Those scientists conflated conversion efficiency with harvesting efficiency (EROI). And they used narrow boundaries. Robert (and others) have explained this about this at least 20 times on this site.

The focus on the Liebigs input du jour is the problem. Water, food, soil, natural gas, coal, etc. and other limiting inputs are ignored.

So you completely ignore Berkley scientists who analyzed petroleum imputs and found it to be 30 times less for ethanol than gasoline?

Appeals to authority don't impress me. Or can I merely appeal to Pimentel's analysis in response?

As I said above, the major input into ethanol is natural gas. Natural gas is not petroleum, but it is a fossil fuel. I clearly addressed that, and ignored nothing.

If gasoline is the direct product in question, why not compare ethanol to gasoline and not oil?

Because when you process oil you get other products like diesel and jet fuel. It is easy to compare energy/water/etc. usage per barrel of oil, but more difficult to allocate per gallon of gasoline - since various crudes and refinery configurations will produce differing amounts of gasoline. And didn't you just write that ethanol "displaces more than 6 percent of US daily oil imports"?

In any case, as I said before, in the case of ethanol a large portion of the energy imputs come from the sun.

That's also where gasoline gets the vast majority of its inputs. Gasoline is ancient sunshine, with some processing. The energy you spend in processing the gasoline will yield about 10 times what you consumed.