| US oil consumption for transportation was 14.16 million barrels per day (595 million gallons per day) in 2018: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... That's 595,000,000 * 365 = 217,175,000,000 gallons per year of oil. Using 100% of cropland producing at 369 gallons of ethanol/acre gives 434,164,946 * 369 = 160,206,865,074 gallons per year of ethanol. That's only 74% as many gallons as oil consumption. It's actually much worse than that, because the energy content of a gallon of ethanol is only about 65% the energy content of a gallon of oil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energ... This much ethanol would only provide 48% of the energy currently consumed by oil based transportation. It's actually much worse than that because most crop land is already used to grow crops eaten by animals and people. If we feed all the crops to transportation machinery, others will go hungry. |