Re: Biofuels provide less energy than their production requires.
But again, no mention of how they came to this conclusion. Are they including the energy involved in making fertilizer from natural gas and perticides and herbicides from oil (plus all the energy used to extract and protect that oil), and the additional oil energy consumed to plant and harvest? Or are they just calculating the energy needed to process the soy into bio-diesel, as the statement seems to infer?
Again, I have no doubt that bio-fuels are of great benefit to society, but when it comes to calculating the overall energy inputs versus the output I think many are quick to ignore the factors that would place the balance in the negative in order to show it to be a source of energy rather than a consumer of energy, or means of converting already extracted stored energy into more environmentally friendly forms.
When bio-fuels really become a source of energy then it should be pretty easy to see since their production should be a closed loop, using only bio-fuels to produce bio-fuels. I do not think this has happened yet, but it probably can at some point as efficiencies increase and the use of energy sink chemicals in agriculture is eliminated. Once technology advances enough then it should be possible to operate a small personal production facility, just as it's possible to grow your own food, growing your own fuel should be just as possible.
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