As someone said, sugar cane is not used for ethanol.
They are making it from wheat grain and this seems to me to be sacrilege.
People are going hungry because they cannot afford bread and we are
burning it in our engines !

Sugar cane appears to be the best for making ethanol as Brazil has found.
I wonder if that is why China has bought up the sugar industry in Australia ?
China will make ethanol for their cars while we ride push bikes !
Well the natives will not be able to afford cars anyway so the
Chinese bosses will tell their Beijing bosses.

It may be of interest that the Gillard/ Windsor ethanol deal has seen the light of day. It took $440 million of extra subsidy for ethanol to get Windsor into the Labor camp.A big portion of this will end up in the two grain ethanol producer's pockets.
So we taxpayers and paying big time for the conversion of grain to ethanol, food for fuel we don't really need.
What happens if there is a few hiccups in world grain production such as the current Russian drought? Of course!! We can outbid third world countries for the grain for our cars.
Grain ethanol---utter stupidity.

By the way, distillers grain byproduct is just a distraction. Seventy percent of grain is starch and that is what is turned into ethanol. The tonnage of grain starch is the relavent figure. If no sugar cane,it takes about one million tonnes of grain starch to fill the NSW E10 mandate, about twenty five percent of an average NSW cereal grain harvest. Utter stupidity with our variable harvests.

Hasbeen,

You need to get up to speed with publications by the research people in Sustainable Ecosystems, CSIRO, for a start. They have done work specifically on that area.

Bazz,

China is in partnership with Australia to breed cane with higher energy and suitable for dry areas.

We still have many small holdings based on the 'one family' farm, but many farmers are aged 60+.

It should be noted that grain for ethanol is primarily low protein grain, because starch content is higher percentage wise.

What do we do now with low protein grains? Mostly feed them to livestock at a typical feed conversion ratio of 6:1 to provide marbled beef to discerning customers. Not for ensuring that poor bellies are full.

The distillers grains constitute 30% of the original source by weight, yet retains the protein and most nutrients. The Distillers grains become a high protein feed source, at approx 30-40% protein compared to the original 10% in the grain.
You can correct me, but my assumption is that we consume meat more for the protein satisfaction than the fat.


The variability of our harvests is a key reason why we should have ethanol facilities, too often the price of grain has fallen below the cost of production and fair energy value. The variability also a key reason not to keep an ethanol mandate.

Sorghum, a target feedstock for grain ethanol, typically sells at below $200/tonne, and only five years ago was $125. Yet will produce 400 litres of ethanol, and still preserve some feed value in distillers grains. In some years the feedstock for 400 L of ethanol could be as low as 100$ net of distillers grains, 25 cents/litre. Even at the current $200/tonne for sorghum it's less than 40c.

It should come down to the best financial result for NSW, exporting less grainfed beef or reducing petroleum imports?

Rojo,
Thanks for the detailed reply.
If as you say it is a partial win win situation then that puts a
different slant on it.
Has anyone done an EROEI study on it ?

Ther must be a lot of transport involved.