Use of ethanol

Press, 4 March 1981, Page 16

Use of ethanol

Sir, — Your article on “Americans in a gasoholic haze” t Wednesday paints a rather uismal picture of the energy and dollar savings from grain ethanol: none at all. The critics have gleefully seized on the farm scale plants and old: bourbon plants and produce ethanol by energy inefficient batch processes: the energy out in the ethanol is less than the energy put into the farm and ; factory; i.e. the energy ratio is < less than one. A modem beet ■■ ethanol plant under New Zealand conditions would give an • energy ratio of four or five on ex factory ethanol price of 3045c/l of petrol equivalent. Even with their less efficient agricultural system the French, | manage an energy ratio of two,. •i though their liiriited land area reduces the. viability of ethanol as an alternative fuel. This does not apply to New Zealand and. beet ethanol’s cost keeps looking better and better (beeter and beeter) compared with petrol — but what was the cost of petrol again? — Yours etc., DR C. F. HENDERSON Research officer*: New Zealand Agricultural Engineering Institute. February 25, 1981.