We were hopeful when we saw this week’s Time magazine cover on ethanol – until we read the entire story. To call ethanol a scam just because it does not bode well for the even bigger scam, anthropogenic global warming, is not that interesting.

Ethanol is a scam. We said exactly that on the cover of Energy Tribune two years ago. (See ET, April 2006.) It makes no business sense without government subsidies and it has a negative energy balance. And the diversion of huge quantities of corn into the ethanol scam is a key factor in the soaring cost of food. But more to the point is this: If all corn grown in the United States were to be converted to ethanol as a fuel, without regard to food prices or water supply, it would provide less than 20 percent of our gasoline needs. It’s about time that magazines like Time started to take notice. Now if we can just get Congress to listen.

This is an exerpt from our original cover story: Corn Ethanol: Laundering Fossil Fuels, Bilking Taxpayers, Damaging the Environment by T. W. Patzek (the whole story's link is below):

Corn ethanol is the fuel du jour. It’s domestic. It’s not oil. Ethanol’s going to help promote “energy independence.” Magazines trumpet it as the motor vehicle fuel that comes from the “Midwest rather than the Mideast.” But is it really?

There is plenty of corn, to be sure. American farmers grow about 42% of the world’s output. It’s the single largest crop on earth (the sugarcane crop is larger, but it contains more water). In 2004, U.S. corn output could have fed the entire population of China. However, a mere 2% of U.S. corn goes directly to feed people; another 19% goes into processed foods (e.g., the high-fructose corn syrup additive in almost every processed food product in our supermarkets). The majority of U.S. corn goes to feed livestock, even though corn makes cattle sick and produces antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

These uses still leave mountains of excess corn stashed all over Midwest fields, waiting to rot or be processed into ethanol.

Interestingly, the National Corn Growers Association has been asking every corn grower to lobby Congress to increase domestic production of fossil fuels by opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and the Outer Continental Shelf for exploration and production, and by drilling everywhere on U.S. territory for oil and gas. Why? Because the U.S. agricultural industry depends heavily on natural gas, coal, and petroleum for its existence. Nitrogen derivatives and other fertilizers drive the high yields achieved by U.S. farmers. Corn farming devours about 40% of these fertilizers. Nitrogen fertilizers, accounting for roughly half the total energy input per acre of harvested corn, are made from natural gas that is badly needed for other uses, such as home heating, cooking, and power generation. Today, the U.S. imports 15% of its natural gas and 60% of its oil. Furthermore, it is the world’s largest importer of nitrogen fertilizers, mostly from Trinidad, Tobago, Canada, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

The farm sector also depends significantly on natural gas and petroleum for transportation, refrigeration, irrigation, crop drying, heating farm buildings and homes, and pesticides and herbicides.

Accounting for the direct costs, roughly 40% of the calorific value of industrial corn grain comes directly from the use of fossil fuels, mostly natural gas, but also coal and petroleum. This grain could be burned in efficient corn stoves to provide home heating for the Midwest, or it could be ground, fermented, and distilled to produce ethanol.

Because corn grain is a nascent, or “baby” fossil fuel, it takes a lot of energy to transform it into ethanol. For example, the best performance guarantee by ICM, Inc. of Kansas, states that a dry-mill ethanol plant will spend an incredible 58% of ethanol’s calorific value on direct distillation and co-product processing costs. If corn or ethanol must be moved from the Midwest to either coast, there is an additional transportation cost of up to 11% of ethanol’s calorific value. An average U.S. refinery uses less than 12% of gasoline or diesel fuel’s calorific value to produce and distribute them. Therefore, it takes from roughly 5 to 12 times more fossil energy to refine corn grain into ethanol than it does to convert crude oil into gasoline or diesel fuel.