Ethanol-Basher Scores 100%...in Idiocy -- Anti-Ethanol Writers Must Go!

August 02, 2022

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by Marc J. Rauch (The Auto Channel) ... The focus of my presentations was to talk about the urgent need to educate consumers and consumer influencers about the benefits of ethanol fuel.

Almost simultaneous with my plane touching down in my home city, I learned about a new ethanol-bashing editorial that proved the importance of my mission in going to South Dakota. This latest anti-ethanol piece of garbage was published on a website called AmericanThinker.com. Titled "ETHANOL MUST GO!" the article was presumably written by a guy named Mac Madden.

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He got everything wrong. Maybe he got his name right, but given the lack of biographical information that's available about him on the Internet, perhaps he got his name wrong, too.

In the article, Mac Madden cites unfounded, absurd, grossly exaggerated information, that has all been rebutted.

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Madden begins by citing a Washington Times article, "Biden Administration Raises Amount Of Ethanol That Must Be Blended With Gas." Right away we can see that the Washington Times piece is red herring nonsense. Why do I say this? Because there was no "must" in Biden's E15 order, there was merely a waiver that E15 could be used in the Summertime, just as Donald Trump had ordered when he was in office.

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Madden then really starts his ethanol bashing with reference to what he says was a "study dating back to 2009" that was written by David Pimentel and Tad Padzek. Actually, the Pimentel-Patzek studies were written a few years earlier than 2009. All that Madden did was to cite a 2009 story published on the "Organic Consumers Association" website that referenced the Pimentel/Patzek study(s). This means he didn't take the time to read and understand what Pimentel and Patzek were saying (lying about), and that he never read the Pimentel-Patzek material for himself.

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The Pimentel and Patzek reports, which were funded by the oil industry, were significantly rebuked almost immediately by a number of entities. One of the leading entities was the Energy and Resources Group at Patzek's own school, UCBerkeley.

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"The assumptions made by the authors (Pimentel and Patzek) were not based on the best data, or were just a little bit too convenient, and had a strong impact on the results," Kammen ( Dan Kammen of the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley) said.”
(Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group is a collaborative community of core faculty, graduate students, hundreds of affiliated faculty and researchers across the campus, and over 600 alumni around the globe. For more information about ERG's rebuke of Pimentel-Patzek visit https://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/01/uc_berkeley_stu.html)

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Another rebuttal study, conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture, was presented in 2007 at UC Berkeley – what a coincidence - by Roger Conway, Office of Energy Policy and New Uses at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

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A third rebuttal study was written by Bruce Dale, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Michigan State University. Professor Dale found that the Pimentel-Patzek methodology is flawed, the measurements of BTU are irrelevant, and the net energy of ethanol is actually higher than gasoline (in other words, EROEI for ethanol is positive, while the EROEI of gasoline is more negative).

In 2005, Professor Bruce Dale participated in a C-SPAN televisied debate against David Pimentel and Tad Patzek. Speaking on Dale's side was John Sheehan, Senior Engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The debate was supposed to center on the issue of net energy balance. One of the most important points illuminated in the debate was that even if Pimentel-Patzek's finding that corn ethanol production results in a negative net energy equation that gasoline production is far worse and electric energy is horrendously bad compared to both ethanol and gasoline. After watching the video of the debate it's hard to believe that anyone has taken Pimentel-Patzek seriously, unless all other opposing information is kept from the viewer. The entire video can be watched by CLICKING HERE.

Another report critical of Pimentel-Patzek was published in 2006 by Justus Wesseler, an Agricultural Economist and Professor of Agricultural Economics and Rural Policy at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He called the Pimentel-Patzek work "flawed" and "misleading." Download the Wesseler rebuttal at https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v35y2007i2p1414-1416.html.

Also in 2006, the spring edition of "The New Atlantis" (Journal of Technology & Society) had this to say about Pimentel and Patzek’s studies: "Professors Pimentel and Patzek have published several studies on this subject, and these have been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked in the scientific literature, in government reports from the Department of Energy and Department of Agriculture, in congressional testimony, and elsewhere…Reputable scientists have publicly called the work of Pimentel and Patzek “shoddy,” “unconvincing,” and lacking in basic scientific transparency. The most recent dissection of their claims, appearing in the journal Science in January 2006, found that their results depended upon “some input data that are old and unrepresentative of current [ethanol-production] processes, or so poorly documented that their quality cannot be evaluated.” The complete editorial from The New Atlantis can be found by CLICKING HERE.

In October 2009, ethanol guru David Blume traveled to Cornell University to conduct a workshop on Permaculture. While there he paid a call on David Pimentel and was able to video record the conversation. In the more than 20-minute long conversation Pimentel agrees and acknowledges that many of the conclusions that were drawn in earlier studies he conducted are now incorrect, or could be rendered incorrect given advances in farming and ethanol production – advances that already had been proven by the time of this conversation in 2009. You can watch this entire video by CLICKING HERE.

In 2011, Forrest Jehlik, Research Engineer, Argonne National Laboratory responded to what he felt are the 5 most prevalent myths about ethanol. He said that ethanol does not take more energy to make than it yields, “Argonne National Laboratory research has shown that corn ethanol delivers a positive energy balance of 8.8 megajoules per liter. The energy balance from second-generation biofuels using cellulosic sources is up to six times better…”

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded a report on LIFECYCLE ENERGY BALANCE by stating "...corn-based ethanol shows a clear benefit over gasoline." You can read this report by CLICKING HERE.

In 2016, The U.S. Department of Agriculture released an updated (2015)report that verified corn ethanol's positive EROEI and stated that additional gains had been made since 2008. This report can be found by CLICKING HERE.

And in 2018, DOE issued another updated positive Energy Balance report. Read this report by CLICKING HERE.

Appropriately enough, Mac Madden closes out the segment of his attack on ethanol fuel his by citing the latest fallacious study vilifying ethanol: the "Tyler Lark" trash that was released this past February. I say this was "appropriate" because the Tyler Lark, et al., study is nothing more than a rehashing of the bogus studies released nearly two decades earlier by Pimentel and Patzek. About 4 weeks after Tyler Lark and his buddies released their study I wrote the third of my challenges to Tyler Lark, et al., in a report titled: SLAM! Shutting the File on the Tyler Lark Anti-Ethanol Study.

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The bottom line is that Mac Madden could have mentioned the rebuttals to the Pimentel-Patzek, and Tyler Lark study. Sure, he could have tried to soft-peddle the rebuttals, so as not to destroy his erroneous attack on ethanol, but he didn't.

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In closing: Gasoline is poison. Gasoline with tetraethyl lead and ethylene bromide is a greater poison. Gasoline with increased levels of benzene, toluene, and xylene is at least as poisonous as leaded gasoline. Ethanol-gasoline blends may be imperfect, but that's because it has gasoline in them. READ MORE