7 Deadly Sins: Comments
As for the energy balance, it's ALWAYS negative -- that's the Second Law of Thermodynamics after all. But caring about the physics energy balance is silly. The energy balance that matters is the economic energy balance -- the inputs that you have to pay for and the outputs that you can sell. And there things get more interesting. This isn't just physics, and you have to know something about the particular crops and the particular economics of the crops to calculate the economic energy balance.
I would claim first of all that as long as there is 1 billion-with-a-b bushels of corn in storage just in IL that the only inputs you should charge against the ethanol is the diesel fuel to move it from silo to ethanol plant. It's already grown, and any inputs that went into growing it are sunk costs. And in the plus column for ethanol you should take into account the storage costs of all that corn we haven't quite figured out what to do with -- burn it off as fuel and we don't have to pay to store it. So don't go blathering about "energy balance" until the nation's grain storage facilities aren't bulging anymore.
That's admittedly a temporary effect. The permanent effect is simply that ethanol can be produced as a by-product of activities which have higher value than fuel production. For example, farmers grow non-gmo corn alongside their gmo corn in order to control the genetics of the process. It's organic because corn isn't valuable enough to justify the expense of pesticides. But if the weather is not perfectly cooperative, the organic non-gmo corn gets infested with corn borers, the weakened corn is infected with fungii, which produce mycotoxins that contaminate the corn and it is too dangerous to feed to livestock. There is a certain amount of demand from the neo-Luddites out there who are willing to pay extra to feed their kids pig-food rejects, but not nearly enough to absorb the supply. This is probably the biggest example, but there is lots of other reasons that crops could become contaminated and be worthless as food but just fine for fuel. Those crops should also count as "free" when toting up the energy balance (except, of course, for the last little bit where you should charge the energy to harvest and transport the crop, and credit the energy that would have gone into plowing the crop under.) Another "by-product" application is to take the whole corn plant, squeeze the corn oil out of the kernals, and then distill all of the remaining otherwise wasted organic matter for the ethanol.
But anyway, you said it much shorter than me: "the first person to mention "Pimental/Cornell" ... is not worth further consideration." And I guess I violated it by giving them consideration!
cathy 
[energy in source material] + [energy used to process source] will always be less than [output energy].This, as you point out, is a fundamental rule of the universe.
Energy balance in this arena refers to the difference between [output energy] and [energy used to process source]. A positive energy balance does not mean that energy was created, but the more useable energy was extracted from the source material than was used in the processing.
Pimental and his legion of drooling morons are fond of the argument that, using their rigged numbers, using ethanol is really making the oil problem worse because more energy is used to process the corn than is in the output ethanol. They also assume that all energy used in processing is provided by oil, which is not the case, and that processing technology will never improve.
Since their assumptions are wrong, so is the conclusion. Yet some troll will come by and scream Pimental numbers at me or will get the ear of a lazy reporter (as is the case here I assume).
I have an announcement. Just filled up the van with her very first tank of E-85 at the new station that opened up at 5 this morning. The price was no deal ($2.19 vs $2.29 for E-10) but I willing to grant that there is still a learning curve -- they'll figure out the right price after awhile. I have confidence in the free market! I need to check out the other E-85 station in the county, still. Saturday we took our 2nd trip looking for it with no success, and I realized on Sunday that the E-85 national listing has it on Avenue when it's supposed to be Street.
There is an interesting effect with ethanol prices in general, though. The closer you are to the Mississippi, the more expensive corn is. Corn further from the river has to trade at a slight discount to cover the expense of getting it to the river so that it can be transported down to the Gulf for export, so that's the ideal spot to site the ethanol plant and divert some corn there and save on the transport costs. So I suspect that ethanol closer to the Mississippi should be a bit more expensive than ethanol further away. Not sure how big and effect it should be, though.
cathy
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