The corn ethanol story is the pick of the litter for oil companies and all other liars that infest the "preserve the carbon owners" lobby. It is that corn is the WORST way to produce ethanol and the only reason it is subsidized is that it is a big vote getter in the midwest.
There are a great many biofuel sources that are economically superior to corn and much friendlier to the planet. But these do not get the votes of the current majority of the farmers who inhabit the midwest. Quite simply, the alternatives do not compete with food crops and it is a double whammy for the midwest framers. Pull the subsidy and the price of corn, wheat, alfalfa, and all the rest go down too. And these guys have a loan at the bank for the new tractor. And the ability to pay was/is based on income from anticipated subsidized prices. OUCH!
This has been a real boon to the oil companies and the Republicans because they know they have the Democrats in a trap. By publicizing the negatives of corn based ethanol they are able to kill all the biofuels. Any editorial you want to chose spends 40% of the text on the problems with corn ethanol. The rest of the editorial will be used to paint the other biofuel sources with that corn brush.
Switchgrass, and sugar cane, and cellulosic ethanol from wood chips are actually more economically viable, less destructive of the environment, and not actually a food crop competitor. But you can bet they will not be discussed in any article about realistic options. Brazil is attacked for destroying the forest and using slave labor in the cane plantations, but the economic viability is not in question, especially if the cane is used for diesel as opposed to ethanol. To get ethanol from the cane you have to take some extra steps in the refining.
You really do have to be a politician to pick ethanol over biodiesel in the first place. The crap with Cuba enters into it also. We can't have any Cuban cane or Cuban biodiesel. No sir. They're commies.
The production of biodiesel from algae is at this point a no brainer, but the production of ethanol is a little trickier and MAY BE MORE ECONOMICALLY FEASIBLE. There are two different announcements of this:
University of Texas and Algenol both claim to be able to produce ethanol from the algae without harvesting and regrowing the algae. The little rascals put out some sugars that can be taken without killing the algae and this is then fermented into ethanol. This deal of not taking the algae and then regrowing them is a rather large energy saver in that the cellulose and such that are part of the algae (and any other plant I would guess) take up a good bit of energy in their growth. I actually talked a good bit with the dude from Austin about this and about the Demitrov papers on basic photosynthetic efficiency. Those calculations are still pretty good, and it says that gasoline would have to cost about $10 a gallon to make this deal work. If, however, we were to add up all the real costs of oil that are not currently paid by the oil producers and owners we would be at about $6 a gallon now and at the height of the oil price bubble we would have seen more than $8 and gallon.
The major problem with biofuels is the horrible loss of energy in photosynthesis. The efficiency is maxes out at about 10% of Photosynthetically Active Radiation. This means a lot of land has to be swallowed up for this stuff. Fortunately, we have a lot of land that isn't good for much else.
While I'm at it I want to give a cheer for windmills, solar farms and SAFE nuclear also and insist that a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) electrical backbone is necessary to the development of just about every one of these. It is possible to make the electricity in the plains, store the electricity in pumped water in the Rockies, and deliver the electricity on demand to New York, using HVDC. It is alos possible to locate nukes in areas very remote from population centers.