Ian
Thank you for taking the interest to reply.
Before we look at the numbers let me comment that a comparison of grain planting with total gasoline use is meaningless. Grain plantings are set based upon current market needs. Total grain capability would be meaningful but these numbers are currently in debate and include political factors. Also 15% of gasoline replaced by grain derived ethanol is a currently acceptable goal by the industry. Biofuels form other feedstocks will make a major contribution also but currently corn derived ethanol is the major game in the US.
Now let's look at their math-even though it is not a useful statistic.
The 2007 grain plantings for the US in 2007 are
Corn 92.9 million acres
Soybeans 64.1 million acres
Winter wheat 45.1 million acres
Let us just consider the total corn plantings.
and again-this is for math only-no one is suggesting touching the food corn supply
But if all corn production was converted to ethanol It would manufacture 92.9 million x200 bu corn/acre x 2.9 gal/bu corn=53.8 billion gallons of ethanol
In 2006 we consumed 146 billion gallons of gasoline
At fuel equivalents in FFV vehicles (see my forthcoming post on relative efficiency)-corn alone would account for 36%-well above the 16% Brown cited. Even if you take ethanol burned in a gasoline engine efficiency the number is 25%- So their math is quire wrong. This makes me suspicious. However, the big misinformation is in coming up with a meaningless statistic.
A 150 liter tank of ethanol is 150/3.79 = 39.6 gallons which could be made from 39.6/2.9=13.7 bushels of corn. Can someone live a year on 13.7 bushels of corn? I wouldn't want to. Making the ethanol would also leave 13.7*17 =232 lbs of high protein distiller’s grain for a quality cattle feed. A 40 gallon fuel tank is quite large. Looks like anothe selected statistic to me
Corn was never $1.46 per bushel in 2006. It was 2.00 for the first seven months but jumped to over $4 for a few months in 2007 when the ethanol surge created a temporary shortage. The market forces took hold, planting has increased drastically and the spot cost has dropped to $3.33 as of Friday this week. It has varied between $1.50 and $4.50 over the last 25 years. The farm cost in food prices is only .20 per dollar. The rest is transportation, packaging, etc. See the following.
http://www.micorn.org/downloads/News...ood_Prices.pdf
I don’t know about Germany or the Indonesian situation -barley malt and bio-diesel from palm oil are insignificant as a source for biofuels in the US.
Once again, thanks for the information.