...but if we made ethanol out of our millions of tons of agricultural waste, and all that grain we store until it rots, just to keep it off the market..and added a gallon of unleaded per gas tank...we could drive all we want, and our friends in the desert and Venezuela would be out of business.
No ?
Yep.
ethanol is a pretty inefficient fuel, unlike crude oil which is a distillable liquid, fairly easily broken down into its constituent fuels and other useful materials.
to make a liquid fuel from grain you must:
grow and harvest the grain.
truck the grain.
mash the grain.
mix up a mash slurry.
ferment it.
boil it.
condense it.
package it.
re-truck it to be mixed with gasoline.
each step requires burning a fossil fuel.
by the end of this production cycle, you burn more energy, 3 to 5 times, than the ethanol fuel itself contains. ethanol is purely a farm state/congressional taxpayer funded sham. it is a net loser from a conservation and pollution standpoint sine it requires so much more energy to make than it contains.