I wish people would stop touting E85 as the fuel of the future. Does anybody realize how low the energy return on investment (ROI) is on ethanol?
from a
KSU research on Ethanol:
A concern with ethanol production in the past has been the belief that more total energy is used to produce ethanol than the amount of energy available in ethanol. A report from the USDA Economic Research Service Office of Energy shows this concern is unfounded and concludes that the net energy value of corn has a positive energy ratio of 1.24 due to technological advances in ethanol conversion and increased efficiency in farm production.
Current energy ROI on crude oil is still around 25:1, ethanol is 1.24:1. Even the tar sands in Alberta have an ROI of at least 2:1 -- and there's around a trillion barrels of synthetic crude to be processed there, and would net enough go-juice for another 40 years of North American demand.
When you're using corn as a feedstock for ethanol, it's about 1/3 as efficient as sugar cane (like Brazil uses.) In addition, we would need to use just about every bit of arable land in this country to grow the corn to feed our current fuel demand, and guess what: nobody rotates crops anymore (not that crop rotation could support our current ag demand anyway), so everything is grown using chemical fertilizer made from natural gas and mined phosphates - which would continue dependence on fossil resources. With all our crop production going to ethanol fuels, what in the hell would we eat?
cliffs notes: ethanol is as much of a pipe dream as hydrogen.