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The prez just left the Brazilians mad because they wanted the 54 cent a gallon tax lowered. They have the ethanol, we don't want it. The corn producers are the problem. If ethanol can be produced below $1 a gallon, why is it over $2 on the futures price(2.32 as I write)? We use corn at $4 a bushel and they use cane at a dirt cheap price is why.

It's all to protect a few votes in the midwest. If we are going to do this, you have to jump in with both feet. Right now, this morning, refined sugar is about 10 cents a pound. At 10 pounds per gallon of ethanol, thats $1 a gallon with a refined product. You don't need to refine it before fermentation, but that just shows how cheap it can be if we weren't propping up the corn farmers. In Brazil, ethanol is 1/2 the price of gasoline and they export a surplus.

If you have figured out a way to make a gallon of pure ethanol from just ten pounds of sugar you should go get a patent and become a zillionaire. It takes everyone else fourteen pounds of sugar or starch to make a gallon of ethanol. With your new method and your supply of ten cent a pound refined sugar you ought to get rich. Where do you find sugar prices like that in the U.S. anyway? I just checked U.S sugar prices and it's going for more than twenty cents a pound. It's close to ten cents a pound on the world market, but of course we can't really buy sugar on the world markets here without paying massive tariffs. Look for "Sugar #14" for U.S. commodity contract prices next time you check, not "Sugar #11," which would show you the world market prices as opposed to U.S. prices.

Chuckles, no offense intended here, but do you really believe there is some grand conspiracy on the part of corn growers and ethanol producers to use nothing but corn for ethanol production? That's just silly conspiracy theory nonsense. Now, no doubt American farmers, corn producers and sugar crop producers alike, do try like crazy to protect themselves from foreign competition. Our sugar industry is extremely protectionist. Sugar crop growers have been actively fighting against attempts (paid for by companies that use sugar to make food products who want to remove protective tariffs on foreign sugar) to subsidize their crops like corn or cotton or wheat or whatever because they know that they will go under as soon as the price supports disappear and the door opens up to foreign competition. While farmers do spend a lot of money lobbying for protection against foreign competition, as far as American grown crops go, corn really is the cheapest one out there for use as an ethanol feedstock, and that's why it ends up being the one our ethanol producers use the most. There's no grand conspiracy to use corn and only corn. If they had a better feedstock they could grow on a huge scale here and thereby reduce the costs of ethanol production American farmers and ethanol producers would switch to that feedstock and in the end make a lot more money.

The reason they wouldn't use refined sugar for instance is that we don't and can't produce nearly enough of it here to supply all the ethanol plants, and in big part because of our artificially high sugar prices in this country it would end up being way too expensive to produce ethanol from sugar here. They don't use refined sugar for ethanol production in Brazil either though. There is no need to refine the juice from the cane into table sugar before converting it into ethanol, and it's not as easy as you might think to ferment refined sugar for that matter anyway.