The Oil Drum

Here are some links, if you want to learn more about it.

I posted this story, which sounded hopeful, here, last year:
http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/10/13/local/doc452eb9efc0fc6435...

And this, is from the National Sorghum Producers (includes some good articles):
http://www.sorghumgrowers.com/SORGHUM-to-Ethanol

Ethanol plants can play an important role in increasing local competition for grain, potentially improving prices paid to farmers.
* Ethanol represents the single largest value-added market for grain sorghum producers in the U.S.
* Ethanol consumes about 15% of the U.S. sorghum crop each year.
* One bushel of grain sorghum produces as much ethanol as one bushel of corn.
* There are currently 8 ethanol plants in the U.S. that use grain sorghum.
* Sorghum's low-water-use characteristics enhance the conservation benefits of ethanol.
* Ethanol from sorghum can replace MTBE as an oxygenate in gasoline, providing a cleaner, safer environment.
* When sorghum is used, distillers grain (an ethanol co-product) is equal in nutritional value to distillers grain made from corn.

The key here, IMO, is "Ethanol from sorghum can replace MTBE as an oxygenate in gasoline, providing a cleaner, safer environment." In other words, it is being used to fulfill the mandate, same as corn ethanol.

If you read about the process, they tend to gloss over the energy intensive logistical problems, requiring more research. EROI? It requires less rainfall than corn--that is good. Also, note that there are different types of sorghum discussed in these articles, short-grain sorghum, and taller sorghum being bred with little grain.

This is nothing new. It's been around for decades.

the underlying physics will never change, the plants have not gotten more efficient, and our understanding of fluid dynamics is still very poor.

we still cannot come close to the entropic minimum of energy expenditure for converting sunlight into ethanol (put another way, the theoretical maximum efficiency)

the only thing that has changed in biotechnology is our ability to rapidly do automatic genetic tests such as PCR and other magnification/purfication. tell me how this helps, or better yet offer some advances which address the issues, ie potential solutions or methods of attack to the navier-stokes equations? How to best scale up small reactors to ponds? how about HTSC(High Temperature Superconductors)? The only real progress has happened in materials science(carbon fiber), and solid state device manufacturing (PV).