How much land will Ethanol Require?
Let’s just start of with some random quotes from the Tech Central Station article:
Proposals for an alcohol-fueled end to dependence on foreign oil do not sit lightly on the American landscape. Can they fit within our borders at all?
Solar ranching translates into paving areas the size of Massachusetts with silicon panels. But farming out the fuel supply means putting multiples of Texas under the plough. Even corn as tall as an elephant’s eye yields less than half a gallon of ethanol per acre per day. And biotech might, at best, wring another quart out of fertile farmland.
That’s just not enough — it takes hundreds of millions of gallons of gas a day to run America’s cars, trucks and tractors. A switch grass combine’s mileage makes an Escalade look like a Prius rolling downhill. It would take upwards of a billion extra acres — a million square miles – to fuel the nation’s transport.
Now put that in perspective, Oahu is 597 square miles. Ethanol grown and refined here is not going to make a dent in Hawaii’s “imported oil” dependence.
The whole TCS article by Russel Sietz here.