[TKDietz]

"I understand that commercial operations burn coal to do the evaporation -- in effect a way of using coal for automobile fuel."

In Brazil they burn their sugar cane stalks for the distillation process and use ethanol to produce the electricity to run their ethanol plants. They end up selling excess electricity to their power companies and still make a nice profit on the ethanol.

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

That makes sense. There was a thread a while back about using enzimes to break up the cellulose -- so that entire corn stalks, etc. could be fermented. I wonder how the economics of that process will compare to burning the material for process heat.

I'm generally suspicious of anything that needs a government subsidy to work (beyond the initial R&D and startup phases). If people can make a profit from producing ethanol, then the onus will be on opponents to show why it isn't a good thing.