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.
Re read what I wrote and re read what you wrote and you just proved what I said except for the part about 10 pounds vs 14 lbs of sugar to make a gallon, we agree on most everything else. I used world sugar price because why would you pay the US sugar price? Then you say I would have to pay the tariff! Bingo! There your conspiracy! Why are we protecting our farmers when we could buy all they have and the world sugar to make ethanol no matter what the ratio is. That's the point! In Brazil, they use cane and can make it for half the price of gas right now, today! We fight over a gas pump that sell 3 cents cheaper than the next.
......."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."........
I don't understand why you can't re read your own statement and see the contradiction in your own sentence. I've studied ethanol production since the first embargo in the '70's and I've built the engines to run on it and have made the ethanol myself for under 25 cents a gallon. Prices have gone up, but are still less than gasoline. I realize you don't have to refine sugar to make it and said so in what I wrote. The point was that you could use sugar to do it and still be cheaper than gas. Even using your formula of 14 lbs of sugar to a gallon, it's still cheaper than gas. The problem is tariff's. Remember the economics 101 saying "if you want less of something tax it". Why don't we want more ethanol? If people knew how cheaply they could make it themselves, they would have stills in their garages and they might take a swig without paying the tax. Why do we have E85 in the first place? You don't need it mixed with gasoline unless you want to poison it. It also makes it more expensive because you have to have 200 proof ethanol to mix with gas. 190 proof works just fine if you use it straight. You can even burn 180 proof in a pinch. That's 10% water! If you mix it with gas the water separates in the tank and you are screwed.
All this makes ethanol fuel more expensive and is just to make it nicer for the people doing the conspiring. There was a story just recently of an old man arrested in Iowa or someplace that made biofuel from French Fry grease for his VW Golf. Seems he didn't pay any road tax on the fuel he made. They really don't want fuel independence is the point.
People argue on these ethanol threads like they do on the evo threads. This is easily provable and isn't rocket science. There are still people here that says it takes more energy to produce corn than you get from the ethanol. They haven't read anything or even bothered to look at it in 20 years.