If so, why does the government need to encourage ethanol production? If it is so profitable, why doesn't the ethanol market work without all the tax incentives, the subsidies, and the mandate? Why does the government require that oil refineries use ethanol to produce gasoline? Answer: No one in their right mind would burn ethanol if it weren't required. One sure-fire way to stop this crazy ethanol binge would be to require that farmers and ethanol producers use biofuels exclusively to grow ethanol and biofuel crops.
If we were stupid enough to try to become "energy independent" of imported oil we would surely run out of farmland. Even if we tried to replace 10% of our gasoline consumption with ethanol it would require about 40% of our existing cropland. Not to mention water. It takes about 1700 gallons of water to make a gallon of ethanol. I wonder what it costs in gasoline or diesel to pump 1700 gallons of water out of the ground.
I suspect Dan that back in the 19th Century you would be asking why the government was subsiding the railroads. Hell you think there would be airlines today without government support back in the early days. Alexander Hamilton would approve of the Biofuel support the same the government in his day directly or indirectly supported new industry in America.
Did you oppose the Interstate System? Damn government boondoggle. The two lane highways are good enough, just going to make the trucking companies rich off the taxpayers. Etc,etc.
The water usage is absolutely bogus. The plants use 4 gallons water per gallon of ethanol and most of the water is recycled. 90% of the corn farmers don’t irrigate their crops. The needed water comes from rainfall.
Think about it, if it took 1,700 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of alcohol then the old moonshiners would have to be getting truckloads of water every hour to make any decent amount.
Budweiser’s St Louis brewery makes 13 million barrels of beer a year and a barrel holds 31 gallons. So about 403,000,000 gallons of ethanol times your figure of 1700 gallons of water to 1 of ethanol and that equals 685,100,000,000 gallons of water needed to make the beer.
Does that sound reasonable? Don’t to me.