Just love it - all of the "clean" technologies touted in this article are all "not quite ready". But coal and corn are - can I guess why they are being chosen? Anyone here understand economics? Who in their right mind would build a plant to produce ethanol using natural gas - whose price is going up and supply is going down.

19% better is still pretty good for a first step. Why whine about only "some" improvement when you can at least take a step forward - and lessen dependence on foreign oil at the same time. Work on the other technologies and pony up the money for a demo plant to show they work. Good enough may not be perfect - but it is certainly better than nothing.

If it's purely economics then why does coal need relaxed air quality standards to compete with natural gas? Let them meet air quality standards without any special favors.

And, where is the "ponying up" of money for other technologies and demo plants? For all the expressed urgency of becoming more energy independent I don't see the Bush administration pushing to attach much funding to accomplish that goal.

If there is any way to screw things up and make them worse the Bushies will find a way to do just that.

My great fear is that the oil industry which is morphing it's way into the concept of 'the energy' industry will morph again and take control of the budding alternative energy industries all to their advantage and all to the disadvantage of American consumers.

Possibly all of this massive transfer of dollars from the taxpayer to the oil industry coffers is being done to help them finance their takeover and domination of the alternative fuels industries. Just a thought---

Whatever is good for the oil industry is equally good for the Bush family and equally bad for America.

If Ethanol is a viable solution, why can't the ehtanol plants be fueled by ethanol? Shouldn't there still be a net gain?

Corn is not the best source for biofuels and coal is not the best fuel for ethanol refineries. Soy diesel has an energy balance of better than 4 to 1 and it doesn't require a modified engine. What doesn't soy diesel have? The monolithic U.S. corn lobby at its back. Soy diesel is making progress, but not as fast as ethanol. There are biodiesel refineries going up using biomass and methane, and they're managing to compete. So why is coal still getting so much attention? Let me direct you to Exhibit B, the massive and well-funded coal lobby. A lot of people make a lot of money mining coal and they've enjoyed over a century of negligible environmental controls and government subsidies (dirt cheap mineral rights leases, anyone?) to prop up their destructive business model. If the imbedded costs of corn and coal were brought to the surface and stripped away so that those industries had to compete head to head with less damaging fuel sources, they'd self destruct in about a minute.

That's economics.

Having recently watched NOVA on PBS, I'm not sure whether to be upset about this revelation. I'd rather we not burn either.

Screw "clean" fuels. Anything that releases greenhouse gases is the enemy ("clean" fuels still release greenhouse gases, just lower visible air pollutants, like soot).

The only true "clean" energy we have are those that don't release visible air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Sad to say, but ethanol is not the direction we should be going. Removing things that burn from the energy cycle is.

Screw "clean" fuels. Anything that releases greenhouse gases is the enemy ("clean" fuels still release greenhouse gases, just lower visible air pollutants, like soot).

That's not the case. Burning ethanol releases carbon into the atmosphere, true. But it is releasing carbon that was removed only months before. That's a net-zero carbon emission. Fossil fuels release carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago, for a net carbon gain. That's the difference, and why we call ethanol "clean."

Before the anti-ethanol crowd rises up to point it out, yes I realize that as it is currently produced, ethanol production uses lots of fossil fuels, so the entire production cycle is a carbon adder. I would retort that that is a flaw in the production process which can be overcome, not an inherent flaw in ethanol itself.

I said that we should be eliminating the need to burn. "Carbon-neutral" does nothing to solve the problem of the greenhouse gases (GGs) that have already been released. Couple that with the lack of and continued reduction of cooling particulates (soot), and you still run the risk of runaway global warming based solely on the GGs already in the atmosphere.

"Clean" burning fuels solve nothing.

For more information, check out Nova on PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/dimming.html

but these plants are producing stored energy.. Why don't they just run them on the ethanol stocks they produce? Sure, it would cut their efficiency a lot, but it completely eliminates the nonrenewable input at no real environmental cost. Otherwise, what we really have is a really complicated method of turning coal/LNG into ethanol, and why bother? Just crack seawater into H2 and O2 with nuclear energy and have done with it.

I just don't think we have the technology yet to convert our transportation fuel to ethanol, not without turning every inch of the country into a corn field. Here are the challenges that we have to overcome first:

http://theopinionator.com/energy/ethanol_boon_boondoggle1.html

According to recent research on ethanol's environmental benefits from the University of California at Berkeley, corn-derived ethanol produced by a natural-gas powered plant offers a 38 percent greenhouse-gas reduction compared to gasoline, while corn-derived ethanol produced by a coal-fired plant offers a greenhouse-gas benefit of only about 19 percent."

Are the estimates in this article based upon the production of ethanol per gallon or by how much cars will actually use? Remember that cars burn between 7% to 30% more ethanol than gasoline. That 19% which still sounded pretty good to some people may come to naught when actually placed in a car.

Also remember that almost all the corn we grow heavily depends upon lots of petroleum based fertilizers, must be mechanically planted, tended, and harvested with gasoline powered machines, and since we don't have a lot of ethanol pipelines running through Iowa and Nebraska, must to be trucked into gas stations. Even with gasoline prices breaking the $3.00 per gallon mark, ethanol is only viable due to special tax breaks and other incentives.