Welfare for landowners? That seems a little harsh to me. It is widely known that Ethanol alone can't supplant the U.S.'s annual fuel consumption of 200 billion gallons, but it can put a good dent in it. I would much rather see our farming friends and neighbors make money on corn or biomass for Ethanol than some other foreign country taking our money, spitting on our flag, and funding their terrorist friends.

Thanks, darwin, for clearly stating my opinion.

Nicely stated, Darwin.

Fact - If you took all the arable land in the US and produced only soybeans (for biodiesel) and corn (for ethanol) you could not replace the amount of fuel used for transportation. Without taking into consideration the increase in fuel use for an ICE running on Ethanol (optimized for it or not). In fact, if you just tried to replace ONLY diesel with all the arable land being used for soybeans you would fail and diesel use is much smaller than gasoline use.

It is impossible to know what the actual cost equivalent to oil is for any of these. And the more heavily you rely on any one of them, the more the price for it goes up and then cost more than oil. It will take a combination of all of those to tackle the energy shortage we'll encounter. If any of them were viable at $50/B, we'd already be using it. How ever much one might despise energy companies, they are a business and they seek to make money. I've read that even heavy or sour oil does not make financial sense if sweet crude is less than $50/barrel. Oil shale, bitumen are clearly more costly. The real number is probably only known to the bigwigs in the energy business, and they are waiting to act on it. My guess is that if they act to soon, the oil price drops, there decision becomes costly, and China/India/etc wins with a glut of cheap oil. BUT, if they act too late, there will not be enough supply to build the required infrastructure.
So it's kind of a catch 22, and the right time to act is based on world reserves that are known by whom?

Cellulosic ethanol is not ready for primetime yet despite millions spent in research, so it's price is actually infinite. And if it were ready, it's price is based upon the cost of farming, which is of course heavily affected by the price of oil.

GTL solves nothing. Natural gas will peak soon enough already and coal is the dirtiest, most CO2 emitting way to fuel transportation we can use, and would peak in a generation anyways if it were the primary fuel for transport.

I'm all for renewable electricity and EV's BTW. But unfortunatley, the more you ramp this stuff up, the more the cost of silicon, nickel, lithium, etc goes up. So it's not so easy to set a price equivalent.

All out on ethanol = higher corn price(or whatever crop) = rising cost of ethanol.

All out on solar = higher cost of silicon = rising cost of Solar energy.

All out on EV's = high cost of Lithium and Nickel = rising cost batteries.

I was waiting for someone to make that stupid claim about "all the arabel land would not cover our needs".

Guess what? Our needs our going to change!
You can't base tomorrows energy needs on today's glutinous usage. We don't need to commute so much, we don't need to build more roads (half the traffic will be gone when it's $5/gallon), we don't need to have A-holes driving a hummer to work everyday. For that matter, we don't NEED soccer practice, piano recitals, leisurely sunday drives.

AND ethanol wil only be a portion of the solution. Maybe our fuel will be 1/3 ethanol, mixed with 1/3 shale oil, mixed with 1/3 Coal to liquid fuel. Who the hell knows? But I know we'll have to reduce usage whatever it might be, so stop making that ridiculous argument.

For that matter, we don't NEED soccer practice, piano recitals, leisurely sunday drives.

Now, here is where I disagree with you. We NEED to be able to relax and do things that make life worth living. And a lot of those do involve using energy in one form or another. Including hauling two kids and all their stuff in an SUV or minivan.

Yes we do NEED to relax, but that doesn't have to involve a car. What if it cost you a day's worth of salary just to drive the kids to the piano recital? You think maybe we'll discover virtual recitals?

I don't have such a plan to force change. Hell, I need to improve myself first. As you said, until there is an economic incentive...

People will change when forced too, and not a moment earlier. Again, that is why we need to prepare/ramp-up alternatives/subsidize or whatever you want to call it.
We aren't making corn ethanol just to save the farmers, its to save ourselves down the line. Wasn't that what this discussion was about? Why we subsidize corn ethanol, a seemingly pointless exercise in energy production?

Well darwin,

Lets do a little math here(1997 census numbers):
~309 million acres of arable land actively harvested.
~3 million acres of arable land lost to development each year. (92 vs 97 data)
~70 million acres for corn, 8.579 billion bushels
~66 million acres for soybeans, 2.504 billion bushels
(CIA fact book)
18.01% of the land mass is arable (407 million acres)

According to the national corn growers association we were getting 149 bushels of corn per acre in 2006(a significant improvement over 1997). So this gives us ~14.9 billion bushels of corn on the unused land without impacting current food production. They estimate 2.8gallons of ethanol from one bushel of corn.

Now we have 41.72 billion gallons of ethanol in a year! Wow, maybe this is bigger than I thought?

We consumed ~138 billion gallons of gasoline in 2003.

So you propose, with an increasing population and decreasing amount of arable land, that we use every last bit of extra acre to produce 30% of gasoline needs?...oh wait, we are going to have to consume 20% more fuel to go the same distance on ethanol. This makes the 41.72 billion gallons equivalent to 33.38 billion gallons or only capable of displacing 24.2% of our gasoline needs.

Oh my, I forgot to account for the extra energy expenditure in cultivating that extra 100 million acres, and then harvesting and refining that corn into ethanol. I better take that into account too...

Hmmm... net energy balance is 6.34 for liquid fuels (actual energy balance is 1.34, but we can always burn more coal to take care of that right? source is eere from the doe) so we are actually producing 35.14 billion gallons of ethanol once the liquid fuels input energy balance is taken into account. Then with the 20% hit on fuel economy you have 28.11 billion gallons of gasoline displaced for 20.4% of the total gasoline consumption. Yet we did nothing about diesel and didn't leave any land for producing soybeans (biodiesel).

BTW darwin,

Did you notice that I used favorable numbers for ethanol where I could? 20% hit on mpg using E100 would require engines unable to run on gasoline, I used the corn growers association's numbers (other sources often cited 2.6-2.7 gallons per bushel of corn and 149bushels per acre is much higher than even the 2003 numbers I found off of the USDA website). I took the gasoline usage number from 2003 (less than we use now).

Corn-based ethanol boosts evaporative emissions, so it isn't even much of an air-quality improver.

I haven't gone over Patrick's numbers carefully, but I'm sure he's not far off the mark.  Ethanol and biodiesel are both dead ends.  The only solution which lets us continue to drive kids and their stuff to piano recitals is electric propulsion.  As the cost of PV, wind power and batteries keep falling, we'll get there — if something doesn't distrupt the gradual progress first.  That's one reason why I want gas taxes and whatnot to hurry it along.

Engineer-Poet, biofuels don't have to support the fuel needs of the current fleet in order to be useful. The efficiency increases of EVs or plugins would drastically reduce the need liquid fuels. If EVs, plug ins, whatever can reduce demand by something like 80 percent even current corn-based ethanol technology could deliver a substantial portion of the remaining liquid fuel needs. No technology has to provide the complete answer.

Heck even corn based ethanol can get better: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/mit_engineered_.html