BTW, I would guess that the $40/gal estimate for ethanol is based upon no change in method for producing the ethanol. If we come up with a more practical method of producing ethanol... things could be better. One great advance would be producing ethanol from standard unprocessed cellulose stocks (i.e. waste vegetative material) instead of high-sugar materials such as corn. There are some papers that detail such an approach by using special bacteria, but I haven't seen any commercial success yet.
We can always hope.
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