I'm not one who forgets we are a petroleum-driven economy, and that's been the norm for decades, if not a century.
My current job is in the fracking industry, and they (Halliburton/Gardner Denver/Black Horse) are throwing millions of dollars at my company just to keep that technology growing.
With all the easy oil gone, fracking has become the mantra, even spouting such prophecies as being energy-independent from Ickystan/Saudi by 2020. (Yeah, right)
Problem is, fracking is nasty business in and of itself, and then there's the seismic tremors that are being produced by injection of the wastewater underground, let alone the fracking process itself which runs my pistons, plungers, pony rods, and valves at 20-30K PSI for about 150 hours before they're scrapped.
Ethanol is Satan's Steaming Loin Juice. You'll drink it, no problem, but gawd forbid you run it in an internal or external combustion engine... 
Here's the problem in a nutshell... Oil, with fracking is still something around a 4:1, maybe 5:1 net energy gain. If we're capturing natural gas from the same field from some of the same work, it's higher.
Ethanol is roughly 10% in total efficient, if that. It's gone from 1.09:1 in 2002, to 2.34:1 in 2010... (And I'm skeptical, as the industry circles the wagons to preserve market share and subsidies...)
Then add to it the logistical expenses, that ethanol can't be pipelined or handled in the same quantities or ways that petroleum can due to it's chemical nature, and the efficiency is even lower. And that multiple fuel and petrochemical fractions such as gas, diesel, kerosene, lubrication oil, paraffin, even bitumen/asphalt, it's economic utility/efficiency is then lowered even further beyond the energy efficiency.
And all the ethanol apologist arguments that it's not mucking with food commodity prices is sophistry. The arguments that land was not in use is now going to ethanol corn is not 100% accurate, and even if it was, that still messes with commodity food prices.
Unlike the false beliefs of various Leftist schools of economics that wrongly portray an economy as a zero-sum game, farming
actually is, because there is only so much land. Whether it's a new field or not,
it's still a field that's not producing other edible or animal feed commodity crops, period.
Ethanol is a loser, propped up by false promises, farm subsidy politics, and emotive reasoning that it's "good" because uh... "
Farmers have it tough, and um... reasons."
