We've known for decades that it requires more energy to produce corn ethanol than is delivered in the ethanol produced. A lot of the necessary inputs are petroleum-based. This is not news.
What MIGHT be news is that the environmentalists who have been pushing biofuels as a "green" alternative to oil have finally figured out this basic physical fact.
It is my understanding that environmentalists never pushed for biofuels at scale. Biofuels make sense at a very limited scale where you use waste to produce fuel, eg pressing sawdust into wood pellets, or making biogas from manure.
Not to mention using up excess corn that we don't have room to store (predicting corn yield is hard), which is why the whole corn-based ethanol thing got going.
But in normal human fashion we took what is a decent idea at limited scale and thought we could make it an even better idea if we scaled it up to ridiculous proportions. And in normal human fashion, instead of realizing our mistake in not applying some moderation, now we're convinced that what is a bad idea at ridiculous proportions must be eliminated entirely...
Yes of course biofuels make sense on a limited scale in certain applications. Pellet stoves are a good example.
But I don't think I've seen many Environmentalist(TM) proposals that were anything less than a wholesale replacement of "fossil fuels" (and other "extractive industries") for all things everywhere.
I miss the good old days when they just wanted to save the whales, before they came to believe they were saving the whole goddamn planet from certain doom.
Biofuels in the US were mostly motivated by a desire to reduce oil imports ("energy security") and were a bipartisan misstep. The original mandate (7.5e9 gal/yr) was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed during a Republican trifecta, and was later expanded to 3.6e10 gal/yr by a Democratic congress in 2007 (still Bush - part of his "Twenty in Ten" energy security goal [0]). That said, reducing greenhouse gas emissions was definitely seen at the time as a benefit as well.
Yah. There's some reason for ethanol in the fuel mix. Having the ability to do it at some scale is good for security purposes, and it helps tailpipe emissions.
But that's a lot less corn-derived ethanol than we currently make/burn.
> There's some reason for ethanol in the fuel mix.
Uh, maybe from a "we can grow our own fuel perspective", but I've never seen a car run better on E10 or E85 than E0. Basically everything (including the newest and fanciest engines) runs like ass if you've got ethanol in there (and now you have to contend with your fuel having a component that's hydrophilic, which is a huge problem in and of itself, and brutal on natural rubber). Some things specifically built for ethanol as the primary fuel might be OK, but E10 is kind of a travesty.
We'd have been better served just working more towards synthetic gasoline and biodiesel (and I'll make a strong wager that there's still going to be a lot of gas/diesel powered stuff 20-30 years out, and we're going to be going back to trying to get good at synthesizing fuel).
It does have higher octane than gasoline, so with the right tuning it can run in higher compression engines and be beneficial, even offsetting the lower caloric density.
What MIGHT be news is that the environmentalists who have been pushing biofuels as a "green" alternative to oil have finally figured out this basic physical fact.