Ethanol: Our Knight in Shining Armor... not quite

When you do the math, and don't just listen to what popular media tells you about how corn ethanol will free us from oil dependence and make our environment cleaner, you see that using corn ethanol is really just a shell game that's hiding a bigger issue.

First and foremost, most everybody now knows that the world is going through a food crisis. People whose main expense is food can no longer afford it, and this is largely due to 2 things, increased cost for transportation (fuel prices) and increased cost food crops in general (due to use of food crops for fuel). That alone should be a huge red flag for us Americans to think twice about upping our Ethanol use for fuel to noticeably reduce our dependency on foreign oil. (Nevermind the fact that if we used all of our corn crops produced today some estimates say that it would only reduce our crude oil usage for gasoline by 20% [oh and forget the fact that we use it for plastics, diesel, almost anything rubberized including tires, and much more]) Currently we use about 20% of our crops to produce ethanol which accounts for 3.5% of our gasoline consumption. So if we used 100% of our corn crops and used it to feed nobody, we'd only reduce gasoline consumption by 20%. I wonder what would happen to food prices if the worlds biggest corn producing country stopped selling corn... "filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year." --Source: The Rolling Stone Issue 1032

Secondly, ethanol's energy density is about 1/3 less than that of gasoline. That means that one gallon of pure ethanol would get your car 1/3 less miles. (don't mind the fact that your car won't run on pure ethanol or if you use more than a small fraction of ethanol your engine would corrode) But proponents would argue that ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline. So even if it was 1/3 less efficient, you're still reducing your emmisions. That is true, but did you ever stop to think of how ethanol is produced? You need to run diesel powered farm equiment to harvest it and use chemical fertilizers and pesticides to maximize your yeild. And what kind of fuel do you think the ethanol refineries are using to generate the energy required to ferment our corn ethanol? Mostly natural gas and coal. Dunno if you heard this, but those are also fossil fuels.

Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog. --Source: The Rolling Stone Issue 1032

Lastly, it will take more than just ethanol to really reduce our dependency on foreign oil. As the quote above suggests there are more energy efficient fuels such as sugar cane ethanol, and possibly ethanol made from plant cellulose, which would not require that ethanol is made from food crops. We should never forget our clean renewable resource that everybody has access to called the sun. Too bad solar panels are so inefficient today that it costs too much to deploy them in any sort of large scale and be profitable. Otherwise, you can be sure that companies would've cornered that market as soon as it became available. Ethanol, just like oil, is all about profit, whose pocket it is in doesn't change the fact that they both pollute the environment and replacing one fuel with another won't change our emission creating habits.

original article
I have more sources, but I don't remember them :P