In a message dated 8/13/2008 6:49:51 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, hjjohnson@sasktel.net <mailto:hjjohnson@sasktel.net> writes:

    I'm not Charlie but in my opinion, corn is one of the worst due to
    competition w/ food consumers. The best option for producing
    ethanol in my opinion would be Algae, totally renewable and if
    used in the correct varieties, it grows VERY fast. You can add
    waste to the mix to keep the nutrients needed to grow it and
    there-bye dispose of two nasties w/ the same stone.. it's an
    emerging market but in time it will replace alot of the food
    variety's currently used.

    Remember back in college when we used to try and decide.. gas
    money or food [or beer]...  anytime you have those two
    competing... it's gonna hurt in the long run..

    Just my opinion..

    Jarrett Johnson

 
The number 2 yellow corn for food stock is required to have less than 10% water content. And other requirements like few damaged kernals, and so-on. About $7.00 per bushel.
 
For Ethanol, the requirement is less than 30% water content, so in most cases the farmer does not need to dry it. A big savings, even though less money is paid for brewing corn. About 6.23 per bushel. About 2 gallons of ethanol is produced from each bushel. How much energy/ fuel is expended to brew each bushel, I could not find.
 
The water corn mash must be boiled to remove the alcohol, but if they pump it down to lower pressures, less heat is required. Each gallon earns the distiller about $2.34 when last I checked.  There were over 100 new distillers cooking corn, with more being built. So the E85 is close to all alcohol and you pay closer to $4.00 for $2.34 worth of alcohol. The oil companies love you.  If the government quit all subsidies for ethanol, to farmers, brewers, and the oil companies, and the EPA stopped screwing with dozens of formula for each area of the country. The oil companies would not buy one gallon of alcohol, for motor fuel.
 
Ethanol in motor fuel is a construct of the US government trying to satisfy the tree huggers. Nothing more.
 
The EPAs last great idea to reduce the evil fumes was a fuel additive known as MTBE (Methyl-Tertiary-Butyl-
Ether). A vile poison that does not break down into anything else. It is now in every water supply in the US in some quantity. Even water wells miles from roadways (where there are huge concentrations) Now you breath it on the freeway. It is the fuel for every known malady and birth problem. It was forced on the oil companies who wanted nothing to do with it. It is now outlawed federally, but before that each state outlawed its use before the feds admitted it was a horrible idea. More tree hugger crap. And the folks who love them.
 
We sit on a 600 year supply of oil. We are not permitted to drill for it. I take pictures of Manatees at a Nuke power plant, converted to coal burning at the cost of God knows what, so the tree huggers would be happy.
 
This coal plant scrubs the smoke to nothingness. Hauls it away to who knows where so all of the delightful chemical compounds made in coal smoke will turn up in the water some day.
 
Now the electric bill includes the never finished nuke plant and the coal fired plant built on the site.
The wind farms now produce less than one percent of all electrical power. With a trillion dollars and a big moon landing push that could be 5% in 10 years. T Boons idea is to build wind power and use the natural gas that powers electrical generators in power stations to liquid and run cars on that. The stations would need to be manned and on standby, because the wind sometimes won't  blow fast enough. Generally a 95% back up must be maintained for wind generators. Another problem is that we import 20% of the natural gas we use now. That used to be zero. It was found along with oil but now we don't drill many wells anymore do we?  See California.............................See California buy massive amounts of power from Canada.........see California have rolling outages, and brown outs.  And they want a million electric cars. With no electrical grid to run all of the demand they have now.
 
We are in the hands of Genius...................in the Wile E. Coyote sense of the term.
 
Lynn E. Hanover