Market Outlook

[Rod]

Any educated guess on market future? I noticed futures are down and know a couple of guys with a few pens of feeders that are expecting a loss.

 

[Big D]

I don't know about educated, but I'll offer a guess.

I was visiting a local feedlot about a month ago, (40,000 head). The manager commented that most of the cattle in the lot was headed for market in april and may. He also stated that most of the yards are in the same situation. Every one was scrambling to buy big feeders in Dec. and Jan. to contract for April. Those cattle are seeing a lot of red ink right now. As long as the feedlots are in this position I don't see feeders doing much other than continuing their down slide.

Corn prices have come up considerable also, but that, IMHO has less to do with the price of feeder cattle than the attitude of the buyer.

On the positive side of things. Feedlot owners do not like empty pens and if they are shipping cattle out they will find a way to fill'em back up. Just hope that the drought eases and everyone doesn't send everything to town at once.

What's your guess?

D

 

[Caustic Burno]

My concern is ethanol with corn prices on the rise to make fuel. The feed lot guys are going to cut cost somewhere and that is going to be the Cattleman. The American consumer is gettting taxed about all they can with out giving up something.
They are not going to give up driving and playing. My 2 cents.

 

[rkm]

I wonder with the cost of fuel and fertilizer if a lot seed stays in the bag this year. especially marginal ground.

 

[dj]

My concern is ethanol with corn prices on the rise to make fuel. The feed lot guys are going to cut cost somewhere and that is going to be the Cattleman. The American consumer is gettting taxed about all they can with out giving up something.
They are not going to give up driving and playing. My 2 cents.

But doesn't distillers grain makes up for the corn loss.
I mean we not losing the feed stuff it just goes an extra leg in it's journey now. And distiillers grain can only be fed as animal feed right?

 

[Caustic Burno]

My concern is ethanol with corn prices on the rise to make fuel. The feed lot guys are going to cut cost somewhere and that is going to be the Cattleman. The American consumer is gettting taxed about all they can with out giving up something.
They are not going to give up driving and playing. My 2 cents.

But doesn't distillers grain makes up for the corn loss.
I mean we not losing the feed stuff it just goes an extra leg in it's journey now. And distiillers grain can only be fed as animal feed right?

My take is that they will quit growing corn for other crops that have a higher ethanol yield than corn. Which leaves less corn so higher prices. In reading there are several other crops that beat corn hands down.

 

[dj]

They (grain farmers)are already decreasing the planted acreage estimates for corn so you are probably right.
In the early 80's when ag was dying from low crop prices and foreclosures. A enthanol plant was built at Hydro, OK. The owner tried to get the local boys to produce Jeruslam (sp) artichokes. Couldn't get any takers. So we tried corn, and wheat. In the end we just would buy 180 proof and dry it to 200 proof. I raised some of the Jerusalem artichokes (small bed) at the house. Nasty plant, spreads terrible and hard to eradicate. But really high in sugars.

 

[Howdyjabo]

Whatever they use to make ethanol will likely still leave a byproduct that will be useable by cattle--

Most have useable limits--- so corn will still be a major ingredient.
The more plants there are around the lower the shipping costs so the byproducts lower cost will make up for the higher corn costs.

The byproducts are usually free--- its the drying and shipping that piles on the cost. Decrease or eliminate those costs and ethanol byproducts are going to be a boost to the feeders(that are in the right spots ).


As far as the cattle market--- I see it crashing and crashing hard.
Think .45/lb calves
Then it will stabalise quickly -- but not peak again for awhile.

Just don't know when its gonna happen I have been waiting for at least a year........

Theres where the problem is--- people are being very careful(and have been for the last year) trying real hard not to get caught with too many calves on hand when it hits-- but still have the system in place to buy hard and fast when it does.

Its really stressing out the nerves

 

[andybob]

dj, we also had a problem with runaway Jerusalem Artichokes,
I just penned a group of pigs 70-75 lbs and they soon dug up and ate them, leaving a well dug and manured corn patch.

 

[ollie']

Whatever they use to make ethanol will likely still leave a byproduct that will be useable by cattle--

Most have useable limits--- so corn will still be a major ingredient.
The more plants there are around the lower the shipping costs so the byproducts lower cost will make up for the higher corn costs.

