Pimentel Tonight

Today I left Chatham for a session on backyard plant design at Chapel Hill High School. There is a motivated group of seniors there that are going to get some biodiesel happening. And from there I headed to Duke for a lecture by Dr. Pimentel.

He’s a famous agriculturalist from Cornell who has been busy putting down ethanol for twenty five years. He likes to maintain that both ethanol and biodiesel have a negative energy balance and that neither are worthy of our consideration.

The lecture series was jointly sponsored by Duke and UNC, and it has some heavyweight speakers on the line card. Unfortunately, Pimentel was not one of them. He was a bizarre inclusion for a series on alternative energy.

He was a rambling old man. The slides in his power point presentation were not consistent or powerful. He traveled through different energy measurements, sometimes metric, sometimes American, sometimes BTUs, sometimes kilocalories. And he provided a strange mixed up message that was virtually incomprehensible.

On the one hand he faulted over population for the earth’s demise, and he struck me as someone with a genuine interest in conservation. On the other hand, he offers nothing but coal as a fall back position for dwindling energy reserves.

“Burn it while we still can,” was a common refrain. Forget biodiesel. Make liquid fuels from coal. Shrug.

He offered a forty five minute lackidasical trip through a hundred numbers and measurements, none of which are supported by any other energy balance research. His numbers are at odds with Argonne National Laboratories, the National Renewable Energy Lab, the USDA, and the DOE.

He seemed alone on a whacko fringe, like someone who might enjoy an evening with the cold fusion folks, or perhaps the handful of global warming skeptics.

The question and answer was brutal. I was pleased to see many of our coop members in the crowd, and indeed some of them threw the hardest punches. One of our guys, from NC State, pointed out that he was using four times as much lime for a crop of soybeans as the industry standard, and that if he corrected his erroneous numbers his energy balance would move from a deficit to neutral. Pimentel waved both of his hands at once—as if to say—“Forget it—next question.”

He complained mightily about our massive subsidies for ethanol, which he repeatedly broadcast at 3 billion dollars a year. That’s about how many gallons of ethanol were burned in this country in 2004. So I asked him about that.

“If we gave ethanol a 3 billion dollar subsidy, and we burned 3 billion gallons, that’s about a dollar per gallon handout to the fuel. What do you think is the subsidy per gallon for petroleum?”

He obfuscated and ducked the question entirely. Instead of speculating on how many dollars of subsidy go into every dollar of petroleum, he spun petroleum subsidy into more subsidy for ethanol.

Very disappointing.

Dr. Shabazi from NC A+T caught his attention when he pointed out from the floor that he could replace his nitrogen inputs (which typically come from natural gas) with animal waste which is in abundance in North Carolina.

Pimentel displayed a genuine affection for agriculture, remarking, “I’m an agriculturalist, I wish this worked out.” He also called for 10.00 per gallon fuel in order to force a conservation era.

If anyone carried the evening it was Tobin Freid from Triangle Clean Cities. As moderator of the evening, she tried repeatedly to call him on his “all or nothing” approach.

“We could grow enough crops to produce enough diesel, but it would take every inch of the United States, ” was his refrain.

Tobin also cited some numbers in his research that were twenty years old. He ducked her onslaught. I was impressed by her perseverance and preparation for this event.

The sad thing was that Dr. Pimentel was no match for the audience. His data is out of date. His facts are completely disputed. And all he could do when people quoted discrepancies from the floor was wave them off as “pshaw.” His logic was not precise. His presence was underwhelming.

Rachel and I had been invited to dinner with the series organizers and with Pimentel, but we ducked out in favor of a massive biodiesel discussion downtown, and we did have Anjuli to return home.

Piedmont Biofuels broke bread with the folks from Bull City Biodiesel, including Rebeka, the solar installer who has a foot in both camps, and Stephen, the master cobb builder who is leading the Tami Tank effort at the Coop.

All in all it was a wonderful evening, despite the underwhelming nature of Dr. Pimentel.

Posted by Lyle at October 4, 2005 11:21 PM