MIT Technology Review looks at the Price of Biofuel. Despite considerable goverment support, the market limitations of corn ethanol are being realized as the high price of corn matched with the drop in the price of ethanol has eliminated profits. Other new biofuel technologies are still years away.

Other points the article makes:

• The production of ethanol from corn is contributing to the rise in the cost of food.
• There are high energy requirements in ethanol production, both to grow corn and convert the kernals into fuel.
• As energy policy ethanol is not making sense- even if all corn produced in US were used it would “the biofuel would still displace only 12 percent of gasoline consumption.”
• Other “cellulosic” material (such as wood, agricultural residues, switchgrass) take less energy to grow, but is too expensive to produce into fuel alternative using current technology due to costly distillation step required at the end of the fermentation process.
• SunEthanol a company in Amherst, MA is attempting to use natural bacteria to break down cellulosic material faster. Several other companies such as LS9 and Amyris are looking into the creation of novel hydrocarbons from genetically engineered microbes that eliminate the distillation step

To refute the biofuels naysayers Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valleys most successful VCs is quoted in the article with the following:

Biomass is the only feedstock in sufficient quantities to cost-effectively replace oil,…..nothing else exists……hybrid and electric vehicles, are just toys and any technology not adoptable by China and India is irrelevant to climate change….. environmentalists don’t focus on scala­bility….. if you can’t scale it up, it is just a toy. Hence the need for biofuels. Hence biofuels from biomass.” H

His views on corn ethanol is that it was a stepping stone to biomass fuels, which has allowed ethanol market infrastructure to develop.