Ain't that great? 2.15 billion bushels is enough to produce about 5.8 billion gallons [per year] of ethanol. Sounds great, doesn't it?

EXCEPT we use about 20 million bbl/d of oil. Factoring in ethanol's lower energy content, we will be replacing about 1.3% of our total crude oil consumption with corn ethanol.

So, even if we used 100% of our corn harvest for ethanol production, we can only replace less than 6.5% of our oil consumption. In the process, we'd cause a huge food shortages and untold hardship on American families.

But don't expect any farm state politician to mention any of these realities. "Just take the picture from my good angle over there..."

Yes, Waste -> Ethanol is way better than Food -> Ethanol. Switchgrass? I don't think so. Algae produce way more biomass per unit area than any other plant.

Also: Why ethanol? Ethanol cause all sorts of corrossion problems. Evaporative loss, VOC emissions, etc. Use your biomass to produce synthetic oil (with no sulfur and no aromatics it's much cleaner than fossil oil). Synthetic oil can also be blended with fossil oil at any convenients ratio, making its use very convenient and scaling up very easy to do. No need to spend a ton of money changing all the vehicles out there and rebuilding the fuel supply chain.

My question is how much of this figure is appropriated for the MTBE changeover. Considering that ethanol is now the replacement for the chemical, it's expected that these figures should be coming in much higher, yeah?

Anyone got a clue why all the focus on corn rather than sugar beets or potatoes? Beets and potatoes have a much higher ethanol yield per acre than corn. Beets do not require enzymatic breakdown. Corn just got better lobbyists?

I remember a news foto from a few years ago of Idaho farmers plowing under their potatoes because the price would not support taking them to market.

Really? Most of that corn is used as cattle feed. Much of the rest is used to produce corn syrup for sweetening various processed foods. Only a small fraction is destined for direct human consumption. I'm not saying corn is a great feedstock for fuel ethanol production but somehow I doubt that US families would suffer a famine if suddenly there were no more corn products in their diet. Maybe they'd even lose a few pounds and fit into a smaller vehicle.
Hehe, haha. Let me see, a shortage of corn is not going to affect the price of beef? High fructose corn syrup is used in just about everything from soft drinks to peanut butter. Taking that off the market will have a ripple effect, the upshot of which will be expensive food.

Cellulosic ethanol promises greater yields by using the whole plant and, crops like switchgrass that can be grown on soils too poor for food crops. Unfortunately, it is not yet ready for prime time. The hard part is converting cellulose into sugars. From there, you can produce several compounds, notably ethanol and butanol.
OK, so we agree that 1) Cellulosic ethanol would be better than corn ethanol, 2) Cellulosic ethanol is not ready for prime time and 3) Converting cellulose to sugar is a pain in the butt.

I ask again: Why ethanol? If you go the gasification/Fischer-Tropsch route (to produce renewable synthetic oil out of biomass), you have the following advantages over cellulosic ethanol:
1. Use 100% of the available organic plant matter, not just the fraction of the cellose fraction that can be coverted to sugar.
2. No need for energy-intensive distillation to separate fuel from water.
3. No need to sell FFV or make any other adjustment to existing vehicles.
4. No need to retool the entire fuel distribution network.
5. No increase in emissions or evaporative loss.
6. A robust chemical process and not a sensitive biological process.
7. Ready for prime time.

Butanol would reportedly be preferable to ethanol from a fuel quality perspective: it can be blended with gasoline in any proportion without modifications to the fuel system, transported in pipelines without risk of corrosion and, has an energy density similar to that of gasoline.
Put it this way: Why butanol?

When you obtain butanol from sugar via the new EEI fermentation process, the end product will also contain some residual butyric acid, a compound that gives human sweat a rather pungent odor. It is not clear if this is significant enough to cause customer acceptance problems. The EEI pricess is in also in the pilot plant stage.
You mean on top of everthing else it also STINKS?

Note that compound produced appears to be n-butanol rather than iso-butanol. This may affect the fuel's octane number. A big plus is the co-production of valuable hydrogen gas.
Hydrogen, don't make me laugh. Hydrogen will be "at least twenty years away" for the next 50 years as for the last 50 years...

