The core distinction here is between energy production and energy storage, and confusing the two is the sort of thing Roko was complaining about (I am not saying anyone here is confusing them).
Ethanol is a valid means of storing energy, although producing it from corn is a terribly suboptimal way of doing so anyway.
Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy, but it is often presented as if it was, and the inability of the general public to understand this is the heart of the matter.
Fossil fuels, like other non-renewable energy sources, are energy that was stored in advance by natural processes, and are only useful for energy “production” because the energy cost of extracting them is far lower than the energy they store. Corn ethanol is just a very silly way to store solar power.
Almost completely correct. The only quibble I have is with the claim that “Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy”.
That’s not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that trying to use corn as an industrial energy source while simultaneously growing it with methods that require artificial fertilizers (which are extremely energy-intensive to synthesize) and mechanical tillage and harvesting (which requires amounts of industrial-level fuel that are prohibitive for that task) is utterly pointless, because the total process requires more industrial-level fuel than it produces.
You can get more energy out of the corn than you invest into it—obviously. But you can’t do so with modern industrial agricultural methods, which expend lots of energy (considered in total, including fertilizer manufacture) to capture a relatively small amount of solar energy in a form that people and animals can consume.
Even when we used draft animals to do the labor required and relied on organic fertilizers only, farmers couldn’t make their planted crop areas provide all of the energy and resources necessary to keep the system going. Large areas of forage (usually grass) were needed to feed the beasts so that human-edible crops could be produced—an ‘external’ energy input for the crop areas. The farms as a whole were powered by the sun only, of course.
When humans do all of the work of agriculture, farming is far, far less efficient (depending on the methods used) and with very primitive methods has a return barely greater than the investment of (human-provided) energy.
The core distinction here is between energy production and energy storage, and confusing the two is the sort of thing Roko was complaining about (I am not saying anyone here is confusing them).
Ethanol is a valid means of storing energy, although producing it from corn is a terribly suboptimal way of doing so anyway.
Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy, but it is often presented as if it was, and the inability of the general public to understand this is the heart of the matter.
Fossil fuels, like other non-renewable energy sources, are energy that was stored in advance by natural processes, and are only useful for energy “production” because the energy cost of extracting them is far lower than the energy they store. Corn ethanol is just a very silly way to store solar power.
Almost completely correct. The only quibble I have is with the claim that “Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy”.
That’s not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that trying to use corn as an industrial energy source while simultaneously growing it with methods that require artificial fertilizers (which are extremely energy-intensive to synthesize) and mechanical tillage and harvesting (which requires amounts of industrial-level fuel that are prohibitive for that task) is utterly pointless, because the total process requires more industrial-level fuel than it produces.
You can get more energy out of the corn than you invest into it—obviously. But you can’t do so with modern industrial agricultural methods, which expend lots of energy (considered in total, including fertilizer manufacture) to capture a relatively small amount of solar energy in a form that people and animals can consume.
Even when we used draft animals to do the labor required and relied on organic fertilizers only, farmers couldn’t make their planted crop areas provide all of the energy and resources necessary to keep the system going. Large areas of forage (usually grass) were needed to feed the beasts so that human-edible crops could be produced—an ‘external’ energy input for the crop areas. The farms as a whole were powered by the sun only, of course.
When humans do all of the work of agriculture, farming is far, far less efficient (depending on the methods used) and with very primitive methods has a return barely greater than the investment of (human-provided) energy.