Can ethanol be made from sugar beets efficiently?

Question

Brazil has become energy independent by using sugar cane to produce fuel. And my understanding is that it is much more efficient than corn and almost as efficient as hemp. But what about sugar beets which can be grown in northern climates?

Answer 1

If yeast will eat it," And It will",  It will make Alcohol.  As to burning our own food, I don't agree.  We have no shortage of food.  If anything we were exporting it for less money.  Now that the ethanol monkey is out of the bag it doesn't matter what it's made from because that crop will replace corn if they can make more from that crop on ethanol.  Corn will still be grown less or priced higher for feed so milk, beef, chicken, pork prices are going to go up.  Plus anything made from corn or any other crop that is grown less because its land is being used to grow crops for ethanol.  The best solution is to go electric or plug-in hybrid to reduce the need for oil or ethanol.  We need to reduce demand for the expensive products to reduce the price of them.

Answer 2

Corn is not the biofuel answer, and at this point, neither is sugar cane, or sugar beets.

While Brazil is experiencing some positive returns in their sugar cane to ethanol experiment, their project is heavily subsidized by the government, and is working on a vastly different scale than anything that would be needed in the US.

Answer 3

The single most efficient ethanol producer per hectare in northern areas is the Jerusalem Artichoke. It is not as efficient as sugar cane or sorghum under optimum conditions.

Sugar Beet or mangel falls in a middle range. However, even with the best use of the land, we are taking land out of food production.

The limitations are land and water to grow whatever crop we use. We can do better than corn, even get more energy back than we put in, but our supply of land and water are finite. Suv's and minivans competing for food with people does not really accomplish much.

However, we do have in our oceans vast areas called dead zones... called that because so much plant material is decomposing into the ocean, removing all the free oxygen from the water that all animal life is killed.  We have so much untapped vegetation there as to provide about 14% (my own estimate) of the fuel needs of the world at current rates of consumption.  

This exceeds the best estimate of possible bio-fuel production from land, after subtracting the energy needed to produce the boi-fuel.