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RE: Don't Get Carried Away
Even if Dr. Patzeks' numbers are off, a side effect of corn-based ethanol is the increase in cost. As a pure food crop, the cost of a dozen ears of corn this year at a non-Amish/Mennonite markets in my area was (on average) around $4.50-5.00. That's at least a full $2.00 over last year. Amish/Mennonite corn prices didn't change. I asked one of the farmers, and he said that he put most of his crop up for Ethanol and had less corn to sell, so he had to raise prices to compensate. Corn grown for Ethanol, it turns out, isn't the same corn you and I eat--it's the corn that chickens, cows, etc. eat. Did you happen to notice the meat prices?
The worse side effect of all in the Ethanol 'boom' is the reduction of land in the CRP program. This directly affects the land available for wetlands, etc., which has been an unexpected benefit of the CRP program. Iowa can directly trace the recovery of native brook and brown trout to the amount of CRP land in existence. As it happens, their brook trout are genetically distinct from others in the US, making them more valued. I'm sure other states such as my own PA can trace their wild trout recovery (at least in part) to the CRP program.
Couple all of this with the subsidies that are being received by ethanol growers, and frankly the Ethanol boom is a true bust. We would be better off focusing on methods such as the algae farming mentioned earlier that do not impact the environment like Ethanol does.. We could even use rooftops of shopping malls for that program, and not need to remove land from the CRP program.
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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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