I've underlined the part that really concerns me. Yes I believe Ethanol is a JOKE unless we find a better way to extract it besides distillation (which involves boiling everything). Maybe the ethanol plants can work with nuclear power plants to use the surplus energy? (Instead of heating up lakes)

To be fair, refining gasoline also takes a huge amount of energy, but not quite as much as distillation of ethanol. Lets take a look at some numbers:

131,000 BTUs are needed to make one gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 BTUS. That is a net LOSS of 40% in energy!

In sharp contrast, refining 1 gallon of gasoline takes only 17,070BTUs of energy to produce 125,000BTUs. The energy cost is probably greatly reduced by economy of scale, but the difference is too big to ignore for now.