[JamesP81]

Some ethanol makes sense, even though it is a loser to plant, grow, and refine ethanol.

Bluntly, I don't believe that, especially if you use sugar instead of corn.

I am related to some people who did hard time for moonshining. They could make 20 gallons of that stuff in a couple of days with supplies they could move in a pick-up truck (and not a very good one either, considering we're talking about the 1930s) and a homemade whisky still. If American industry has degraded to the point we can't even make moonshine anymore, then we really are in bad shape.

[RightWhale]

They burned some wood to cook up that product.

[KC_for_Freedom]

I looked up some reports to see if I could back up what I said. What I found shows that improvements in technology are indeed being credited with a slight positive benefit for ethanol. Look at the first table in this document:

http://www.ethanol.org/pdfs/energy_balance_ethanol.pdf

It suggests that a factor of 1.34 can be used showing that ethanol can produce about 34% more energh than it takes to make it. (However it is still a lot less stored energh than petroleum which means mileage will fall, but you can use ethanol to reduce our dependence on foreigh oil.)