Ethanol is a joke unless we start making it out of food.
There is an effort to make ethanol from sawgrass. That is much better than wasting corn. It's still all the bad things listed by Sierra Wasp. Better than MTBE, but still damaging to vehicles.
I agree. Butonal can be fermented from the same corn, sugar beets, sorghum, cassava, sugarcane, corn stalks, and other biomass as does ethanol. There's also promising research with manufacturing it from food manufacturing waste products (e.g dairy whey).
I believe we are not hearing about the promise of butanol as a fuel alternative because it doesn't have a political lobby (as does ethanol).