How much does it cost to make corn ethanol
“Last year, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the cost to taxpayers of using corn ethanol to reduce gasoline consumption by one gallon is $1.78. This year, the corn ethanol sector will produce about 13.8 billion gallons of ethanol, the energy equivalent of about 9.1 billion gallons of gasoline. How much does it cost to produce 1 gallon of ethanol?It will cost about $1.10 to $1.20/gal to make the alcohol from various feed-stocks like corn, barley, potatoes, or Jerusalem artichokes. You will also have by-products which you can sell or use as animal feed, reducing the total cost down to about $.95/gal. With 50 acres needed to grow corn for a gallon of ethanol, we calculate that it would take 5,480 acre feet of water to grow the corn, which doesn't appear high, unless you realize that equals 1.7 billion gallons of water, or 75 more gallons of water per gallon of ethanol. 1 Ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline.  2 That helps explain why fossil fuels -- not ethanol -- are used to produce ethanol, Pimentel says.  3 The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. This means 2.77 gallons of ethanol are produced from each bushel of corn. This is a widely accepted number in the industry. At the current corn price of around $7.00 per bushel, just the corn feedstock cost for corn-based ethanol should be about $2.53 per gallon. You can produce your own ethanol for an ongoing cost of less than $2 per gallon. If you grow your own corn, you can distill more than 300 gallons of ethanol from 1 acre of corn. If you drive less than 10,000 miles per year, you could produce all your own fuel from 2 acres of corn — and, granted, a lot of labor. An average 16 gallon tank of gas contains ethanol from enough corn to feed 22 people for a day, or one person for over three weeks. The total amount of ethanol produced in the US in 2011 was 13.95 billion gallons [9], enough to feed 570 million people that year. A rough comparison is that with current technology, corn ethanol plants cost U.S. $2.00 per annual gallon, or about $60 million for a 30 million gallon corn ethanol plant. In contrast, cellulosic ethanol plants may cost $6-10 or more per annual gallon. The total crop used for corn-based ethanol in 2010 was about 4.77 billion bushels and 13.2 billion gallons of ethanol were produced. This means 2.77 gallons of ethanol are produced from each bushel of corn. This is a widely accepted number in the industry. The US used over 45% of its 2011 corn crop to produce ethanol, up from under 15% before 2005 [1]--a rise dictated by federal mandate and promoted by federal subsidies. The drought in 2012 is leading to questions about whether using corn for fuel is reasonable while people go hungry due to a world food shortage.
$1.78 per gallon.