Roger,
Most of the corn grown today is no-til. Some areas still plow due to soil
type or continuous corn crops, maybe you live in one of those areas. Under
no-til, it's fertilize, spray, plant, maybe apply more nitrogen, and
harvest. Plowing is very expensive and most farmers avoid it. No-til usually
does better anyway. The main fertilizer corn uses is nitrogen and most of
that production has shifted to areas where they have natural gas as a
by-product of oil production, but no pipe line or LNG to ship it. Otherwise
it would have been burned off or in some cases pumped back in the oil well
to help maintain pressure. I'm not sure all of that should be counted in the
energy equation. As for the labor part, I don't understand your point. The
farmer will still be around if he stops producing corn. He could idle his
equipment and land, get a desk job saving energy and other energy inputs,
but he is still going to use energy to live. I also don't think the farmer's
personal energy consumption should be counted in the conversion. One other
big energy input you did miss is irrigation, but very little corn is grown
under irrigation.


wrote in message
news
On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:28:15 -0700, Denny wrote:

Roger, an unsolved issue with alcohol is that smog is produced... I
have not done the reading to see what the solution to that is likely
some form of catalytic convertor so I'm not going to claim it is a
deal breaker, but it is significant...


My understanding is it is a great Ozone producer. I'm not sure how
that works our chemically...chem 111 and 112 were a long way back.

So as with the new energy efficient light bulbs which contain mercury
we are exchanging one pollution problem for another.

For the ethanol lovers, I am not against ethanol just against muddy
thinking...
TO get ethanol for vehicles you:
*haul seed and supplies
*plow

Don't forget, disk, pack, and drag

*spray pesticides and herbicides
*fertilize
*plant
grow awhile
*knife in nitrogen

Don't forget cultivating.

grow a bit more
*herbicides / pesticides again
grow awhile more

Corn takes a lot out of the land. or rephrased, it's depletes the soil
and its success depends on a very narrow range of growing conditions.

*harvest
*haul
ferment

Several handling/separation/pumping steps

*distill
*haul it again
mix with gasoline, or whatever hybrid fuel you make
*haul it again
and finally pump it onto your vehicle

Every step that has an asterisk uses fuel or chemicals or fertilizer
dependent upon petroleum...
The fuel of your grandchildren will be a hydrocarbon product made from
coal, not corn...

For the optimistic, the current "net energy gain" for corn alcohol
_in-a-*good*_growing_year is about 33%. that means for the equivalent
of every two gallons invested we get 2.66 gallons out. Or IOW we
gained a whole 2/3 of a gallon. So we have a 33% gain, but that
doesn't take into account labor. When labor is added in the true price
of that corn alcohol is astronomical whether we pay for it directly at
the pump, or through subsidies to the grower and processor.


denny