Originally posted by Arwon

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Ethanol is a lot more efficient and cost-effective taken from sugar. America would be better off using all the money it spends to subsidise corn-derived ethanol to import biofuel from Brazil, a country which is now self-sufficient in terms of fuel thanks to its massive ethanol industry.

Brazil meets its own needs with less than 1% of its land devoted to sugar.

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Originally posted by Blade556

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According to that site, it takes one bushel of 56 pounds of grain to make 2.7 gallons (11 liters or so) of fuel. My car can fill up at about 40 liters, which is 10 gallons, which needs about 168-178 pounds of grain. Multiply that by one million people about to convert to this type of fuel and you have 168 million pounds of grain needed.

Now lets say they fill up their car every 2 days. In a month, we need 2.856 BILLION pounds of grain for every million people that need Ethanol fuel. (Note that I assumed that people filled up their 40 liter tank every month 17 times in a 30 day month)

And thats just for one million people. In a year thats 34 billion pounds of grain needed.

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Originally posted by Rom Manic

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Brazil also has a large and fragile ecosystem to take care of. It's interesting, really, all that rainforest area produces so much oxygen for us to breathe...I would imagine, while that amount is significant, the amount of CO and toxins produced by burning any fuel at all may begin to damage it, if only slightly. But small damage now can be severe in the future.

While we may not see farms coast to coast, making Ethanol use widespread across the globe is not going to be effective enough to be a substitute, which is what alot of people think it will be.

But anyways, lets take a scenario: All the worlds oil is gone (We know this by the power of magic), and we need a substitute. There is no oil in the immediate vicinity of the milky way (Also known by magic). We have Ethanol, but now we have to farm our lands to great extents just to survive on fuel-oil cars.

Allow me to quote myself from another forum a long time ago (In response to a website that was pro-ethanol).

Originally posted by Blade556

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According to that site, it takes one bushel of 56 pounds of grain to make 2.7 gallons (11 liters or so) of fuel. My car can fill up at about 40 liters, which is 10 gallons, which needs about 168-178 pounds of grain. Multiply that by one million people about to convert to this type of fuel and you have 168 million pounds of grain needed.

Now lets say they fill up their car every 2 days. In a month, we need 2.856 BILLION pounds of grain for every million people that need Ethanol fuel. (Note that I assumed that people filled up their 40 liter tank every month 17 times in a 30 day month)

And thats just for one million people. In a year thats 34 billion pounds of grain needed.

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So thats out of the picture. The only other alternative we know of is electricity. We could use batteries to power our cars, but now we need more power to meet the electricity requirements of such a feat. So maybe we could park our cars outside during the day and use solar power to charge our batteries, and convert existing gas stations into recharge stations. But who will foot the bill of that effort? The government? But those limits aside, what does a car need to have enough torque to even move the flywheel? Can a simple battery provide enough amperage to make the car move efficiently?

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