EROEI

[Fugeguy]

Currently from what I've read ethanol is roughly equivalent to burning natural gas to produce charcoal from wood.

If anyone is interested I can post several studies.

 

[zerosum]

When the biofuels become inherently (relatively) cheap, they will fuel the process because they are already at the producing site, just like oil refineries now consume some of their process fluids to fuel the process (as opposed to, say, importing intrinsically cheaper coal to fire the process).

Perhaps then the economic distortion caused by government intervention can be appreciated.

Not to mention the environmental disaster fuel EtOH from corn is rapidly becoming.

 

[KiwiMace]

I did mention that the question was tongue in cheek...

The obvious answer is that we have to get our energy sources into a form in which it can be used in it's intended purpose.

Natural gas is a wonderful energy source (while we have it) but it suffers from low volumetric efficiency, and it can't be added to liquid petroleum based fuels to reduce pinking.

Whether we should be driving injected NG cars might be cause for another forum.