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They use sugar beets in France, but only produce a tiny amount of ethanol. They've done studies on using beets here and found that it would be much more costly than using corn in this country. Per acre ethanol yields can actually be higher than with sugarcane, but high per acre yields don't help much when it costs more to produce each gallon of fuel. Sugar beets are a picky plant that are really only commercially viable in a few areas of this country. Almost all sugar beets grown now are used for table sugar and other sweeteners. They're labor intensive to grow compared to corn and hard to harvest. Harvesting them can also be very destructive to the soil as they are big fat massive roots with really long tap roots.

I lot of people seem to think that the reason our ethanol producers use corn for ethanol instead of some other crop is because of some big conspiracy. That isn't it. If ethanol producers could find a better feedstock they'd jump right on it and American farmers would be more than happy to supply it. When they take costs into consideration, our climate and so on, corn is the actually the best thing we have for ethanol production at present. Bushels per acre corn yields have gotten really high, on up to better than 150 bushels per acre compared to only 40 or so a few decades ago, and the yields keep going up. Corn is chock full of starch and sugars. Ethanol producers are now averaging about 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn with the more efficient plants getting 2.8 gallons per bushel. Brazilians are averaging something like 650 gallon of ethanol per acre, compared to only around 400 gallons of ethanol per acre of corn from the U.S., but of course we aren't on the equator and don't have millions and millions of acres where sugarcane grows well year around. We have less good land for sugarcane than we do for sugar beets and the climate in our sugarcane regions is not as ideal for sugarcane growing as the climate in the cane growing regions of Brazil. We're just limited in how much cane and beets we can produce and what little we do produce is already selling for a high price.

Corn is not a perfect fuel feedstock by any means. Our farmers and ethanol producers have improved yields and will no doubt continue to improve yields, but currently it takes almost two acres of land to supply one average American driver for a year. We're going to have to get to where we can supply several drivers per acre before any of these fuels that come from crops can make up a really big part of our liquid fuel supply. We'll soon have 20 million acres of corn devoted to ethanol production, and that will be enough top supply something like 11 or 12 million average drivers if they were running their vehicles on pure ethanol. That's a lot of land, but not that much in the grand scheme of things. We farm over 450 million acres and could be farming more. Before 20 million acres would supply a 100 million drivers, we'd have to see per acre ethanol yields increase such that an acre would supply 5 drivers. We'd have to go from a little better than 400 gallons of ethanol per acre to almost 4000 gallons per acre. We won't get anywhere close to that with corn, or sugar beets or sugar cane. We might get close to it with cellulosic ethanol.

Since you can go close to twice as many miles in a vehicle burning biodiesel as you can in an alcohol powered version of the same vehicle it might be easier to get to where we can produce enough biodiesel per acre for several drivers, but that will never happen with our main biodiesel feedstock, soybeans. They only average something like 40 or 50 gallons of biodesel per acre of soybeans. It takes several acres to produce enough soy oil biodiesel to equal the energy content of ethanol they're producing now from a single acre of corn. Biodiesel is a much better fuel in terms of energy content but we can't produce enough of it per acre with any of the feedstocks currently in use for commercial production of biodiesel to equal the energy content from the 400+ gallons of ethanol we get from the average acre of corn. For biodiesel or ethanol to really take off and supply us a major portion of our transportation fuels, we'll have to come up with new feedstocks. We may very well see that happen in the coming years, but until then these will remain rather small niche industries.