Department of Agriculture

[Kevin]

I don't have time to do the research, but wanted to make a quick comment: I was told South America uses switch grass for ethanol and has completely gotten rid of their dependence on oil. I also heard switch grass won't grow out here in North America, else farmers would have used that instead of corn. I'll check into it more when I get back from JURY DUTY...

Almost all of Brazil's ethanol comes from sugarcane, and they are the only oil independent nation I know of.

Switch grass grows in the US (it's native to North America and grows from southern Canada down to middle Mexico). It's also fairly drought resistant. From what I've read it would be better than corn (corn is actually one of the worst crops to use for ethanol because of how badly it leaches nitrogen from the soil and it's a fairly low rate of return on fuel from biomass). It's my understanding that a few test farms have been set up to test commercial viability of switch grass for ethanol. One of it's other big advantages is that you can get moderate to high yields in soil that couldn't sustain most other "row crops". It can be used as feedstock for cattle, but it has issues for horse, sheep, and goats. It doesn't really have any direct human consumption.

So the main issue with it, and corn as well, is that you end up having energy production in direct competition with food production (only so much land and the entire edible part of the plant is used to produce ethanol). Sugarcane works in Brazil because most of the sugar cane is used as feed stock and it's the cane waste that is then used to produce the ethanol. With corn they use the grain. With switchgrass the whole plant. Sugarcane you get to extract the food part and either refine it (though humans don't actually consume that much of it so most goes to feedstock) or make feedstock and then what is left over can be used to make ethanol.

I'm not sure there is another plant that can have the acreage used to produce both food and energy at least in commercially viable processes. If you could make ethanol from everything but the kernel of corn then you would have the situation you have with sugarcane, but currently you get so little that it's a net loss to do so.