There is a current Debate about whether to continue Ethanol subsidies to farmers. Farmers can produce about 30 gallons of ethanol per acre from corn. But this process is energy intensive and produces more CO2 than it saves. It also drives up the price of food, and uses good crop land.
Compare this technology with the process of producing oil from algae. It is possible to produce anywhere from 100,000 to 20 million gallons of oil from each acre of land, and the land can be waste land or contaminated land that is not good for anything else, and the water needed can be full of brine or other contaminants so we don't waste our precious drinking water.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/r...There is already a pilot plant that produces Initially, the pilot facility will produce 43,070 gallons of algae oil / biodiesel per annum using 6 modules of photo-bioreactors covering 84 square feet. If you scale that up it is possible to get 20 million gallons of biodiesel per acre per year.
http://www.oilgae.com/club/users/MiaFran...It is also possible to combine the oil/algae plants with sewage systems, with animal feed lots, and the exhaust from coal energy plants. The sewage produces the nutrients and the CO2 makes the algae grow faster.
We are finding that almost all of the traditional energy plants have severe negative impacts on the environment and are unsafe and unhealthy. We are running out of the easy oil, the clean burning coal, the fracking of oil and gas bearing rock threatens our scarce water supplies as do all of the other extractive industries, and the costs of all of these energy sources are rapidly increasing. Oil supports terrorism, Coal destroys mountaintops valleys and rivers. Nuclear power is dangerous for millions of years and endangers 1/8th of the nation.
Oil from algae has few negative impacts and the oil can be refined so our current cars and existing technologies can utilize this fuel, but it burns cleaner than conventional oil.
http://www.oilgae.com/