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Originally Posted by MikeK
I read an article on this exact topic months ago. It put 90% of the blame on the current ethanol boom. Bush gave a speech a while back promising subsidies to increase ethanol production and a lot of farmers have started selling corn and other crops to refineries (or whoever makes ethanol from plants).
Since the crops used to be used for everything in the grocery store, including feeding livestock, the prices have gone up. There are hundreds of ethanol refineries under construction, and when they all start demanding corn and other crops in the next few months/years, the situation will get even worse.
The ironic part is that if every singe crop grown in the US was converted to ethanol, it would only cover 4% of the current energy use (and in the process the population would starve and the revenue from food exports would dry up). Awesome!
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Ethanol/Biodiesel is modern-day snake-oil.
It's an awesome idea... using "America's Heartland" to detach ourselves from Middle Eastern oil. But it's not like we've got excess corn flying out of the nation's ass... Plus the cost of converting corn to fuel is not cheap, nor is it efficient when you factor in the cost of farming plus the cost of refining. Maybe going the route of using farm waste or biofuel as fuel for electric power plants... that's not a bad idea. But trying to fuel cars with corn isn't even a good stop-gap measure on the way to hydrogen power.
I will say though, E85 is a great fuel... great in turbo cars.
IMO, we need nuclear, wind, solar and clean-coal power, and plug-in hybrid or straight electric cars. Use ethanol just as an octane booster for normal fuel... don't expect it to save us from external energy dependency.