GoodCheer, to respond to your question, see here:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/achieving-energy-victory

Letstakeawalk, you fatally undermine your case by citing anti-ethanol zealot David Pimentel. Like many cranks, he is not a credentialed and respected expert in the field he writes in (he is a mere insect entomologist rather than an engineer, let alone a specialist in energy) and has had his papers forcefully refuted in the refereed literature. Not that that prevents oil cartel funded think tanks from spamming them out into public discourse long after they have been discredited.

Pimentel is notorious for several reasons.

One is that he is an outlier among other writers on ethanol. As you can see here,
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/pdfs/43835.pdf (page 4) he and his collaborator are virtually alone in their conclusions, and his methodology is constantly corrected

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/brief_comparison_pimentel_patzek.pdf

That doesn't stop his papers from being spammed all over the place after they are refuted.

Second is that his collaborator Patzek is an oil industry man.

Third, he is on the record holding many fringe views such as opposing pet ownership (calling dogs and cats "invasive species" to North America) as well as all modern agriculture (including the Green Revolution that has saved billions from starvation), and wants to reduce the world population by government policy by at least half, and to reduce Americans' standard of living by at least half. And that's just what he's willing to say in public.

Fourth, his "greatest hit" paper in 2002 claiming to prove ethanol is a net energy consumer is absurd. If it were true it would cost a fortune and would need subsidies of more than its value to be remotely competitive, which it does not either in the US or Brazil - so the claim is a humiliating failure of basic numeracy. The specifics of the paper were torn apart within a year in the refereed literature by Butler and other actual experts in chemical engineering, who highlighted numerous errors and fatal flaws such as Pimentel using decades-old statistics (always to ethanol's detriment) or his assuming that all ethanol corn is irrigated (only 16% of corn is, and nearly no ethanol corn is - which alone destroyed his calculations) etc.

Bill Young, I stand corrected. I knew that was true for methane and natural gas as a whole, and figured that carried over.

Letstakeawalk, these quotes are absurd.

In drastic contrast with gasoline, ethanol -

When burned, emits significantly less NOx, and in vapor form (released via imperfect combustion or leaks during refueling) reacts to atmospheric NOx at less than a tenth the rate. Finally its vapor easily washes out of the air when it rains, unlike gasoline vapor which is persistent. Result: far less ozone smog.

When burned, emits NO sulfur, the cause of acid rain;

When burned, emits NO smoke, soot, or particulate matter, the cause of smog and 40,000 lung cancer deaths a year according to EPA. (In fact firefighting crews used to billowing black smoke from gasoline fires have had to be retrained to realize that the lack of smoke does not mean no fire when ethanol is present). Say goodbye to black roadside snow.

Is water soluble and biodegradable, making water pollution physically impossible. If the Exxon Valdez had been carrying ethanol, it would not have remained persistently concentrated in the local environment but dissolved away into the vast hydrosphere within days if not hours, and the been munched by naturally occurring bacteria until there was no trace. Meanwhile the Valdez is still killing wildlife as sea otters eat contaminated shellfish. Also there would be no obnoxious rainbow slicks in roadside puddles or waterways frequented by Jetskis etc.

Is renewable and thus its carbon is part of the current carbon cycle and would have returned to the atmosphere anyway - no net addition. By contrast a fossil fuel's carbon has been sequestered deep underground and would have remained there for essentially forever in human terms. Also agriculture and adding leaf space has a cooling effect - that's why the air above cities is hotter, and why standing on your yard is cooler on a hot day than standing in the asphalt street.

Finally, gasoline is riddled with aromatics such as benzene, xylene, and toluene that are carcinogens and mutagens. Ethanol is neither.

Propane, like methane, ethane, or butane, can only be liquefied under high pressure or when cryogenically chilled. Both methods are expensive, inconvenient, and unnecessary.

It makes far more sense to deal with propanol, methanol, ethanol, or butanol -- alcohols that are liquid at normal temperature and pressure and which can thus use ordinary non pressurized non refrigerated transports and storage (both at the filling station and in the vehicle).

Technology allowing cars to use any of these alcohols in an otherwise ordinary gasoline car has existed since the early 1990s, using the same fuel tank, fuel line, and engine as the gasoline, in any mix with each other or gasoline or no mix at all.

It costs automakers only $130 per car to add compatibility with any alcohol fuel, far less than the cost of, say, an airbag. We should simply mandate it as a standard feature in all new cars to create within 3-4 years a market share for alternative fuel compatibility big enough so that alt-fuel is routinely sold at gas stations.

(Currently some automakers make some of their cars ethanol/gasoline compatible - a $100 expense. But this is not a standard feature across all their lines, models, and trim levels, is not done by all automakers, and is not any-alcohol compatible.)

Is it just me or does it look like someone stepped on it? Maybe it's the photo equivalent of Stretch-o-vision on TV, which idiots think is HD - a horizontal stretching.

jake said, "Flex-fuel didn't really solve any problem."

Actually, according to a Merrill Lynch analysis published in the Wall Street Journal, ethanol helped keep the price of gasoline down by 15% compared to what they would have been otherwise.