The byproducts are usually free--- its the drying and shipping that piles on the cost. Decrease or eliminate those costs and ethanol byproducts are going to be a boost to the feeders(that are in the right spots ).


As far as the cattle market--- I see it crashing and crashing hard.
Think .45/lb calves
Then it will stabalise quickly -- but not peak again for awhile.

Just don't know when its gonna happen I have been waiting for at least a year........

Theres where the problem is--- people are being very careful(and have been for the last year) trying real hard not to get caught with too many calves on hand when it hits-- but still have the system in place to buy hard and fast when it does.

Its really stressing out the nerves

Karen have you got anything to base 45cent calves on? If we see 45 cent weaned calves, the world is broke.

 

[Campground Cattle]

Ethanol is a bust the only person it is good for is the corn farmer. It takes one gallon of traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol. A car that gets 30 miles per gallon on gasoline will get 23 miles per gallon on ethanol its back to those pesky btu's of energy. If every American would drive 5% less the gasoline market would crater.
Our long term energy needs will never be solved by ethanol,or hydrogen its that btu thing again pyhsics is a real B.
Our solutions lie in solar,wind,atomic,coal,and conservation.
Or until we can design an internal combustion engine/ transmission that we can get more than 35% effieciency.
Cattle and Oil are commodities and traded on the commodities markets and will always have high and low cycles as speculators play the commodites until they crash the market.

 

[Howdyjabo]

I am baseing it on nothing more than my "the sky is falling"
view of the world today-- I am very pessamistic lately .

Just the gas situation ALONE(if not resolved someway) is enough to bust the cattle market as it is now. It relies too heavily on MOVING wieght long distances- from one place to another. Both the animals and the feed they eat and the end product..
Add to that broke consumers don't buy high end meat(where the money is).And without resolving the gas situation the consumer market is gonna bust at the same time.

Everyone has been absorbing $$$ issues(except the cow/calf opperator) over the last few years-- I think that critical mass is looming and the #### is gonna hit the fan.

Cattle market needs some major overhauls to a more local system and its gonna bust the system(as it is now) wide open when it starts.
Its gonna bankrupt alot of people and its gonna provide new opportuities for others.

But then........ I also thought it would have started before now .......................

 

[somn]

Ethanol is a bust the only person it is good for is the corn farmer. It takes one gallon of traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol. A car that gets 30 miles per gallon on gasoline will get 23 miles per gallon on ethanol its back to those pesky btu's of energy. If every American would drive 5% less the gasoline market would crater.
Our long term energy needs will never be solved by ethanol,or hydrogen its that btu thing again pyhsics is a real B.
Our solutions lie in solar,wind,atomic,coal,and conservation.
Or until we can design an internal combustion engine/ transmission that we can get more than 35% effieciency.
Cattle and Oil are commodities and traded on the commodities markets and will always have high and low cycles as speculators play the commodites until they crash the market.

Please explain this one gallon of traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol. Seems impossible but I learn something new everyday.

 

[Campground Cattle]

Ethanol is a bust the only person it is good for is the corn farmer. It takes one gallon of traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol. A car that gets 30 miles per gallon on gasoline will get 23 miles per gallon on ethanol its back to those pesky btu's of energy. If every American would drive 5% less the gasoline market would crater.
Our long term energy needs will never be solved by ethanol,or hydrogen its that btu thing again pyhsics is a real B.
Our solutions lie in solar,wind,atomic,coal,and conservation.
Or until we can design an internal combustion engine/ transmission that we can get more than 35% effieciency.
Cattle and Oil are commodities and traded on the commodities markets and will always have high and low cycles as speculators play the commodites until they crash the market.

Please explain this one gallon of traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol. Seems impossible but I learn something new everyday.

From Berkley

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... THANOL.TMP

 

[somn]

Ethanol is a bust the only person it is good for is the corn farmer. It takes one gallon of traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol. A car that gets 30 miles per gallon on gasoline will get 23 miles per gallon on ethanol its back to those pesky btu's of energy. If every American would drive 5% less the gasoline market would crater.
Our long term energy needs will never be solved by ethanol,or hydrogen its that btu thing again pyhsics is a real B.
Our solutions lie in solar,wind,atomic,coal,and conservation.
Or until we can design an internal combustion engine/ transmission that we can get more than 35% effieciency.
Cattle and Oil are commodities and traded on the commodities markets and will always have high and low cycles as speculators play the commodites until they crash the market.

Please explain this one gallon of traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol. Seems impossible but I learn something new everyday.

From Berkley

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... THANOL.TMP

I'm sorry but that didn't show me one figure to back up the one gallon traditional fuel to produce 1.6 gallons of ethanol claim.

 

[Campground Cattle]

This is one of the reasons I seldom enter into energy issues as the average person can't grasp that it takes energy to produce energy, even basic hydrocarbon energy. It takes fuel to plant,grow, and harvest the corn plus transpotation to a refinery, yes a refinery as the product has to be refined and transported to a distrubution system. All this to produce a less effiecent fuel.

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Fuel's Gold
Turning Corn Into Ethanol May Not Be Worth It

August 3, 2005

Most people would agree that the United States needs a new source of fuel: something reMnewable and nonpolluting with which to replace gasoline ... something that could be produced right here at home. Deep in America's heartland, a lot of people think they know the answer: ethanol, a fuel made from fermented corn.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, you can get about 21/2 gallons of it from a bushel of corn. And an increasing number of states are working to make an 85 percent ethanol fuel called E85 available at gas stations at prices significantly below that of regular gasoline ... even when you account for the fact that ethanol provides only 62 percent of the mileage of gasoline.

It sounds like a perfect, win-win solution for both the nation's farm economy and its energy needs. According to the National Corn Growers Association, ethanol production could make 1.4 billion bushels of corn "disappear" in 2004 ... enough to replace more than 2 billion gallons of gasoline and provide a much-needed market for farmers stricken with chronically low corn prices.

There's just one catch: According to scientists in New York and California, it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get back in fuel savings. More precisely, says David Pimentel of Cornell University, it takes the equivalent of 1.29 gallons of gasoline to produce enough ethanol to replace one gallon of gasoline at the pump. Instead of making the nation more energy self-sufficient, ethanol production actually increases our need for oil and gas imports, Pimentel says.

Pimentel is an ecology professor who had been examining energy usage in corn production since 1970. It may sound odd for an ecologist to study agriculture, but it's not actually a big jump, because ecologists have long been interested in energy flows in natural systems. Pimentel sees his work merely as applying a traditional way of thinking to a new arena.

In a recent paper in the journal Natural Resources Research, he calculates that it takes the energy equivalent of 271 gallons of gasoline to grow a hectare (about 2.47 acres) of corn. Part of that energy is for tractor fuel, but the biggest use is for manufacturing nitrogen fertilizers, which are mandatory for high-yield corn-growing.

These fertilizers are made by heating natural gas under controlled circumstances so that it reacts with nitrogen in the air. Not only does it take heat to do this, but it uses up natural gas that could have been burned as fuel. Pimentel estimates that in corn-growing, nitrogen fertilizers alone use the equivalent of 80 gallons of gasoline per hectare.

More energy is needed to turn the corn into fuel. Ethanol is produced by grinding corn, mixing it with water, and fermenting it in a process similar to that used to make beer or wine. The unprocessed product, in fact, is a lot like beer: 8 percent alcohol and 92 percent water. Not something that's going to burn in a car engine.

To make a usable fuel, all but 0.5 percent of the water must be removed. This is done by a series of distillation and chemical extractions that, according to Pimentel's calculations, use even more energy than was used to grow the corn. And that doesn't count the diesel fuel needed to ship corn to the ethanol plant or ethanol to the pump. In theory, all of these energy costs should make ethanol uneconomical to produce.

But it can be produced affordably, Pimentel says, because the government is subsidizing its production to the tune of $3 billion per year.

Tad Patzek, a chemical engineer at the University of California Berkeley, who collaborated with Pimentel, calls the whole thing a "politically driven initiative" by "confused people" who think it's good for the country. But really, he says, it's equivalent to the medieval alchemist's quest for the mythical Philosopher's Stone, which could turn anything into gold. The only difference is that in this case, the reward isn't gold, it's "pure, environmentally benign energy" that could satisfy the greenest of environmentalists.

"We need a new liquid fuel," Pimentel adds, "but this isn't the one."

