David Pimentel and Tad Patzek

Critics of ethanol-as-fuel often point to studies done by these two prolific, vocal, and zealous anti-ethanol crusaders. If you see any report or article or blog post that cites either Pimentel or Patzek, whether directly or indirectly, you need to turn on your bullshit detector.

It's not that they don't put a lot of work into their work, they do, but some of it's fuzzy, some of it's poorly reasoned, and some of it's downright controversial.

A f'rinstance. They calculate the "oil equivalent" of the labor that goes into farming corn [and other ethanol-producing crops]. They figure up how many calories of food a farm laborer eats and how many gallons of gasoline a farm laborer uses to get from home to the fields and back, and then set this equivalent to X number of liters of oil and add this to the total energy put into producing the resulting ethanol [8000 liters/year/hectare here].

That's all fine and dandy, I like thorough analyses as well as the next number-cruncher [and maybe more], but they never once do any such figuration on producing an equivalent amount of gasoline. Oops. In fact, I've spent the last two years, ever since Slate lauded their anti-ethanol ethos here, trying to find out how much energy goes into producing the gasoline you use.

This is the best I've found so far [and it's not great, so remember your grain of salt]:

• It takes 0.74 BTU of fossil energy [coal + natural gas + petroleum] to produce produce and deliver to the gas pump 1 BTU of ethanol from corn.


• It takes 1.23 BTU of fossil energy [coal + natural gas + petroleum] to produce produce and deliver to the gas pump 1 BTU of gasoline from petroleum.

NB: As far as I can tell, nobody's found a link between Pimentel and Big Oil, but Patzek has ties.


Just sayin'.