If you’re worried about the effect of using too much fossil fuel, ride the bus or carpool. These have a REAL effect, not a delusional one.

http://www.whatcar.com/car-news/bmw-vision-hybrid-concept-on-show/242874

Electric motors are going to be used one way or another to power cars fully or partly in the future!! Simples!!

I’m not sure where to start. It still looks like you are hung up on the food/fuel, scarce land, afraid everyone will starve. OK, I guess I’ll start with that.

As I’ve said, we can make ethanol from any type of plant material at all, including cellulose and we’ve been able to do it for over a century.
The US Forest Service estimates depending on species, spacing and local climate, the pulpable mass obtained from culling managed timber lots is from 2,000 to 3,000 dry tons per acre. Seedlings are planted close together, and must be regularly thinned to provide space, light and nutrients to provide maximum growth without competiion and to allow remaining trees to grow tall and straight in order to provide the best milling lumber. Currently, culls are simply stacked and burned to reduce damage from fire and insects.
Fischer-Tropsch process currently yields about 70 gallons of ethanol per ton of dry wood. That is 140,000 to 210,000 gallons per acre we could drive our vehicles on that is simply wasted energy now. And you still have the lumber logs left over to harvest later, also.
There are similar conditions for all sorts of agricultural crops also. Corn stover, wheat straw, citrus rinds, cotton bush, sugar cane bagasse, almost any kind of agricultural product you look at has some kind of waste cellulose. Even lawn and garden waste.

It isn’t a matter of either food or fuel—-mostly it is a matter of food AND fuel.

As for market control—-petroleum is a monopoly cartel. You are already being manipulated and have no choice or control of price. This is because not only can you not produce petroleum yourself—-you also have no choice of a substitute product, the petroleum cartel has seen to that. With a Flex Fuel vehicle—-you can choose to use either biofuel, or petroleum, whichever you choose. If you drive a Flex Fuel car—-you don’t HAVE to use E85—-but you can if you want. If you drive a diesel car, you don’t HAVE to use biodiesel, but you can if you want to. Freedom means having a choice. If you don’t have a choice—-you have no freedom. Big Oil has done everything they can for the last 100 years to take your choice away from you and keep it in their pocket.

If you really want to be free—-FIRST, start thinking free. Most of the things you have been saying to me are verbatim quotes of the propaganda that Big Oil has been spouting for years to keep their hands in your pockets. Big Oil does not want biofuels to gain a foothold in the market—-they’d lose their monopoly status.

Lets be clear that no technology or fuel will ever give us a perfect environmental solution. This is due to energy being consumed throughout the cycle of the product including recycling. If you do support biofuels or ethanol you have to be extremely clear on what types of feedstock are acceptable. You argue that wood feedstock produces enough cheap supplies to be mass produced into fuels? Also as I said there are so many subsidies for biofuels & ethanol that create a barrier to cheaper supplies & if there is less intensive labor & land feedstocks w/ higher rates of combustion we should be investing in those materials not the junk that politicians support now. Let me illustrate hydrogen needs more R&D as there are issues of storage & the way it is currently extracted but most on this issue fail to realize they are going about it the wrong way in trying to muscle their way into getting Americans hooked on that w/o looking at ways in which the technology could be made better first that is to be extracted in a renewable fashion. This is why I criticize many how claim to be green as only looking at short-term get rich schemes at the expense of American’s & environmental folks who fail to look at the whole process. I think this is the same case w/ biofuels & ethanol. For all the talk about algae as a feedstock there has been very little support in dollars behind it I have heard this as somewhat of a pipe dream for at least a decade. Remember the scheme is control of distribution & pricing of the fuel not a fake assumption that American’s will have more choices by being independent from large futures markets. Feedstocks of biofuels or ethanol are dominated by stupid anti-competitive government polices that actually don’t help small farmers but mostly for large agro businesses. I hope you see the problems w/ current feedstocks even the scheme of switchgrass but as I said in order to produce a viable feedstock you need to mass produce it to scale w/c I doubt most disposable feedstock can actually do. Any crop including swithgrass can be susceptible to growing conditions, bacteria, or insect damage.

I worry that there are too many process in the chain of biofuels. At some point you will have to look to foreign suppliers to meet demand from set quotes or from bad production years for the products as policymakers will have to juggle food prices w/ energy prices of crops that is when w/ lobbing of the Shells of the world you will see more imported ethanol or biofuel coming into the U.S. at some point dumb trade barriers will not matter as cheaper supplies will hit the market that is you will not be able to control how the fuel is produced. This is where you lose the idea of waste feedstocks as it may be easier to grow feedstock in large quantities from foreign countries. Your idea is realistic as a competing fuel but at a given rate maybe hypothetically 20 % you reach the limit of whats possible with production of waste stock. If you say this is a actual substitute for oil products at that hypothetical number you will have to go outside the U.S & again you will have no control in how blends are produced or how markets & the big oil companies will dictate prices. I don’t see how long term conditions from markets would grant any differences in how we consume or get oil now?

