How much fossil fuels does it take to create an alternative fuel?

Question

I need solid proof! I am a college student doing a research paper for a class so please include references ie. websites where I can pull up the information.

Now let be real! It cost fossil fuel to plant, harvest, transport, and produce most if not all alternative fuels including solar energy. I am looking for the report or study that gives the information.

Thank you

Answer 1

Zero,burning wvo,and zero making biodiesel from wvo.

Answer 2

Turn on CNBC right now, they are talking about it now.

Ethanol - what a waste - The corn needs potash as a fertilizer so where do we get it? we import from Canada.  Fertilizer is a byproduct of natural gas.  The boilers to convert the starch to sugar and then the sugar/yeast mash to alcohol run on coal.  The byproduct of ethanol is methanol and formaldehyde which are being dumped into the streams and rivers by the ethanol plants.  You can do a google search on (ethanol, pollution) (corn fertilizer) to get all this.

FYI, ethanol has to be transported by either truck or rail, it cannot be shipped by pipelines due to water contamination.

Answer 3

depends on how far back you want to go. if you want to play the game your way, you'd also better add in the energy it took to smelt the steel that made the machinery that built the vehicles that planted, fertilized, harvested, and transported the biomass. AND whatever fuel that was required for distillation and transportation to distribution nodes. You want real? Stick with the basic costs starting at the start of the year. Only you can crank out those numbers, because only you know what you want to prove.

Answer 4

Well, someone at Argonne calculated that making ethanol is a 34% energy gain.  That is, you get 1.34 BTUs of ethanol for an input of 1.0 BTUs of (possibly fossil) fuels.

For biodiesel, the energy gain is more significant; 3.2 BTUs of biodiesel for 1.0 BTUs of energy input (which could easily be biodiesel).

Neither of these actually include the input of solar energy required to make the plants grow.  

In comparison, if you only look at the external energy needed to pump and process oil compared to the output, oil gives about 4.0 BTUs for 1.0 BTUs of input energy.  Although, people typically consider the oil (as pumped from the ground) as an "input", which makes the ratio 0.8 BTUs out for 1.0 BTUs in.  If we applied this same reasoning to the biofuels above, then their efficiencies become horrible.