Outside the gates
Hosein Shapouri disagrees. An economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he too has spent years studying the amount of energy needed to produce ethanol. His latest calculations, published in 2004, conclude that for each gallon of gasoline invested (or its equivalent in coal, electrical power, etc.), you get back the equivalent of 1.67 gallons of gasoline. That's up, he adds, from 1.36 gallons in 1996 and 1.24 gallons in 1991.

Shapouri charges that Pimentel's work is based on an outdated understanding of how the industry works. "He doesn't see technology," Shapouri says. "Corn production is becoming more efficient, and ethanol is, too."

Pimentel, on the other hand, charges Shapouri with overlooking important steps in the farm-to-ethanol process. "The reason the USDA comes up with positive returns and we do not," he says, "is that they omit about half of the inputs."

One "input" that Shapouri has overlooked, Pimentel says, is the energy used to make and maintain farm equipment. "Have you seen many farmers raising corn by hand?" he asks. Shapouri "draws the boundary too close to the gates of the ethanol plant," Patzek says. "His whole analysis accentuates the last element of the chain, which is ethanol production."

Patzek also says that Shapouri accidentally mixed up ethanol-production statistics for corn with different amount of moisture in it, so-called "wet" and "dry" corn. "That overestimates the yield by 15 percent," he says.

Shapouri, on the other hand, charges that Patzek and Pimentel should be basing their study on USDA's corn-growing data, rather than attempting to supplement the government statistics with figures from other sources. "We used a USDA corn survey and also a survey of ethanol plants," Shapouri told the National Corn Growers Association in 2004. "Our data are crystal clear."

Patzek, on the other hand, sees no reason not to try to improve on the USDA data. "They're not God," he says.

Rating the leftovers
But the most important dispute involves how to account for the fact that fuel isn't the only product to come from an ethanol plant. The leftovers from the fermentation process form dry distillers grain, which can be used in food production. Because dry distillers grain represents nearly 34 percent of the plant's output, Shapouri says that 34 percent of the total energy cost should be credited to it. That leaves only 66 percent to be charged against the ethanol.

Pimentel agrees that a credit is appropriate but argues that because soybean meal can be used for many of the same purposes, the appropriate adjustment is for the amount of energy needed to grow and produce soybean meal – vastly smaller than the amount needed for growing corn and making dry distillers grain.

An additional problem is that corn is an environmentally unfriendly crop. It contributes more to soil erosion than do other crops, says Pimentel, and pesticides and the nitrates from nitrogen fertilizer contaminate creeks, rivers and even the Gulf of Mexico.

These problems can be reduced by using other crops for ethanol, such as grass or wood, or by making biodiesel from soybean oil or sunflower oil. But grass and wood are difficult to process, and oilseed crops have relatively low yields compared with corn. Pimentel did his energy calculations with all four and found that only soybeans fare better than corn (because they don't need nitrogen fertilizer to grow). But even they require 1.27 times as much energy to produce as they give back in biodiesel, he says.

A fifth alternative, sugar cane, might be slightly better, he adds, but it too depletes soils and increases erosion.

In his 1966 novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein coined the slogan TANSTAAFL – short for There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. If there is any single thing that the ethanol dispute reveals, it's that in the search for alternative fuels, Heinlein's motto is depressingly correct.

Even Shapouri's figures show only a 67 percent return on the energy investment needed for ethanol production. But many other forms of energy suffer from the same problem, including drilling for oil and mining coal, which require a lot of energy for drilling, transportation and digging.

"That's the thing," he says in an echo of Heinlein. "If you want to produce energy, you have to spend energy."

Pimentel thinks we'd get more return on our energy investment by growing trees for woodstoves or other such uses. "Wood is an extremely valuable resource," he says. "We already get 3 percent of our energy from biomass – the same as we get from hydropower. But that's thermal energy, not liquid fuel."

Patzek thinks the U.S. needs a two-pronged approach, neither of which involves ethanol. First, he says, we need more efficient cars. Doubling the average car's fuel efficiency would cut gasoline needs in half, while converting all of the nation's corn production into ethanol would only satisfy 12 percent of current needs, he says.

Similarly, he says, we could reduce fuel needs by redesigning cities to be livable, rather than "drive-in deserts."

