I would assume that it takes a certain amount of labor and energy cost to produce fuel via be by mining generation or extraction.
The problem with alternitive fuels like corn,vegitible and alchol is that they use energy to distill or extract the fuel. Coal Mining is very labor intensive so that if there could be found a way to liquify the coal in the mineing process that could save time. Oil and gas driiling seems to be the least labor intensive becuase once the well is drilled the oil well is on a automatic timer to pull oil out automacticaly. Hydrogen is not found by itself and must be made via electralis by Hydropower Plants So Hydrogen is just another way to transfer electicity. One must ask that----If we had a Dam on every river in North America could that meet our energy needs? Garbarge or trash plants were built in the 1970s to generate power but air polution is worse then coal plants because in addtion to sulfer dioide we dont know what else is going up the smoke stack
The factor to use is : how many barrels of oil are used to extract one barrel of oil? seem strange? well, Alberta tar sands extraction is something like 3 or 4 tons of bitumen for 1 barrel of oil, then there is the natural gas to heat it ( a lot ) and thousands of gallons of water Also try fuel for a tractor to plant, purchase seed and fuel used to make the fertilizer,deliver it, fuel used to harvest the corn, fuel used to heat and process the corn to fuel stage, in some cases it’s probable that today some methods of extracting oil could be as high as using 2 barrels of oil to create 1 barrel of oil.
Good Point[:)]