AquaCura.com

I am standing by my guess that we need to reduce our driving by something like 90% if we want biofuels to meet our personal transportation desires.

It's interesting to see a research group assigning a positive energy benefit to ethanol - we have probably all heard that ethanol's energy balance sheet is negative. But we shouldn't get too excited about a 25% energy dividend. Note that much of it comes from assuming the spent corn mash would be used as animal feed. And how eco-logical is it to feed animals corn anyways? And what about the water demanded by the feeding operations that use this corn mash. And on and on.

But the important points of the article are that biofuels are not going to do much to reduce greenhouse gas generation. Driving a lot less will reduce greenhouse gas generation, but our society hasn't gotten there yet.

Finally, cellulose-fed ethanol production remains to be perfected (and the energy balance of producing ethanol from cellulose remains to be defined), and then we have to figure out how to harvest the feedstock. It's easy to say 'switchgrass'. Even W has figured out how to say that. And it's easy to say that we can harvest said switchgrass from otherwise marginal lands. Marginal to whom and what? And what does harvesting entail, and what does it cost?

Which gets back to driving less. Damn!