Urging Congress to Cancel the Ethanol Tariff

reporter writes "The Wall Street Journal is urging Washington to discard the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. This tariff is effectively a subsidy for corn-based ethanol produced in the USA. Yet, producing ethanol from corn is highly inefficient and consumes 1 unit of energy for each 1.3 units of energy that burning ethanol provides. By contrast, ethanol derived from sugarcane (which is the sole source of ethanol in Brazil) yields 8.3 units of energy. Sugercane is about 7 times more efficient than corn. Some studies even show that corn yields only 0.8 unit of energy, resulting in a net loss of energy."

Comments

Re:No source for 7x number

[marcosdumay]

You got the wrong results from your research, what is not hard to happen, since it is very rare to see inforation in english about brazilian ethanol (don't know why). That 3.7 figure is dated, even the 8.1 is old, people are talking about 10 now.

About the other points, 1: That value is true on some regions, but it is still more expensive than using tractors. So, people that use human larbor is normaly too cheap to invest on the refinning process, and ends up with a low EROEI. The highter EROEI farms normaly use tractors.

2: True (land area, isn't it?). But has no relevance for EROEI.

3: Gas also needs sealed tanks. But even if it was completely impossible to transport ethanol without getting it contamined (Bazil already exports a lot of ethanol overseas), you could stil do the third (and cheaper) destilation at the destination. And the bigest problem to ethanol transportation is the fact that it is acid, not hydrophilic.

4: Ethanol cars lose mileage but the power increases. Also, flex cars are able to deal well with ethanol, working the same way is pure ethanol cars. What you don't seem to grasp is that flex cars detect the amount of ethanol and gas on the fuel, and set everyhing according.

Now, a previous poster said that ethanol cars age faster. If that happens, the difference is very small to be detected. Brazilian used cars are priced according to the price of the fuel (and some speculation). When ethanol whas expensiver, ethanol used cars become cheaper, when it was cheaper, the cars become expensiver. I've never heard bout ethanol cars gatting old faster, and could never detect that trend myself.