Creating biofuel from crops requires large amounts of energy and uses land that food could grow on. Thus the entire process is inefficient, says Hartmut Michel, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner in 1988. In addition, creating biofuel from crops uses considerable amounts of water, which must also be a consideration too.
It’s a bad idea to depend on biofuels as an alternative energy source because of a combination of the high amount of energy needed to make the raw materials and the potential food shortages created by diverting such plants away from the global food supply. We’ve heard these arguments before, but not often with Nobel attached to them.
Jim Smith noted in the comments that electric vehicles are a better way to go.
I did a rough calculation of how much solar PV it would take to run an EV 15,000 miles per year (the number of miles the EPA uses for it’s annual cost estimates) and I compared it to the amount of land it would take to grow enough corn to make enough corn ethanol to fuel an E-85 vehicle. It takes about two acres of corn for the E-85 car and 24 square meters of PV for the EV. That’s a ratio of about 350 to 1. This is just a ballpark number but…. WOW!!!