Here is an email I sent Bill O'Reilly regarding his discussion about ethanol tonight.

You don’t seem to understand the ethanol situation based on your exchange with Michelle Malkin tonight, and I can’t tell if she does. I’m an engineer so it is hard for me to be pithy; I’ll try to keep it short.

Brazil makes ethanol from sugar cane. That is reasonably efficient. They burn the bagasse (the residue after the juice is extracted) to distill the alcohol. (It is even possible to generate excess electricity from the steam produced by burning of the bagasse.)

Making ethanol from corn is a loser from an energy standpoint. And, it would take 600 million acres of farmland (most of what is available in the US) to make enough ethanol to fuel all of our vehicles with E85. We will still want to eat, so there is simply not enough arable land.

I still like ethanol as a partial solution. We can grow sugarcane in the South, and we could import ethanol from the tropical countries that can grow sugarcane. It would help us and them; a win-win situation. But, the corn and oil lobbies may not agree. I don’t think the corn guys want us to start importing ethanol.