they are going to have fit!! I just LOVE the irony of it!!
Mr Minority
