A couple of two edged swords and a nitpick. The argument about importing ethanol cheaper than home grown ignores the case for self reliance. Some importers of Russian gas know why that's a good idea. If the biofuels group said there were cheaper forms of carbon reduction I hope they weren't talking about offsets which I regard as largely fraudulent.

Is there good ethanol and bad ethanol? The price of grains like corn, wheat, barley and sorghum are going through the roof and could hardly be economic feedstocks without subsidies. Sugarcane ethanol allegedly has an EROEI of 8. It's bizarre that only a few years ago cane growers were being paid to leave the industry and now there's not enough acreage. Other pathways to ethanol include fermented syngas (Khosla's new approach?), cellulosic variants still in development and catalytic conversion of bio and petro methanol. It's still inferior to butanol and a host of non-alcohol fuels, both in terms of energy density and storage properties.

Cut the mandates and the subsidies (R&D grants are OK) and I think we will end up with very little ethanol, more like FT diesel from sawdust at $3/L before excise. I also think that means that most pure piston engined cars (say half a billion) will be off the road within 20 years.

Phil

A point of clarification about the nature of this research paper. In your antepenultimate (third last) paragraph you say, “Given such a dim opinion from the Government on the economics of ethanol. . .”. In case you were under the impression that this paper from the Parliamentary Research Service represents the view of the Government I would like to point out that the Research Service (part of the Parliamentary Library) exists to provide independent advice to all members of Parliament. It is an agency of the Commonwealth Parliament, not the Government. Like its counterpart in the US Library of Congress, it is fiercely independent and frequently issues papers which conflict with Government viewpoints and policies. The Parliamentary Research Service is one of our lesser-known national treasures.

Wow I just read this in Crikey

The (immediate) future of liquid fuels:

http://www.poetenergy.com/news/showRelease.asp?id=86&year=2007&categoryid=0

Study done by the Univ of N Dakota, and Mn State in which 3 out of 4 cars tested achieved higher fuel economy with an ethanol blend than with straight gasoline:

http://www.rhapsodyingreen.com/rhapsody_in_green/files/optimal_ethanol_b...

You say

While the U.S. is now converting more than one third of it's corn crop to ethanol,

I have been trying to figure out the correct percentage is myself.

When one looks at this report from the USDA, a person finds the following values:

A. Corn production 13,074 million bushels
B. Food, alchohol and industial use 4,532 million bushels
C. = B / A = 34.7%

I am wondering, however, whether the 4,532 million bushels contains a lot more than ethanol.

If we look at Robert Rapier's post on ethanol, a bushel of corn contains "up to 2.7 gallons of ethanol". If we multiply 2.7 gallons times 4,532 million bushels, we get 12,236 million gallons of ethanol which is way too much ethanol.

If I look at this EIA site, and estimate the month of December, it looks to me like total US produced ethanol for 2007 is going to be something like 6,500 million gallons = 6.5 billion gallons. It may be that there is a year lag, and this year's corn is used to produce next year's ethanol. If that is the case, we are talking about perhaps 9 billion gallons (mandated in 2007 energy bill).

If we use 6.5 billion gallons, that equates to something like 2,407 million bushels, or 18.4% of the 2007 corn crop. If we use 9.0 billion gallons, that equates to 3,333 million bushels, or 27% of the 2007 corn crop. My guess is that is really something in between these two numbers, because there is only a part-year lag, perhaps 25%.

If anyone has any official calculations, I would like to see them.

The readers of at GCC have their take on this as well...

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/02/report-for-parl.html#comments

This is an unremarkable conclusion, IMO, given its source.

For the most part the report pushed by the free-market Howard Administration favors buying ethanol (if necessary) from Brazil, but
isn't sure that ethanol is even needed
as an oxygenate. This puts them ideologically in step with American
conservatives(John McCain, Ron Paul) who reject ethanol as a wasteful government program(hand-out).

Queensland is a big producer of sugar cane and I would guess that the sugar cane made in Australia, the world's 8th largest sugar cane producer ahead of the USA, would not be less economical than sugar cane made in Brazil. One authority (Rabobank) says that Queensland's sugar region is 'stable' and shouldn't be extended, whereas the Australian grain industry supports the biofuel E10( especially sorghum-Australia is not a big corn producer) and bio-diesel.

I don't know how many times I've heard corn ethanol opponents admit that while Brazilian sugar cane worked corn ethanol in the US would never work because of EROEI.
A Brazilian farmer has stated that in Brazil 'organic' sugar cane give ethanol an EROEI of 12!

http://www.biofuelsnow.com/Ethanol%20From%20Sugar%20Cane.pdf

We're going to do 15 billion gallons/yr of corn ethanol. The facilities for about 13.4 Billion are already under construction.

