Regarding: “People always put-down plug-ins saying that the battery technology isn’t mature yet. That doesn’t pass muster with me. Toyota designed and built a battery vehicle in the 1990s…My wife bought one of those…I cringe whenever I hear “the batteries are not ready”.

Earl, that’s rediculous. I guess you didn’t realize that Toyota intentionally sold this car at a loss. Toyotal lost about sixty thousand dollars per car. The RAV4-EV cost more than one hundred thousand dollars each to build. That’s wholesale manufacturing cost, not the MSRP that would be needed for Toyota to make money selling them. By the way, even at a huge loss, Toyota still charged around $42,000 for the -EV. A base model RAV4 was only $16,000. The cost was well over eighty thousand dollars more than a standard RAV4 before any kind of markup or profit.

You paid $42,000 for a $16,000 car that cost over $100,000 to build, and that’s your version of “ten year old batteries are already ready for ‘prime-time’”? I don’t think so.

Oh, and by the way, 76K miles and 5 or 6 years isn’t very long at all! What’s it going to cost to replace those batteries in a few more years? What will the environmental impact be of disposing of them?

The factor though, that you’ve arrived at means that one needs to multiply the area required for “net” ethanol production by that number? There should be a name for this factor to make it simpler to talk about. Maybe “Gross biofuel footprint factor” or something.

I would add that there are competing uses for co-products, including animal feed, so it is difficult to know how much they will be re-used in ethanol production or sold for other uses.

Also, none of these analyses takes into account the depletion of the soil, something that I am not competent to assign numbers to, but which Patzek has attempted to do in his analyses.

One way or the other its, as a mass solution, unsustainable.

A EB of 1.77 means that for each liter of ethanol, energy equivalent to 0.57 liters of ethanol when into its production (0.57 = 1/1.77). So I don’t need to produce one liter, but rather 1.57. But then to produce that extra 0.57 liter, I need 0.57*0.57 = 0.32 liters of input. But to produce that 0.32, I need an energy input of 0.32*0.57 = 0.18 liter. And so on. There is a standard formula for summing an infinite series of this form, and it is 1/(1-0.57) = 2.3. For an EB of 1.10, the same analysis is that to produce one liter, one needs 0.91 of energy inputs. The infinite sum is then 1/(1-0.91) = 11.4.

Now, using ethanol as the energy input for producing ethanol may not be the best way to estimate land use. But if that is what you choose to do, then you need to get the calculation right, so you need to multiply by a factor of 2.3 if co-products are valuable, and a factor of 11.4 if co-products are waste. Multiplying by the energy balance number is not mathematically correct for using ethanol to produce ethanol.

Patzek, who is a (controversial) specialist in this area, tries to account for ecosystem services that biofuel production would need to re-supply to the soil to maintain its fertility. It gets complicated fast. He concludes that only certain types of tropical biofuel production may become net positive in terms of energy production after enough organic material is returned to the soil.

http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/ papers/ Biofuels/ OECDSept102007TWPatzek.pdf

From your Iowa page, I got 500 gallons/acre, not 512. That converts to 4677 liter/ha, which is higher than the 3900 I got from Wikipedia, but only by 20%. Even 500 seems a little high compared to 2.7 to 2.8 gallons/bushel * 176 bushels/acre = 475 to 493 gallons/acre (or 4443 to 4610 liter/ha). The 176 comes from 2.2e9 bushels / 12.5e6 acres, numbers from
http://www.iowacorn.org/cornuse/cornuse_20.html
The 2.8 gallons/bushel comes from your page, but it elsewhere implies 2.7 (1.7 billion gallons / 630 million bushels and 4.9 billion gallons / 1.8 billion bushels).

So far this is all within 20%.

The most interesting reference you posted in the USDA/ANL paper on energy balance. First, it presents data on 9 states, rather than just Iowa, and obviously Iowa cannot fulfill all transportation needs, so the 9 state averages are much more relevant. For example, the 139.34 bushels/acre is a lot lower than the 176 calculated above from the Iowa page (even the Iowa entry in the paper is lower at 152.06). 139.34 converts to 3500 L/ha, which is the middle of the Wikipedia range. 156.02 converts to 3840 L/ha, or pretty close to the high-end of the Wikipedia range.

What is more interesting about Table 1 is that it gives you most of what you need to substitute bioenergy for fossil energy on a case by case basis, instead of just using a single factor for EROI. For diesel substitute biodiesel (e.g. from rape) land use, for gasoline substitute ethanol land use, for electricity use biomass land area (e.g. 18.1 GJ/ha from http://www.sciencemag.org/ cgi/ reprint/ 314/ 5805/ 1598.pdf), for LPG and NG use the biomass gross energy land area (e.g. 68.1 GJ/ha from the same reference). (Since LPG/NG are probably used for heating, and burning biomass for heat is very efficient, the last one probably makes sense.)

That leaves the issue of co-products. Notice that makes the difference in Tables 3 and 4 between EROI of 1.10 and 1.77 for dry milling. What a difference! USDA/ANL are correct to adjust the EROI for co-products for small-scale ethanol. However, at the same required to replace all gasoline, co-products become waste products: it is unlikely we have any use for that much DDGS in the U.S., and it will take energy to dispose of them (e.g. compost and return to the fields). With an EROI of 1.10, the multiple on land area is enormous! I’ll leave it here.

There are lots of comments & blogs in blogs that are perfectly useful, but may not be sufficient. It is perfectly useful to discuss various topics for the readers of a blog, and I’m very happy to see this blog getting more attention (at least, it seems that way to me at first glance).

It’s simply that in many blogs, there may well be plenty of agreement about something, and everyone is happy to agree, like on:

a) Science reporting is bad, especially in newspapers.
b) There are lots of hardcore climate change denialists, and look at what {Inhofe, Monckton, etc} have done now.
c) VK is wrong.

and the net effect in the real world is ~0 unless people take appropriate action, usually over a long period, and usually with many unsuccessful attempts. Joe has certainly been trying for years.

For example, regarding a), we had a long discussion of this over in Deltoid:
http://scienceblogs.com/ deltoid/ 2007/ 10/ john_mashey_what_to_do_about_p.php#more

about positive measures to take with regard to science reporting.

In the particular case of VK, unlike b) and c), he is one person, and hence far more likely possible to reason with, unlike b) (where it’s almost impossible), and c) where it’s a dispersed, long-term educational contest.

As always, one must pick one’s wars. I just think, in this case, that it’s a whole lot easier to get the ear of somebody like VK than a lot of others, and people do listen to him, right or wrong. If I knew VK personally, I’d happily introduce him & Joe, but I don’t.

If Joe’s going to be out here [Silicon Valley] some time, I might be able to arrange a meeting with another serious VC who invests in this turf [and Earl knows] and who knows VK well. Maybe, sooner or later, that would lead to something, or maybe not. Again, Rapier was able to establish a dialog of sorts with VK, and I think Joe has even more real-world credibility, so one never knows.

Michael: if one can get VK to read Climateprogress, that would be good, but if he were reading it, he would probably already have posted something. With all due respect to blogs, not everyone reads everything relevant, and VCs are *busy*. Most don’t read blogs at all….