Thomas Mott Osborne: “during last night's debate, there was a great deal said about renewable fuels and particularly about ethanol. Much of…”

“during last night's debate, there was a great deal said about renewable fuels and particularly about ethanol. Much of this was uninformed and inaccurate. I think some of it was due to the fact that it was based on old research. One of the comments that was made was that ethanol is not energy efficient, that it takes a lot more energy to produce than what it actually yields. Actually for every Btu of fossil fuel used, ethanol yields 1.4 Btus of energy. Gasoline for every Btu of energy used yields .8 Btu. MTBE yields about .7 Btu. It is the most energy efficient fuel that we have going at the present time. Also, ethanol reduces farm payments by $5.9 billion over 10 years and it adds $51 billion to the farm economy. It reduces the trade deficit by $34 billion over 10 years which certainly helps the economy as well, and in 2002 removed 4 million tons of carbon dioxide from the air.”