Secondly, he says, we need to remember that corn is merely a natural means of converting solar energy into chemical energy, and that it's not really all that efficient at doing so. Solar cells are much more efficient, and could be harnessed to make hydrogen fuel.

Rather than subsidizing ethanol production, Patzek says, we should invest in research designed to make it possible to produce these cells more efficiently. In the U.S., he predicts that people will eventually realize that corn ethanol isn't efficient and will switch to a succession of other crops, none of which will be much better. A much bigger problem, he says, will come with efforts to supply the developed world's fuel needs with "green" imports from developing countries.

"All this hoopla about corn ethanol is child's play compared with the issue of biomass production in the tropics," he says. "The issues with converting pristine, important ecosystems into plantations will dwarf the problems we have with corn ethanol in the U.S. We're encroaching on the basic environmental services of the planet, and that's a lot more scary than polluting the Mississippi Basin and Gulf of Mexico with nitrates."

Patzek would most likely agree with Heinlein's TANSTAAFL principle. As he sees it, there's no such thing as a totally benign, farm-grown energy source. "It's not that simple," he says sadly. "It's anything but simple."

 

[somn]

This is one of the reasons I seldom enter into energy issues as the average person can't grasp that it takes energy to produce energy, even basic hydrocarbon energy. It takes fuel to plant,grow, and harvest the corn plus transpotation to a refinery, yes a refinery as the product has to be refined and transported to a distrubution system. All this to produce a less effiecent fuel.

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Fuel's Gold
Turning Corn Into Ethanol May Not Be Worth It

August 3, 2005

Most people would agree that the United States needs a new source of fuel: something reMnewable and nonpolluting with which to replace gasoline ... something that could be produced right here at home. Deep in America's heartland, a lot of people think they know the answer: ethanol, a fuel made from fermented corn.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, you can get about 21/2 gallons of it from a bushel of corn. And an increasing number of states are working to make an 85 percent ethanol fuel called E85 available at gas stations at prices significantly below that of regular gasoline ... even when you account for the fact that ethanol provides only 62 percent of the mileage of gasoline.

It sounds like a perfect, win-win solution for both the nation's farm economy and its energy needs. According to the National Corn Growers Association, ethanol production could make 1.4 billion bushels of corn "disappear" in 2004 ... enough to replace more than 2 billion gallons of gasoline and provide a much-needed market for farmers stricken with chronically low corn prices.

There's just one catch: According to scientists in New York and California, it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get back in fuel savings. More precisely, says David Pimentel of Cornell University, it takes the equivalent of 1.29 gallons of gasoline to produce enough ethanol to replace one gallon of gasoline at the pump. Instead of making the nation more energy self-sufficient, ethanol production actually increases our need for oil and gas imports, Pimentel says.

Pimentel is an ecology professor who had been examining energy usage in corn production since 1970. It may sound odd for an ecologist to study agriculture, but it's not actually a big jump, because ecologists have long been interested in energy flows in natural systems. Pimentel sees his work merely as applying a traditional way of thinking to a new arena.

In a recent paper in the journal Natural Resources Research, he calculates that it takes the energy equivalent of 271 gallons of gasoline to grow a hectare (about 2.47 acres) of corn. Part of that energy is for tractor fuel, but the biggest use is for manufacturing nitrogen fertilizers, which are mandatory for high-yield corn-growing.

These fertilizers are made by heating natural gas under controlled circumstances so that it reacts with nitrogen in the air. Not only does it take heat to do this, but it uses up natural gas that could have been burned as fuel. Pimentel estimates that in corn-growing, nitrogen fertilizers alone use the equivalent of 80 gallons of gasoline per hectare.

More energy is needed to turn the corn into fuel. Ethanol is produced by grinding corn, mixing it with water, and fermenting it in a process similar to that used to make beer or wine. The unprocessed product, in fact, is a lot like beer: 8 percent alcohol and 92 percent water. Not something that's going to burn in a car engine.

To make a usable fuel, all but 0.5 percent of the water must be removed. This is done by a series of distillation and chemical extractions that, according to Pimentel's calculations, use even more energy than was used to grow the corn. And that doesn't count the diesel fuel needed to ship corn to the ethanol plant or ethanol to the pump. In theory, all of these energy costs should make ethanol uneconomical to produce.

