And it’s almost grammatical, too! (I guess that’s pretty good for a lefty.)

But, today, most ethanol is still coming from corn, and it’s driving up corn prices and causing farmers to divert their resources to corn from other crops, and the prices of many other foods are rising because of it.

All of the sources I used for this post were published within a week of my writing it. It was all the current news that inspired me to write about it. So, I don’t think it’s so much that my information is out of date, as that yours is still in the future. Hopefully, the very near future.

Your FACT about ethanol delivering one third more energy than it consumes to produce it is totally consistent with what I wrote in my post. But that’s still a very small amount of energy for the cost and effort required to produce it – not just the energy cost, but the costs of processing it and the social and environmental costs it incurs.

I hope biofuels will be a viable energy source in the future, and I’m disappointed to hear you say they aren’t intended to be a long term solution, but only a stop gap. My main point is that we jumped the gun on this, and leapt to massive ethanol production from corn before we figured out the right way to do it, and the result has been disastrous. My other point was that the reason we did that was because of pressure from the environmental lobby. But they cannot be held accountable for the consequences, becaues they’re supposed to be the “good guys.”

MYTH: Ethanol cannot be produced from corn in large enough quantities to make a real difference without disrupting food and feed supplies.
FACT: Corn is only one source of biofuel. In the future, a significant amount of ethanol will be made from more abundant biomass sources.
Future ethanol will also be produced from cellulose found in crop residues (stalks, hulls), forestry residues (forest thinning, wood byproducts), energy crops (switchgrass), and sorted municipal wastes. Some promising energy crops grow on marginal soils not suited for traditional agriculture. The ethanol production process produces not only fuel but valuable livestock feed products (distiller’s grain with solubles or DGS).
A joint study by the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture found that we can grow adequate biomass feedstocks to displace approximately 30% of curent gasoline consumption on a sustainable basis. This
Billion Ton Study determined that 1.3 billion tons of U.S. biomass feedstock are potentially available for the production of biofuels.

MYTH: More energy goes into producing ethanol than it delivers as a fuel.
FACT: Each gallon of corn ethanol today delivers one third or more energy than is used to produce it. Over the last two decades, the amount of energy needed
to produce corn ethanol has decreased because of improved farming techniques, more efficient use of fertilizers and pesticides, higher-yielding crops, and advances in conversion technology. Today, ethanol has a positive energy balance. That is, the energy content of corn ethanol is greater than the energy used to produce it. In the future, most ethanol will come from cellulosic ethanol, which delivers four to six times more energy than is needed in its production.

MYTH: When it comes to environmental emissions, ethanol is the same as gasoline or worse.
FACT: Ethanol results in fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than gasoline and is fully biodegradable, unlike some additives. On a life cycle basis, cellulosic ethanol has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 86%. Ethanol readily biodegrades without harm to the environment, and is a safe, high-performance replacement for toxic fuel additives such as MTB
possible carcinogen. The use of ethanol can increase tailpipe emissions of some air pollutants but others are significantly reduced.

Future biofuels will be made from a wide range of hardy and fast-growing plants, such as switchgrass–which is a perennial native to all American prairies. Switchgrass requires just a quarter of the irrigation and fertilization devoted to other crops and offers an estimated net energy values of up to
of 343%.

Biofuel production was never intended as a long-term replacement for hydrocarbon-based fuels, but rather as a stop-gap measure to buy time while we can drive up the efficiencies of other non-polluting energy options; solar, wind, wave/current, geothermal, etc. Biofuels, even in the short-term, will create American jobs while reducing American dependence of fossil fuels and saving American lives.