Why H2 = White Elephant
1. Cost
"One of the biggest advantages of biodiesel [or renewable synthetic oil] compared to many other alternative transportation fuels is that it can be used in existing diesel engines without modification, and can be blended in at any ratio with petroleum diesel. This completely eliminates the "chicken-and-egg" dilemma that other alternatives have, such as hydrogen powered fuel cells. For hydrogen vehicles, even when (and if) vehicle manufacturers eventually have production stage vehicles ready (which currently cost around $1 million each to make), nobody would buy them unless there was already a wide scale hydrogen fuel production and distribution system in place. But, no companies would be interested in building that wide scale hydrogen fuel production and distribution system until a significant number of fuel cell vehicles are on the road, so that consumers are ready to start using it. With a single hydrogen fuel pump costing roughly $1 million, installing just one at each of the 176,000 fuel stations across the US would cost $176 billion - a cost that can be completely avoided with liquid biofuels that can use our current infrastructure." - http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

2. Properties of hydrogen
"Hydrogen is often mentioned as a replacement for petroleum. But, hydrogen is not an energy source, so much as it is an energy carrier, and certain very significant technical challenges must be solved before "The Hydrogen Economy" ever becomes realistic. A workshop conducted by the Department of Energy in 2002 concluded that the transition to a hydrogen economy "could take several decades" for a number of reasons. Hydrogen has a very low energy density, is difficult to transport and store, and hydrogen fuel cells are very expensive. In addition, at present 95% of all hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, which is why it is listed as "nonrenewable," even though the potential exists for creating it from renewable sources. Due to the substantial challenges, hydrogen can’t be counted on at this time to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil." - http://www.omninerd.com/2006/05/17/articles/52

3. It has a habit of going BOOM

Note that so far, hydrogen is only used for space travel, due to its high energy to mass ratio. Hydrogen cannot even penetrate the highly competitive air travel industry, where there is a significant benefit for light weight fuel. So, why would we use hydrogen for surface travel, where there is very little benefit for a light weight fuel?

How about consuming 50% less fossil liquid fuel. More efficent lighter vehicles like most Europeans use would do it. Wouldn't that be a more common sense approach?

The remaining 50% could further be reduced by half with a mix of improved hybrids and PHEVs. At that point,(the remaining 25%) the use of ethanol and biofuels would make sense and would not require 100% of USA farm lands.

Upgrading Hybrids to PHEVs could reduce the remaining 25% to 12.5% or less and our good neighbour (USA) would finally stop importing fossil fuel. The Alberta Tar Sands production could be eased to one (1) million barrel/day or less. Canada's and US GHG would be reduced by 25% or more.

Sounds simple, but it would be more effective than multiplying gas guzzlers and consuming more and more.

I also want to add that real corn prices today are effectively unchanged since the 1860's until today; the market is so oversupplied that prices are depressed to the point where

Although I don't think corn ethanol is a viable or desirable feedstock for alternative fuels, using a significant portion of the corn crop for it will not seriously affect prices in real terms and might help stimulate agriculture in markets previously depressed by subsidized US corn.

It's a mixed bag, I guess.

An Engineer, it would increase prices and stimulate production of corn worldwide. That doesn't mean those higher prices will be either desirable or realistic, but they will be higher and they will eat in to the surplus at least until more production comes on line.

The only real way to revive corn is to eliminate the subsidies on it and its products. Otherwise, corn growers will have to deal with permanently and artificially low prices and the American taxpayer will have to subsidize a product neither desired nor economically viable without subsidies.

The money spent on corn and ethanol would be a lot more useful if put in to research or spent on tax credits for energy efficiency or similar purchases by individuals.

This article provides a bit more information about the broader picture on crop prices:

http://www.record-eagle.com/2006/jun/04ethanol.htm

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An Engineer:

> 3. High corn demand for ethanol results in higher corn
> prices. Talk about inflationary pressure. Suddenly,
> all food is more expensive. But what can you do, stop
> eating?

Gosh, I wish. If the only impact of ethanol production was to make the average American eat ~200 less calories per day it would be worth 10x what we're spending on it. This would extend more lives than curing cancer.

The price of corn is a minor contributor to the cost of food on your plate. Farmers get very little of our food dollar; the cost is mostly in distribution and processing. As an aside, this is also true of energy consumption in the food sector: the US uses more energy cooking food than it does growing it.

About BTL via gasification: it's my understanding that the minimum economic size of an ethanol plant is smaller than that of a BTL plant. FT works best if the syngas is not diluted with nitrogen (since if it is you can't easily recycle it through the FT reactor, as the nitrogen builds up in the gas stream). You can gasify with oxygen, but oxygen separation plants currently don't scale down well, leading to a minimum size of about 100 MW. Or, you can burn the FT off gass in a turbine instead of recycling it, but that reduces the FT yield.

It would be interesting if a practical means of producing low-nitrogen syngas could be found that didn't involve a large oxygen separation plant. For example, chemical looping gasification, or better techniques for oxygen separation via membranes.

Regarding an earlier comment about beets and potatoes. It should now be obvious why we use corn vs beetsand potatoes. It's called the corn lobby. If it weren't for that lobby, we wouldn't be talking about corn.