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RE: Don't Get Carried Away
I've read the UC Berkeley study, by a guy named Tad Patzek if I recall correctly. I heard of his argument about a year ago about the energy balance of ethanol and I was...well, let's just say EXTREMELY skeptical of his analysis. I think he grossly overestimated the amount of pesticides and fertilizers US farmers employ. Heck, he didn't even have to guess at that figure, because the total production of all of that stuff is on a website I looked up to refute his data.
Moreover, it breaks it down by sub-set of agriculture, and fruit crops, such as Strawberries, Apples, etc. require a lot more pesticides than, say, corn. Additionally, GMO corn and soybeans (i.e. Roundup-Ready (TM)) can really economize on the herbicides and are becoming more and more resistant to pests. Before we start delving into the GMO aspect, corn and soybean varieties were being bred to be more pest resistant long before there was GMO. Again, most insecticides go toward fruit growing crops.
As for fertilizers, the most popular fertilizer for corn is anhydrous ammonia. This is because corn LOVES nitrogen and will respond very favorably up to a point of diminishing returns to increasing amounts of it. This is injected into the soil as a cryogenic liquid and doesn't run off easily. The problem with this stuff is that they use natural gas (or coal) to make it. As I said before though, the natural gas (or coal) comes from domestic sources--it's a pain in the tail to transport natural gas by ship, and even now the economics of trying are very dubious. In short, even if ethanol is energy negative (which it isn't), it matters where the energy is coming from because some sources are more palatable than others.
Cellulostic ethanol will be free from many of the concerns, perhaps all of them. Some cellulostic methods involve Willow trees. Some involve switch grass. Heck, if a few weeds grow in your switchgrass crop, chuck 'em in with the switchgrass and make ethanol out of it. I don't know if anyone would bother to fertilize any of this stuff, and crop rotation goes a long way to naturally deterring pests. Willow trees for example hang out just fine on their own for a very long time without human intervention. Some argue as well that our pest problem is due in part to our monoculture farming methods, and cellulostic crops would break some of that up.
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RE: Don't Get Carried Away
Back to the "food vs. fuel" argument the other poster brought up, that's where cellulostic ethanol comes in.
Cellulosic Ethanol still has some of the same problems that Corn does--notably the use of herbicides/pesticides and more severely fertilizers. As an avid angler, the overuse of chemicals on crops concerns me. Pesticides are broad-based; they kill not only what they are supposed to kill, but every other species as well. Many of the insects they kill off are food insects for other animal populations. One thing we have noted in our local organizations is a lack of certain insects during a hatch period in waterway areas bordered by farms. This affects the populations of many creatures in the waterway ecosystem. Add to that the use of broadband herbicides, and the farm runoff causes a kill-off of beneficial waterway plants.
By far the worst offender in this trio are the fertilizers. These cause massive algae blooms, which in turn wreaks severe havoc on the populations of the creatures in the waterway ecosystem. Not only that, but most algae blooms cause odor and taste problems that are not addressable in the water treatment process.
I am stiil trying to find the original article I cited some time ago. This actually linked back to a Berkley study that confirms much of what UCS claims about fuel economy vs oil consumption.
Finally, I agree with your comments about butanol/ethanol. I also looked at this article about using mutated algae to produce hydrogen. Now if we could only get the transport-vs-efficiency level higher than 55%.
BTW..this is ldsudduth--I tried to login, but kept getting a 500 Server Error.
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