Keep in mind, folks, that field corn is, primarily "cattle feed." When you process that five billion bushels for ethanol you will get back one third of it in Distillers Grains. This means, in all reality, you've used about 3.33 Billion Bushels (out of a total crop of about 13 Billion bushels) or about 25% of our current corn crop.

Just more tripe.

More and more people are coming around to realize how important David Blume's work is. Before anyone can dismiss it, they had better go through his book.

All in all, small scale alcohol plants will rule the day, no matter what other people claim. There are garage tinkerers starting to crank out stills, and the moonshine revolution will prove these studies are bunk.

When people can support their families from selling Talapia raised from the byproducts of alcohol fuel feedstocks, or many other businesses, big oil won't be able to turn it off.

The problem is regulations and distribution, not physics.

This was one of my first calculations when I came across peak oil:

(A) How many hectares of sugar cane fields would we need in order to run Sydney’s cars?
Basic assumptions:
(1) Yield of 80 tons of cane per hectare per annum
(2) 12.5 tons of cane can be distilled into 1,000 liters of ethanol
(3) There are 2.5 million cars all running on E85 engines requiring 40 liters per week
Now let us calculate:
2,500,000 cars * 40 liters * 52 weeks * 12.5 tons / (1,000 liters * 80 tons) = 812,500 ha

That is almost double the area now under cultivation in Australia (420,000 ha). In other words: If we wanted to keep our sugar production at current levels, we would have to triple sugar cane land just to run Sydney’s cars

It would take at least 15 years to convert our car fleet to cars suitable to run on an 85% ethanol/petrol blend (E85)

(B) How many liters of ethanol a week would we get for an average Australian car if all current Australian sugar cane production would be used for ethanol production?

Let’s assume 10 million cars in Australia running on E85 engines: 420,000 ha * 80 tons * 1,000 liters / (12.5 tons * 52 weeks * 10,000,000) = 5.2 liters

All current sugar cane used to produce ethanol: 5.2 liters ethanol/car/week

(C) In order to produce all that ethanol, we need an unending supply of gas (8 GJ per hectare p.a.) for nitrogen fertilizer production plus energy for the distillation process and other inputs and, of course, sufficient, regular rains or irrigation water.

Councils in sugar cane country now want cane acreage limited as the run-off from fields laden with excess fertilizer and flowing into ocean waters would eventually kill off all corals close to our shoreline.

There are doubts about the net energy balance of ethanol production. With present technology and according to information available on the public domain (NEVC & US Dep. Of Energy), ethanol production means 1 unit of (fossil) energy is turned into 1.38 units of (“renewable”) energy contained in ethanol. This ratio may depend on the type of production process, in particular the heat source for the distillation.

(D) The Australian Sugarcane Milling Council calculated in submission 48 to the Biofuels Taskforce that the previous government’s target of 350 megaliters biofuels pa. by 2010 is just 1.4 % of Australia’s present fuel consumption.

(E) Conclusion: the ethanol example shows the quantitative limitations in the use of one of the alternative fuels. It seems biofuels are best used in the vital agricultural sector itself with the aim of decreasing its dependency on oil-based fuels. While urban areas can always organise public transport to replace car usage, regional areas with their spread-out farms do not have this option. Governments will have to decide on priorities if biofuels are to play an efficient role during the coming oil crisis.

Extract from my submission to the Senate Inquiry on oil supplies:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/rrat_ctte/oil_supply/submissions/...

This site says passenger vehicles used in Australia in 1995 was 14,196 million liters of fuel (gasoline?)

http://tiny.cc/84fMm

That's ~3,750,000,000 gallons in 1995. So today there might be about 4.2 billion gallons.
To convert it to E10, you'd need to produce 420 million gallons of ethanol.
A ton of sugar cane produces 140 gallons of ethanol, therefore that would take 3 million tons of sugar cane.
Australia raised 38 million tons of sugar cane in 2005. That's 8% of current sugar cane crop going to ethanol.

If Australia decides to produce ethanol, there is no reason that sugar cane can't easily meet that demand.

David Blume's book is called "Alcohol Can Be A Gas", and I challenge anyone to factually challenge information in the book.

Instead of making sweeping statements, please reference the page and numbers, citing what he published. While he is opinionated for sure, his opinions are backed with physics.

This is about science, not punditry.

The good news about Peak Oil, high prices, and eventual gas shortages is that entrepreneurs won't pay attention to naysayers. They will just do it when they see the money from all the great businesses you can make happen from just the byproducts of alcohol.

Go ahead and poo poo it all you want, but the market will beat oil and paid ethanol haters.