Source: E&E (subscription required)
Katherine Ling, E&E reporter
Corn ethanol supplies twice the amount of energy that is required to make it, the Agriculture Department said in a report released today.
For every British thermal unit (Btu) of energy required to make corn ethanol, 2.3 Btu is produced, the report says. The ratio is higher, it adds, if companies use biomass energy in ethanol production.
"Ethanol has made the transition from an energy sink, to a moderate net energy gain in the 1990s, to a substantial net energy gain in the present," the report says. "And there are still prospects for improvement."
It takes less corn to make an equal amount of ethanol, the report says. Greater use of starch in corn and higher corn crop yields per acre of land have helped ethanol yields increase by 10 percent in the past two decades, the report says.
USDA's Office of Energy Policy and New Uses gathered data for the report from a survey of corn growers in 2005 and ethanol production plants in fall 2008 and winter 2009.
