Ethanol runs out of gas when you tote up true cost

In the politically motivated rush to replace gasoline with corn ethanol, we may be doing ourselves real economic harm.

The government-supported push for ethanol will not only increase taxes and damage the environment, but will add to Americans’ burden of high fuel and food costs and especially hurt people on fixed incomes. And it will do almost nothing to reduce dependence on foreign oil — all of the ethanol production this year will replace less than 5 percent of the gasoline sold.
The scientific problem with corn ethanol is that it contains one-third less energy than gasoline. So a motorist has to purchase one-third more fuel to go the same distance. If you total up all of the fossil fuel that goes into making and transporting ethanol — nitrogen-based fertilizer and herbicides, fuel to run farm machinery and delivery trucks, natural gas for the distilling process at ethanol plants — it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the fuel provides.

Furthermore, the rush to produce ethanol is adversely impacting the environment. In many parts of the corn belt, water tables are dropping, in some places 10 feet or more in the past decade, because it takes so much water to grow corn and produce ethanol. For that matter, if the government keeps mandating unreasonably high levels of ethanol production, a prolonged drought that devastates the corn crop could cause fuel shortages in the future.

In addition, heavy corn production exacerbates soil erosion, pollutes groundwater supplies from chemical runoff, and increases the level of greenhouse gas emissions from the conversion of grassland to corn production.

Houston Chronicle