This is taking a tremendous effort on my part to curb my sarcasm, but here are the facts:
The article that started this thread bragged about "nearly 255,000 barrels of ethanol production daily". Americans consume over eighty times that much -- about $1.3 trillion per year --about a tenth of the gdp. Most we import, and most of what we import is from non-OPEC countries. Americas biggest oil supplier (for imports) is Canada. The next one is Mexico (from the DOE). Right now ethanol costs twice as much as gasoline. Assuming no change in price with volume we're talking about Americans spending an extra $trillion per year. People on this thread say the price would go down if the scale expanded. I say the price would go even higher because if we decided to replace all imported oil with ethanol, virtually all of the U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States. (from here)
If the issue were really national security, we could think of a lot better ways to allocate these immense resources then this nonsense. This ethanol canard will never come near addressing national security in any sense other than emotionally and politically. Economically and strategically this is pure farmer welfare.
I probably should know better than to ask, but whence came this little factoid?