But it can be produced affordably, Pimentel says, because the government is subsidizing its production to the tune of $3 billion per year.

Tad Patzek, a chemical engineer at the University of California Berkeley, who collaborated with Pimentel, calls the whole thing a "politically driven initiative" by "confused people" who think it's good for the country. But really, he says, it's equivalent to the medieval alchemist's quest for the mythical Philosopher's Stone, which could turn anything into gold. The only difference is that in this case, the reward isn't gold, it's "pure, environmentally benign energy" that could satisfy the greenest of environmentalists.

"We need a new liquid fuel," Pimentel adds, "but this isn't the one."

Outside the gates
Hosein Shapouri disagrees. An economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he too has spent years studying the amount of energy needed to produce ethanol. His latest calculations, published in 2004, conclude that for each gallon of gasoline invested (or its equivalent in coal, electrical power, etc.), you get back the equivalent of 1.67 gallons of gasoline. That's up, he adds, from 1.36 gallons in 1996 and 1.24 gallons in 1991.

Shapouri charges that Pimentel's work is based on an outdated understanding of how the industry works. "He doesn't see technology," Shapouri says. "Corn production is becoming more efficient, and ethanol is, too."

Pimentel, on the other hand, charges Shapouri with overlooking important steps in the farm-to-ethanol process. "The reason the USDA comes up with positive returns and we do not," he says, "is that they omit about half of the inputs."

One "input" that Shapouri has overlooked, Pimentel says, is the energy used to make and maintain farm equipment. "Have you seen many farmers raising corn by hand?" he asks. Shapouri "draws the boundary too close to the gates of the ethanol plant," Patzek says. "His whole analysis accentuates the last element of the chain, which is ethanol production."

Patzek also says that Shapouri accidentally mixed up ethanol-production statistics for corn with different amount of moisture in it, so-called "wet" and "dry" corn. "That overestimates the yield by 15 percent," he says.

Shapouri, on the other hand, charges that Patzek and Pimentel should be basing their study on USDA's corn-growing data, rather than attempting to supplement the government statistics with figures from other sources. "We used a USDA corn survey and also a survey of ethanol plants," Shapouri told the National Corn Growers Association in 2004. "Our data are crystal clear."

Patzek, on the other hand, sees no reason not to try to improve on the USDA data. "They're not God," he says.

Rating the leftovers
But the most important dispute involves how to account for the fact that fuel isn't the only product to come from an ethanol plant. The leftovers from the fermentation process form dry distillers grain, which can be used in food production. Because dry distillers grain represents nearly 34 percent of the plant's output, Shapouri says that 34 percent of the total energy cost should be credited to it. That leaves only 66 percent to be charged against the ethanol.

Pimentel agrees that a credit is appropriate but argues that because soybean meal can be used for many of the same purposes, the appropriate adjustment is for the amount of energy needed to grow and produce soybean meal – vastly smaller than the amount needed for growing corn and making dry distillers grain.

An additional problem is that corn is an environmentally unfriendly crop. It contributes more to soil erosion than do other crops, says Pimentel, and pesticides and the nitrates from nitrogen fertilizer contaminate creeks, rivers and even the Gulf of Mexico.

These problems can be reduced by using other crops for ethanol, such as grass or wood, or by making biodiesel from soybean oil or sunflower oil. But grass and wood are difficult to process, and oilseed crops have relatively low yields compared with corn. Pimentel did his energy calculations with all four and found that only soybeans fare better than corn (because they don't need nitrogen fertilizer to grow). But even they require 1.27 times as much energy to produce as they give back in biodiesel, he says.

A fifth alternative, sugar cane, might be slightly better, he adds, but it too depletes soils and increases erosion.

In his 1966 novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein coined the slogan TANSTAAFL – short for There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. If there is any single thing that the ethanol dispute reveals, it's that in the search for alternative fuels, Heinlein's motto is depressingly correct.

Even Shapouri's figures show only a 67 percent return on the energy investment needed for ethanol production. But many other forms of energy suffer from the same problem, including drilling for oil and mining coal, which require a lot of energy for drilling, transportation and digging.

"That's the thing," he says in an echo of Heinlein. "If you want to produce energy, you have to spend energy."

