Ethanol Math

Andrew Kantor is a writer, but he can do the arithmetic it takes to show how ethanol could never work. The numbers for production just don't add up, there isn't near enough farm land to produce enough ethanol to power America's cars.

"To get a gallon of ethanol, you need a little more than 26 pounds of
corn, and an acre of land can yield about 9,400 pounds per year. In other words,
one acre of land can generate about 362 gallons of ethanol per year.
But
people in the U.S. use about 174 million gallons of gasoline per day just for
their cars (so says the Department of Energy). If the Magic Fairy came down and
all our cars suddenly ran on ethanol we would need about 261 million gallons per
day.
That would require more than 260 million acres of corn to produce.
Considering that in 2000 farmers in the U.S. harvested about 73 million acres of
corn, it looks like they'll need to get cracking."

-Andrew Kantor, USA today