I found it interesting that 40% of the corn crop goes to produce ethanol. According to the article, that works out to 91*0.40= 36.4 million acres. This is about

I found it interesting that 40% of the corn crop goes to produce ethanol. According to the article, that works out to 91*0.40= 36.4 million acres. This is about the same as all the farmland in Iowa (32 million acres). The average power output of this land by ethanol production is about 40 Gigawatts [(13.2 billion gallons of ethanol per year) X (89 million Joules/gallon) / 3.154e+7 seconds per year/1e9]. With the advent of electric cars, taking into consideration the energy used in producing the ethanol and the lower efficiency of internal combustion power, you could probably replace that farmland energy output with ten 2 Gigawatt nuclear power plants. It would be cool if the environmentalists and the farmers on the marginal areas of the great plains could get together and work on opening up a huge prairie preserve while building a dozen nuclear power plants to replace the lost energy. Bring back the huge herds of Bison. After all, as said elsewhere in this thread, the Ogalalla Aquifer is starting to run dry.