"We have millions of flex fuel cars, but no one is using the flex fuel ability because of lack of availability of E85."

Actually, there are over 2,000 filling stations selling E85 now in the US, a sharp increase from only 300 in 2005.

http://www.e85fuel.com/news/2008/101308_1800stations/2001-2008_growth_chart.gif

Frankly that is a miracle given the small market share of flex fuel cars (about 3%). Our policy makers have it ass backwards, trying to push the fuel without making sure that the cars can use it.

A simple mandate that all cars be fully flex fueled, able to run equally easily on any alcohol fuel as on gasoline, is in fact the least intrusive and easiest way to break through the chicken and egg dilemma here. It is the key step that remains neglected. You can subsidize and tax break and to everything else you want, but nothing matters unless the cars can use it, unless there's a market out there to buy it. The MANDATE is the key, and the solution to the complaints and objections by anti-alcoholers.

Cellulosic ethanol is not "better" in any way than standard sugar-starch ethanol. It is a distraction and an excuse for more delay while OPEC makes hundreds of billions a year to spend on luxury, extremism, terror, and nuclear weapons. Inedible organic matter can already be made into CHEAP methanol fuel, with no need for years of expensive maybe ready someday research. A smart post petroleum policy is for methanol to be the standard bargain fuel and ethanol to be the mid range fuel. Maybe propanol, butanol, or bio-gasoline to be the high end fuel.

BlackbirdHighway, the world economy collapsed when gasoline hit over $4 a gallon in the US, and more relevantly when petroleum hit $140 per barrel on the world market (up from $10 a barrel in 1999).

And throughout that fourteenfold run-up, petroleum demand continued to rise. Oil demand is highly price-insensitive and inelastic. We just keep on driving and taking the "hit" economically, sacrificing other things, until everything crashes.

Get it now? You will not affect human behavior to reduce oil demand and consumption by taking gas to $10 a barrel; you'll just destroy economic growth and prosperity and countless real people's lives.

The issue of fuel efficiency is suffused with emotionally charged myths and magical thinking. Too many politicians and activists display a vast impatience with the blunt realities of science, physics, chemistry, and cause-and-effect rationality. Just mandate it and somehow it will happen.

Supposedly, massive breakthrough in efficiency are possible or even imminent, but stupid / evil automakers mulishly refuse to implement them, for reasons that are never properly explained. After all no automaker is owned by or owns an oil company, so they cannot be hurt by reduced oil demand. Furthermore if there really is a huge demand from the driving public for increased fuel efficiency automakers would make that their top priority, discarding safety, price, comfort, power, range, speed and style as needed to do so. So they can't be holding back on these huge increases in fuel economy as part of a sinister greedy plot. So why don't they?

Because you can't squeeze any more blood from this stone. The internal combustion engine is a highly mature, well-understood, more than century-old technology. The easy and obvious steps to increased fuel efficiency have already been taken (not that they reduced gasoline consumption either, see above). There IS NO big breakthrough around the corner, and mandating it will only force automakers to produce more of the unpopular money-losing high MPG cars that previously had been subsidized by the highly popular and profitable low MPG SUVs, pickup trucks, minivans and performance sedans.

The real solution, again, is to break out of the gasoline box. If alcohol compatibility is a standard feature like seatbelts, in a few years alcohol compatible cars will achieve enough market share so that gas taxes will begin to persuade people to switch fuels.

It's fuel SUBSTITUTION, not conservation, that is the proper goal and policy.

"One way the government can get cleaner cars to the market is to raise CAFE standards, which they did earlier this year."

Wrong. CAFE raised average mpg from 13 in 1976 to 20 in 1990, but gasoline consumption went UP, from 89 to 103 billion gallons a year. Increased efficiency does not work; the growth in demand and usage is too strong and will swamp it.

Greens constantly talk about how laying down more highway doesn't ease congestion because more cars flood the road to take advantage of the extra capacity, soon bringing congestion right back to where it was.

Why can't they understand that a similar dynamic is at work when it comes to efficiency? We CANNOT make the Earth cleaner with more fuel efficient cars. It will NOT work.

Just consider that China has 8 cars per thousand people, a quadrupling in the last several years. We have 800 per thousand. The growth of car ownership in China in India is going to be explosive - even the most draconian regulation and dramatic efficiency increases cannot hope to match the massive increase in fuel consumption that is already happening.

Fuel efficiency is a mirage, a distraction, a waste of political and media and consumer e-energy and focus, a waste of research dollars, both public and private. The 76-90 increase was the easy stuff, the obvious low hanging fruit.

The real solution is not austerity but to switch to a form of motive power that is renewable and clean(er). EVs offer that but they are not ready for prime time. For the short and mid term the solution is alcohol fuel, which is easy to transition to given the existence of cheap ($130 per car) flex fuel technology allowing automakers to add alcohol capability to ordinary gasoline models.

Algae can also produce methanol, which can be made from any biomass without exception. Methanol can be used in fully flex fueled cars, which are able to use gasoline or any alcohol fuel equally easily.

As for hydrogen - http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax