I take that back. You have only been a member for 36 weeks. But there are other posters in the ethanol business that have been posting here for years..Sorry for that mistake.

I've got to agree with the general direction of your comment, Majorian. I would be much less sanguine about our energy future if it wasn't for hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs, Nuclear, electrified rail, wind, geothermal, etc.

There are just scads of opportunities available to us. California's going to hit their 25% renewable target in a breeze. Without even a "drop" of perspiration.

Combine all the new technologies in ICE's, biology, solar, etc. it just looks easy from where I sit. We knock the "Need" for liquid fuels down to 5, or 6 mbpd, and ethanol/biodiesel/biobutanol, etc knocks it right on out. Easy.

R^2 on his post threw out a number of .52 gallons of water per gallon of crude for refineries.

I didn't just "throw out" that number. First, I worked at that refinery and know exactly how much water we used. But second - I used the publicly available water bill from the city of Billings. So, pretty tough to dispute that number. You may not want to believe it, but it is what it is:

http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/03/water-usage-in-oil-refinery.html

You sometimes see numbers that are much higher. For instance, I have seen high numbers for BP's Whiting refinery in Indiana that uses lake water for cooling. But what you will find is that the water only passes through the refinery and doesn't contact the process. They pull water in from the lake, use it to cool the process, and put it back in the lake a little warmer than they took it out. The more water they pull, the less temperature rise. So the more water they use, the less impact on the lake.

1 gallon of ethanol replaces 7 gallons of petroleum per Shapouri.

1 gallon of ethanol plus corn plus natural gas plus coal.

96% is an upper limit, as your source states.

I agree with your basic point that irrigated corn acreage is a small fraction, and your most important point, that etoh will never scale, a bad idea.

Based on the 2002 Farm and Ranch Survey, irrigated corn for grain accounted for approximately 571,140 thousand bushels, compared to a total crop of over 8,613,115 thousand bushels, a little over 6 and a half percent. When looking at that survey from an area perspective, we find about 14 per cent of the corn cropland was irrigated in some form.

Based in part on the methodology and questions of the survey, it is subject to error, but it is by far the best data we have. Interpretations can be made for full vs partial season irrigation, among others. The 2007 survey was mailed last winter, and should be out soon. I expect irrigation percentages for corn to rise, perhaps dramatically.

Henry, do you have the nagging feeling looking at that post that something's wrong with it? Sure you do. Here's the problem.

You take 130 some odd thousand btus of crude oil, burn another ten, or twenty thousand, or whatever of nat gas to turn it into 116,000 of gasoline, and, proudly proclaim: "Voila, 8:1 eroei.

On the other hand, farmer joe takes a thousand btus of diesel, thirty three (or, often, less) btus of nat gas, reaches up in the sky and grabs a little solar energy, produces 76,000 btus of ethanol (with a 115 Octane rating, by the way) and you proclaim: 1.5:1 eroei. Doesn't make much sense, does it?

Sometimes, you just have to go with common sense. Ethanol costs less, even without tax credits, for a reason.