I think the most interesting thing I've seen on Ethonol was in an article posted here yesterday. In order to make enough ethonol to meet America's current demand for gasoline would require us to uses 71% of our farm land to grow the fuel.
"I think the most interesting thing I've seen on Ethonol was in an article posted here yesterday. In order to make enough ethonol to meet America's current demand for gasoline would require us to uses 71% of our farm land to grow the fuel."
Farm land can stay framland growing produce. Hundreds of millions of unused acres of switch grass can be used for ethanol, and it grows naturally in the Midwest. Cut all of it down and you'll have a brand new crop the next year without doing diddly. However, I doubt we will be able to fully supplant ME oil entirely from either switchgrass or corn, but if we produce 30% ethanol and 30% biodiesel our market demand would be so low oil prices would drop massively. We are still the #1 oil consumer in the world, we just have very little market leverage right now because demand is so high.