Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Norm Kalmanovitch

Jim,
The energy used in oilsands production is only a small fraction of what is needed to make ethanol. The oilsands only need to be warmed to the extent that the heavy oil will flow compared to ethanol which must be distilled. It takes a lot of energy to boil off the alcohol to get 14% methanol up to the 95% pure state that is required for e95 fuel and even more energy to get it to the 99% pure level necessary for mixing with gasoline at 10% for e90 fuel.
Current ethanol, production to the 99% pure level requires 100 units of input energy to get 139 units of energy output from ethanol.
By comparison if you just burned the feedstock for ethanol and used the heat generated to produce electricity with a 50% efficient generator you would be much better off than converting the feedstock to ethanol.