How energy-positive is ethanol, really?

The Bush administration is more pro-ethanol than ever. In his latest state of the union address, President Bush called on Congress to "fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years."

But can ethanol really offer the energy gains promised by the President? In July 2005 scientists David Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek published a controversial paper challenging the energy economics of ethanol and biodiesel. According to their research, the process of converting plants such as corn, soybeans, and sunflowers into fuel consumes much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates. Specifically, they said that corn requires 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol produced, for switch grass it's 45% more, and wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

Understandably, this research has been controversial, especially with ethanol supporters. The most recent return volley by researchers from UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group claims to find net energy benefits that Pimentel and Patzek overlooked. There's no easy answer to the ethanol economics debate, but it does pay to ask questions about it. When considering local sources of ethanol or biodiesel, crunch the numbers. The energy and environmental impacts of ethanol, and how they compare to those of gasoline, can vary substantially by region, feedstock (or petroleum source), and manufacturing process.

Rumors of blogs' demise are exaggerated

online.wsj.com :

Maybe you've heard: Blogs are a vanishing fad. Or a business bubble about to pop. Or a sucker's bet for new-media fame seekers. New York magazine cast cold water on newly minted bloggers' dreams with an examination of the divide between a handful of A-list blogs and countless B-list and C-list blogs that can't get much traffic no matter how hard their creators work. Slate's Daniel Gross spotlighted signs that blogs may have peaked as a business. And a much-discussed Gallup poll concluded that growth in U.S. blog readers was "somewhere between nil and negative."

The latest word from Dave Sifry, CEO of the blog search engine Technorati, is that there are some 28.4 million blogs and the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5.5 months, but other Technorati numbers show that less than half of those blogs are still getting posts three months after their creation, and less than 10% - just 2.7 million - are updated at least weekly. That means of Technorati's blogs, more than 90% are either abandoned or updated too rarely to merit the name - nothing kills reader interest or visits more quickly and thoroughly than a stale blog.

Blogs will be everywhere in the near-future, but singling them out amid the Internet tumult will seem odd. But blogging will no longer be a phenomenon. When people talk about it, they'll often be referring to tools for putting up simple Web sites easily, or a certain style of Web publishing: brightly written, frequently updated and inviting reader conversation. Blogging is easier, faster and more conversational than traditional Web publishing, but that doesn't change the fact that relatively few people actually yearn to be publishers. Nor do they particularly care what category the things they read fit into, or what technological tools produced them. That may not sound like the stuff of revolution or VC riches, but it also doesn't sound like a fad or a failure.

(2006-03-03 16:37:59 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

Total joins record-setting oil majors

channelnewsasia.com (backblog) :

French oil group Total reported that its net profit last year leapt by nearly a third to 12.0 billion euros (14.28 billion dollars), marking a record for the group and for any French company. International oil companies, which have posted bumper profits for 2005, have been accused of raising prices at the expense of consumers.

Total, the fourth-biggest oil group in the world, has nearly doubled its profitability in two years after reporting net profit of 7.0 billion euros in 2003. But the group is far behind ExxonMobil of the United States, the biggest oil group in the world, which posted record net profit of 36.0 billion dollars for 2005.

(2006-03-03 16:23:31 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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