1. The U. S. currently consumes about 20 million barrels of Crude Oil every day!! Many different products are made from this crude oil (as you will see in one of the lectures), and on average about 20 gallons of gas are produced from each barrel of oil. If we wanted to replace 25% of gasoline with ethanol, how many gallons of gas would we need to replace on an annual basis? (let’s do this as back-of-the-envelope calculations…we can use lots of rounding to make things easier with these big numbers) 2. Unfortunately, ethanol does not contain the same amount of energy per volume as gas. Gas contains 130 MegaJoules/gallon while ethanol contains 90 MegaJoules/gallon. How many total gallons of ethanol would need to be produced to make up for this energy difference?

3. Ethanol production requires substantial fossil fuel energy inputs associated with the production and transportation of corn, as well as the processing of corn into ethanol. For every gallon of ethanol produced, 0.66 gallons of ethanol will need to be consumed. How many additional gallons of ethanol will need to be produced now? Adding this to your answer from number 2, how many total gallons of ethanol will need to be produced?

4. Given your estimate of the total amount of ethanol that would need to be produced each year, we now need to determine how many acres of corn would need to be grown to support the production of ethanol. Use the following figures to determine how many bushels of corn would need to be grown each year.

Ethanol production from corn: 2.5 gallons/bushel

5. Given your estimate of the total number of bushels of corn that must be grown, determine how many acres of corn would need to be planted assuming the current average production rate is 170 bushels/acre.

6. Given the table below, determine if the current U. S. corn production could support your estimated ethanol production needs.

7. What would be potential ramifications if we used all corn for ethanol?

8. What are some other crop sources for ethanol and how do they compare for required ethanol production?