And the profits grow

[Kevin]

GG, I agree with everything you are saying. I have one other caveat with bio-fuel. I'm concerned about the impact of overlapping the energy market with the food market. There will be a tendency to use arable land for fuel, that would otherwise feed the third world. In that case, where will compassion fall? Will it side with starving humans and economic stability, or will we continue to prevent drilling for oil in otherwise off limits areas?

Yeah, that is a real concern. It's yet another reason why my whole "what if the US had embraced ethanol like Brazil" thought needs more study. I've not looked at how much land that would require to meet X% of fuel needs. I've not looked at if the Brazilians are cutting down rainforests mostly to make room for crops for fuel, land for habitat growth or what not, to try and look at that environmental impact.

I'm not really worried that the price of corn that we eat would go up because of the demand for fuel because we don't eat the corn that would be grown for fuel creation. Just like we don't eat the corn that is grown to feed the animals that we eat or get our milk from. We can, but most of the corn humans eat is a different kind of plant. Most of the corn grown in this country most people wouldn't want to eat, they wouldn't like the flavor. But as you mentioned and as I kinda covered with my density issues, I would be worried about the impact on the food market for exactly the reasons you state. If fuel corn sells for $1/bushel and feed corn sells for $.85/bushel and corn for people only sells at $.75/bushel and wheat sells for $.50/bushel all 4 products have the same yield per acre (or you convert those figures into $/acre so the yield is accounted for), what would you grow on your 500 acres? Well you would grow fuel corn, which would lower it's price and likely raise the price of the other 3, assuming you were initially growing nothing, if you were growing wheat then it would be affected more as you have cut it's supply, but yeah, basic economics.

One potential answer to this is the processes that use everything, so that all you are doing is adding value to whatever you grow. Of course those processes don't produce as much fuel and they are more expensive to run to create fuel especially when you factor in transportation costs since a "traditional" ethanol plant would be place right next to the fields that were growing the crop that they were going to use, but a process that was just using the old stalks of the corn (which used to get composted/mulched/worked, whatever the term back into the soil so now you have to worry about the health of that soil more as some of that isn't going back in) after harvest, isn't going to set up as close to the fields that it is using.

So yeah, I still like the idea, and I still think it is workable but I do think it would have a negative and direct effect on the food markets or at least our taxes because the government could very well have to step in provide subsidies for food growers since I'm pretty sure the energy growers would be making more money.