We know that electrification of vehicles has its own problems w/ environmental issues. But how would biofuels or ethanol supply a more diverse fueling option than independently storing energy & using it to “fuel a vehicle”. The flex option does not allow for most to independently fuel your own vehicle w/o the dictation of a futures market that can change in pricing daily.

You know a lot about ethanol but for someone as smart as I think you are I would challenge you to find better feedstocks say taking a closer look at improving algae production. I hope you see that markets in the long-run will not be to kind to your only waste feedstock view. It may seem like a non issue now but lobbyist will continue to expand feedstocks into hap hazard imported fuels that will not go away for decades. Look at the process & find real solutions that minimize land issues or issues of labor & other natural resources first so that in the long-run we can have decentralized productive ways in which consumers in this case freight & large trucks can receive biofuels at a reasonable price w/o subsidies that will not in the long-run create the same mess we are into today.

Peak Oil is here. The development of the tar sands in Canada is proof of that. Just 20 years ago, the Canadian tar sands were well known but considered far too expensive and environmentally damaging to develop. Now, they are falling all over themselves to develop them as quickly as possible.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text

Oil companies are valued by the reserves that they hold rights to. No one can see through two miles or more of solid rock to actually SEE how much oil there is. Oil reserves are a guess. Since the more you have, the more money you get—-how do you imagine they “guess” how much oil is down there? If you said “Wildly and blindly high overestimate.”, you are correct. What that means is—we don’t have a whole lot of time. Oil is going to run out, probably sooner than later. MUCH sooner.

So—all things considered, we need something to replace oil. It needs to be something that does not pollute, is easily producable from wide spread, cheap and readily available feedstock, that is renewable and sustainable. It needs to be compatible with our current infrastructure with a minimum of change and expense. We need to be able to integrate it quickly and seamlessly into what we use now.

Biofuels are the only technology that fit all of those criteria.

I have nothing against PHEVs or EVs—we can have those too. But they will take far too long to do us much good right now. We can switch to biofuels, and if EVs are still better than biofuels they can evolve from there.

As for why the U.S leads in ethanol it is no surprise. We first subsidize the heck out corn & other stock materials, we next put tariffs on other countries who import biofuel or ethanol ie Latin American countries, large producers who refine stock into fuel get huge subsides also we set a quota for certain ethanol blends to go into vehicles of consumers. All these government handouts lead to non competitive pricing that will stay above the cost of petroleum. If you do decide to lower tariffs & handouts for farm subsidies you would see biofuels compete closer to actual petro products but doing so will mean cheap fuels from countries that will decide to reduce say rain forests or convert food crops into fuel crops.

As for one other point you bring up, we are not at peak oil. Basic economics & accounting will tell you this. If scarcity rent increases as you say oil firms like the oligopolies & cartels will increase prices to reduce the rate of exhaustion over time. As prices of oil goes up demand reduces or slows. So the point is if we were at peak oil you would see prices that don’t reflex current production & hedging costs (remember that production costs are delayed from the time of production to refining). The price of oil will continue to increase but current pricing does not indicate the situation that you are talking about. Also as prices increase from production you will see extraction methods like shell oil become more profitable, though this situation is not a long-term solution.

Just because a car can consume flex options doesn’t mean large oil producers don’t have a hand in these markets. You simply can’t produce the fuel yourself even if you have the options. That should not be understated. Now putting subsidies aside you have to produce E85 or biofuels at a level which creates a production of scale/ w/ low labor costs. Almost all current production of biofuels creates a cost prohibitive situation when competing w/ refining oil products. Again if you want to reduce the price of biofuels or E85 you have to reduce subsidies & tariffs so to bring in cheaper supplies.

Even if you impose protectionist/ political ideologies on ethanol & biofuel for the U.S. you need a concentration of producers & large amounts of capital to scale up production. Small time biofuel companies will not make it. So you still get stuck w/ futures markets, hedging/speculation that does not reduce a consumers independence from fuel sources. Land in the U.S as with other places is a scarcity this may not seem to be true but any cost reduction in ethanol or biofuels translates into large crop areas to do so. So here are some other reasons why land is scarce, keep in mind that external costs are associated with these competing uses, water resources, non-protected wildlife areas (voluntary land conservation under the AG program will be reduced), food crops like wheat, soy, & corn that create cheap consumption foods, fertilizer runoff on semi-arid land due to soil structures, drainage retention values & back to the Midwest, depletion of prairie & veg. & wildlife that goes w/ it.