An Ethanol question.

Question

How efficient would making ethanol from sugar beets be? Like how many units of fossil fuels would it take to make so many units of sugar beet ethanol. For instance it takes 1 unit of fossil fuel to make 1.3 gallons of corn ethanol, or how it takes 1 unit of fossil fuels to make 8 units of sugarcane ethanol.

Oh and please cite your sources.

Answer 1

About the same and depends on your climate. Brazil has a better climate so they use alcohol for their gas, but us get's less rain to they drill it. All in all about the same.

Answer 2

All I know is it takes fewer acres of sugar beets to create ethanol than corn, so if you're somewhere that you could grow either, grow the sugar beets instead. You get more bang for the buck with them. That aside, using up farmland to make fuel instead of food doesn't seem too bright, especially since making ethanol uses more energy than it's worth. What I did was buy cars that run on natural gas (methane). It's super cheap to fill up ($10) and clean for the environment. Ethanol still uses oil while natural gas doesn't, plus the USA has plenty of it, so the money stays in our own economy. Lots of upside. I'll list some sources if you'd like to look into it for yourself!  

Answer 3

Not sure if I am understanding your question.  Fossil fuels are not produced using ethanol. Ethanol is an additive to the gas.  To make ethanol you need plants with starch and sugars so a sugar beet probably will work but I know switchgrass is being tested as a source

Answer 4

I would imagine it would be the same, or similar to sugar cane. Until we get cellulose ethanol up and running in full scale (1 unit of energy to get 16) we need to start using a wider variety of crops. I think we should also start using tobacco because it is very starchy. Tobacco also has a lot of oils that could be used for bio diesel too. Besides, not too many people will complain that we are using the tobacco for fuel instead of cigarettes.

We also need to start using membranes to seperate the water from alchohol instead of disitlation to save on energy consumed to make fuel (like in the Efuel Microfueler 100).