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If it takes one thousand gallons of gasoline to produce 10 thousand gallons of ethanol, then it could be a net win by requiring less gasoline production later o
by eximius 9y ago
If it takes one thousand gallons of gasoline to produce 10 thousand gallons of ethanol, then it could be a net win by requiring less gasoline production later or something.
But I have no clue how the numbers actually work out.
- jogjayr 9y agoThe laws of thermodynamics alone lead me to suspect that that's probably not the case.
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe energy input to crops that later become ethanol is the sun, not the gasoline burnt in the production process, so there is no necessary relationship inferrable by thermodynamics between fuel burnt and the energy content of crops or the resulting ethanol. If there were, then human-powered farming would have been pointless as a food production method.
- jogjayr 9y agoI stand corrected.
- nate_meurer 9y agoI assume you're speaking in theoretical terms, but it bears mentioning that in practice, fossil fuels are a critical input to the production of crops, to the extent that EROEI for corn ethanol remains stuck at around 1.