5 gallons of water = 1 gallon of ethanol

What I’m about to tell you isn’t new. It’s not new like Tori Spelling endorsing a line of baby clothes. Heck, it’s not even new like, bananas could go the way of dinosaurs.

No, that is just a reminder of what we already know:

One gallon of ethanol on average requires five gallons of water. Not only that, ethanol is an expensive fuel to produce. Currently the U.S. government subsidizes its production at .54 a gallon. That’s to drop to .47, due to the 2008 Farm Bill.

Renowned environmental researcher David Pimentel of Cornell University has completed numerous studies that show ethanol, no matter the biomass used to produce it, simply uses more energy than it produces.That’s considering ethanol is made from heavily tilled and fertilized crops that thereupon are shipped hundreds of miles to ethanol plants

where the process of conversion begins. Corn-based ethanol uses 29-percent more fossil fuel than it produces.

Researcher David Green agrees that the process uses more energy than it produces, and he says it cuts a negligible amount of greenhouse gases from our atmosphere. He’s a senior researcher at the agency of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

But let’s get back to water. Most plants today are 50 million gallons. At five gallons per, that’s 2.5 billion gallons of water for one year of ethanol production. That water typically comes from regional aquifers that are quickly drained. While that frequently hurts regional wells, particularly rural residential wells, that’s not going to stop these plants.

Energy production is a high priority in our nation. So that even in the Phoenix desert, companies can justify building an ethanol plant.

[Source] Sea Stachura

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