While the article was better than average overall, it also made the common mistake of assuming that mileage necessarily correlates with btu content. While this may be true for the one vehicle they tested and some others, it is not true for all vehicles. A more comprehensive study has shown that in at least some cars, mileage with a ten percent ethanol mix is identical to pure gasoline. This means that in some vehicles already on the market, ethanol can be used as a 1:1 substitute for gasoline by volume. This means that the overall miles travelled per btu consumed can go up dramatically through the use of ethanol in some current vehicles. (
http://www.ethanol.org/documents/ACEFuelEconomyStudy.pdf) According to annual fuel cost estimates from the epa, running e85 in flex fuel vehicles results in either slight savings or slightly extra cost over a year, depending on your vehicle.
The real downside, which was ignored by the article, is that there are no comprehensive metrics published informing us the efficiency of particular vehicles at different percentage ethanol. All we have are a few individual case studies, and epa ratings for ffv's. Congratulations to all the camry owners who can get identical mileage with ten percent ethanol. And the upside which was largely ignored is that some vehicles can get within ten percent of the same mileage as gas even with an e85 mixture. The reason so many ffv's get such poor mileage is that they are not optimized for use with e85. When they start making cars that are optimized for ethanol, the energy efficiency of transportation can be increased substantially.
Oil is running out, that is inevitable. The only realistic alternatives are ethanol and biodiesel. Biodiesel is great, especially when made from filtered frier oil, but most consumer vehicles are not diesel, so it can't be the only answer. Hydrogen would be great for improving the economics of large scale wind farms through demand side management, but is not realistic on any practical timescale for transportation. Fuel cells will be used for utility peaking power and whole building power backup for hospitals and banks for a long time before they have any significance to transportation.
Criticizing ethanol production at this stage is like criticizing computers seventy years ago. You'll never have a computer that fits in a normal sized room. Computers may have specialized uses, but they'll never become mainstream. We wouldn't even be able to make enough vaccuum tubes for half of homes to have a computer in a hundred years.
Ethanol is already economical and energy efficient in climates that are better suited for high energy crops. All it needs in the US is enough of a market for big money investors to feel comfortable betting their futures on introducing large scale production.
Sustainable farming as a great goal to shoot for, but it's a separate issue. Energy used to distill ethanol doesn't have to come from fossil fuels either, it can use wind or solar power. Therefore the energy used to produce it isn't particularly relevant to the reduction in oil consumption or sustainability. Some producers already use renewable energy. As for the price of ethanol tracking the price of oil, the greater the volume of production, the more independent its price can be. Even if it only increases effective fuel supply by one percent, that can still have a tremendous impact on pump prices when demand is so high relative to supply. Furthermore, conventional gasoline supply cannot be increased any further (except by massive usage of the tdp process by changing world technologies.) Ethanol is the only alternative available for use in extending the volume of gasoline supply. Without it we would be more vulnerable to gas supply disruptions and price spikes. At this time point future price spikes are inevitable, but the faster alternative fuels are brought online, the less dramatic the price spikes will be.
Edit: I see some people still are under the false impression that that Pimentel chap from cornell has any relevance to the ethanol discussion. If you read his work carefully you'll realize it's innacurate.
http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/debunking/index.htm
According to better studies (
http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/pdfs/Wang2005.pdf )
It takes .74 million Btu of fossil energy to produce 1 million Btu of ethanol. For comparison, it takes 1.23 million Btu of fossil energy to produce 1 million Btu of gasoline.
