Recently, the corn price went high to double ($4/bushel) because of need of bioethanol. Some researchers (C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer) said it could starve the poor and it is a bubble like dot-com.

One good way to ease these criticisms is to make bioethanol from cellulosic biomass. Last month, DOE (the Department of Energy) announced that they backed 385 milion dollars to six companies making cellulosic bioethanol.  


The country of bioethanol has been Brazil which produces 4.2 billion gallons a year from sugar cane. US can produce almost 4 billion gallons of bioethanol from corn. However, the six companies can only produce 0.13 billion gallons of cellosic bioethanol. It is still very small portion of total bioethanol production but if it works good, it could be very strong altanative way to produce bioethanol from wasted biomass.