Some one who knows more about Ethanol than I do

I was just blown away by this comment posted on my blog today. It takes into account some things that I had neglected. Extremely enlightening, and glad to see some one else is blogging when they should be hard at work at grad school. Much thanks Erin.
I'd love to respond more to it, but right now I think its worthy of just putting up as its own post.

"It is nice to see that someone else out there understands that the magical "corn ethanol" idea is a waste of time, money, and resources! I got to do a nice little study on it back when I worked for that oil company, and it quickly became very obvious that without subsidies, the production of ethanol does not, cannot, and will not ever work! (and subsidies are not good, not to mention all the other problems it causes that you mentioned in your other post below).
Speaking of oil companies (now for my own little rant), yes the price of oil is high, but placing a windfall tax on American oil companies will only make it worse - and will definitely not help in making America "energy independent" (which, like you said, is a crock). It doesn't matter what the price per barrel of oil is, if the other contributing costs that go into drilling and producing oil wells(and that includes taxes on production, as well as all of the service, supply, and equipment costs that rise right along with the per barrel prices) make the necessary profit margin disappear, the companies will slow their drilling down. It's as simple as that. Every for-profit company in every sector of the economy has certain profit margin requirements for deciding whether or not to pursue a project. If we really want to increase American oil production, then what we need to do is provide more incentives to companies to pursue more unconventional production methods (such as waterfloods, nitrogen injections, etc) which are extremely costly but can be very efficient. Conventional methods (i.e. your standard Oklahoma pumping units that we see dotting the landscapes) can only produce a very small percentage of the oil that is actually down there before the pressures drop too low, causing the pump to stop working and the well to be abandoned. By using unconventional methods, you can return to the same oil field and continue producing the oil that the conventional pump was not able to get. This is, of course, disregarding the other problem the US has - the fact that our refineries are already pretty much at max capacity, and that no new refinery has been built in the US since the 70's because of too many environmental codes that are impossible for any refinery to meet, among other reasons - including the fact that they are extremely costly and complicated to build, don't provide the best profit margins, and are therefore very susceptible to the volatile energy market. (note - I am not "against the environment", but being the oil and gas consuming nation that we are, it is important to have refineries to make that oil usable).
And that's it. Sorry for the super long comment - I should be writing a paper, but reading blogs is just so much more fun!"