Ethanol

For a little while there, ethanol was being pushed as the replacement fuel of the future.  The corn lobby was the biggest advocate, but other environmental-seeming groups jumped in.  The future of the automobile seemed bright, and even though corn was quickly recognized as not optimal, switchgrass and other approaches seemed popular for a while.  It looks like the hype has now died off, which is a good thing.  Much of the support was coming not from people concerned with improving the environment, but from front groups sponsored by fossil fuel companies.

Professor Patzek puts the energy inputs to produce corn ethanol at about 7 times the energy produced.  Today, nearly all of this is from fossil fuels, mostly petroleum and natural gas.  These include agricultural inputs--fertilizer and pesticides, (which are substantially petroleum products) fuel to operate machinery, harvesting, processing (distillation being the big one), and transport costs.  Ethanol is too volatile to be shipped in pipes--it has to be shipped in tanks, on trucks or trains.  This is also why gasoline with some ethanol in it--typically E10--goes bad after a few months.   All of these inputs are ignored and ethanol is treated as a zero emissions biofuel, for computing subsidies and tax breaks, over and above the crop subsidies for growing corn.  This clearly not true, and is bad policy, at many levels.  The process could be improved: no-till agriculture eliminates most fertilizer and pesticides and some of the other fuel consumption. Agricultural waste could be burned to power some of the distillation process (for corn, there's not enough of it to do it all).  Converting to switchgrass would improve much of this.  But even making the most optimistic assumptions, the energy required to produce ethanol is about four times the energy produced.

The bottom line is that ethanol, especially corn ethanol, is a boon to the fossil fuel and corn companies.  The subsidies have distorted the market, and the corn and fossil companies have put up a big environmental-appearing front to try to improve their own profits.  But it's a fraud.