Replies

Even if by some miracle ethanol equates gallon for gallon with gasoline (which it doesn't) that would still require dedicating 292 million acres of corn to it, which is still three times our current corn acreage.

If this grass being talked about in the article is 10x as efficient per acre, you'd still need 40 million acres of it, assuming a more realistic gallon of ethanol to gallon of gas ratio, which will have to come out of other croplands. That means permanently higher good prices. Maybe that's worth it, but 40 million acres is a hell of a bite out of our arable land and doesn't leave us with a lot of margin for error should we have a bad growing season.

I think we're running into a physical barrier. I think the biological processes we're looking at do not contain enough potential energy to satisfy demand. And even if we did find a biological system that did that, it'd likely wear out the soil pretty quickly.

We're barking up the wrong tree. The only real long term solution is to perfect electric cars (the research into improved batteries is being driven by hybrids right now, which I imagine is the only useful thing that will ever come out of that technology), increase our use of nuclear power, and upgrade the electrical grid to support it. Not easily done, but it does have the advantages of 1) solving the problem rather than delaying it and 2) being physically possible.