[FastCoyote]

"No, YOU misunderstood IronJack's meaning. Whether or not ethanol takes more energy to produce than it gives off as a fuel (kind of disproven by Bommer's posting), IF we use American coal as the source of fossil energy for the distillation process (the biggest "energy hit" during production), this displaces a large amount of foreign crude oil--far more than just the ethanol produced."

Then you both are a little dim, because you might as well crack the coal to begin with instead of creating a massive farm welfare state. Unless that's the goal, in which case we might as well go back to burning wood in steam engines because that would certainly create more work.

And if you are going to all this trouble, why not just go nuclear in the first place. I think you guys are just Rube Goldberg wannabees.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Then you both are a little dim, because you might as well crack the coal to begin with instead of creating a massive farm welfare state. Unless that's the goal, in which case we might as well go back to burning wood in steam engines because that would certainly create more work."

Completely wrong. "Cracking coal" (in reality, a bit more is involved than simple cracking, as a large amount of post-cracking refining is also involved) is FAR more energy intensive than simple distillation of ethanol, and so uses far more coal energy per gallon of "transportation fuel" produced than would the ethanol route. To take JUST the core processe---"cracking" involves temperatures up around 500 Centigrade--distilling ethanol barely takes 100 Centigrade.

There's someone "dim" here, but it's neither me nor IronJack.

[IronJack]

Then you both are a little dim, because you might as well crack the coal to begin with instead of creating a massive farm welfare state.

Yeah. WE'RE dim. You wanna take a shot at how much energy is consumed in "cracking" the coal, compared to how much is used to produce the ethanol?