Pimentel thinks we'd get more return on our energy investment by growing trees for woodstoves or other such uses. "Wood is an extremely valuable resource," he says. "We already get 3 percent of our energy from biomass – the same as we get from hydropower. But that's thermal energy, not liquid fuel."

Patzek thinks the U.S. needs a two-pronged approach, neither of which involves ethanol. First, he says, we need more efficient cars. Doubling the average car's fuel efficiency would cut gasoline needs in half, while converting all of the nation's corn production into ethanol would only satisfy 12 percent of current needs, he says.

Similarly, he says, we could reduce fuel needs by redesigning cities to be livable, rather than "drive-in deserts."

Secondly, he says, we need to remember that corn is merely a natural means of converting solar energy into chemical energy, and that it's not really all that efficient at doing so. Solar cells are much more efficient, and could be harnessed to make hydrogen fuel.

Rather than subsidizing ethanol production, Patzek says, we should invest in research designed to make it possible to produce these cells more efficiently. In the U.S., he predicts that people will eventually realize that corn ethanol isn't efficient and will switch to a succession of other crops, none of which will be much better. A much bigger problem, he says, will come with efforts to supply the developed world's fuel needs with "green" imports from developing countries.

"All this hoopla about corn ethanol is child's play compared with the issue of biomass production in the tropics," he says. "The issues with converting pristine, important ecosystems into plantations will dwarf the problems we have with corn ethanol in the U.S. We're encroaching on the basic environmental services of the planet, and that's a lot more scary than polluting the Mississippi Basin and Gulf of Mexico with nitrates."

Patzek would most likely agree with Heinlein's TANSTAAFL principle. As he sees it, there's no such thing as a totally benign, farm-grown energy source. "It's not that simple," he says sadly. "It's anything but simple."

So sir as an average person let me educate you . Just how much useable energy comes from a box of corn flakes? It is hard for me to understand why you educated people can't grasp the fact that all this energy used to grow corn is the same regardless of the end use. Cornflakes or ethanol. The costs remain the same. You must have stock in Big oil. You can use any excuse you want to when trying to include this energy in the production of ethanol. It is used in the production of corn not ethanol. If this claim of yours was used to justify all energy used. I guess we better stop feeding cattle, hogs chickens, all livestock in general stop producing corn, soybeans, wheat ,and all other grains lets all starve to death it isn't worth the energy spent producing it. You might be educated and I might be an average person but the one thing you don't have that the average person has is common sense.
Go celebrate your educated victory over an average person with your friends from OPEC.

 

[Campground Cattle]

I see you are another spoiled ignorant consumer that hasn't a clue about fuel. Americans have had there head stuck in the sand, now they are mad. This diasater started down this road in the mid 1990's with no action to head it off.

We need a new liquid fuel source, ethanol isn't it. Spending more energy to make energy is just stupid no other way to put it.
The reason gas prices are soaring right now is the government and speculators. Government regs required the use of MTBE which made up 10% of the gasoline volume in the U.S. now they say you can't use, that is equal to shutting down a 1.2 million barrel day refinery in the country. This is to made up with ethanol that doesn't exist at this time. So we are going to import more oil to make ethanol make's sense. That sure should drive down prices.

Keep driving that vehicle that gets 15 miles to the gallon for your OPEC buddie.

 

[cypressfarms]

I've got to jump in here with Camp. I've read the article, and several others on corn growth. My dad was a manager at a farmer's co-op for 20 years, and I worked for Ouachita Fertilizer during summers in high school.

The basic fact is that the energy needed to produce that bushel of corn is more than the energy gained from that bushel. Corn sucks up fertilizer (to produce the high yields), and that fertilizer is a petroleum derivative. The country/world does need a viable option to oil, but I don't see corn as the answer.

 

[dj]

Didn't Brazil flirt with ethanol powered vehicles in the 80 & 90s'.
I wonder what their production costs were?
When I read all these reports I can't help but think the results read just like they want them to.
If the study sponser is for it thats what the results are.
I have been around alcohol production and use.
I've been in oil production and refining.
Both areas firmly believed they held the correct postion.
I do think, as a consumer, alcohol would be a better fuel.
If I want to power a small light weight hi-bred vehicle.
If I want to pull something. I want the power a diesel offers.
Maybe we are going to have to learn to live with both.