Literally, your first sentence implies “corn _is_ more expensive than oil for producing car fuel, but there are _additional_ reasons corn is more expensive than oil.”

Did you mean to say:
“Just to emphasis my last point, corn isn’t more expensive than oil when producing car fuel. It’s only more expensive than oil when used as a source of ethanol.”
IE: oil-ethanol is cheaper than corn-ethanol which is cheaper than gasoline.

Or did you mean to say:
“Just to emphasis my last point, corn is not only more expensive than oil for producing car fuel. It’s also more expensive than oil when used as a source of ethanol” ? IE, corn ethanol is more expensive than _both_ gasoline and oil-produced ethanol.)

Jacob,
I guess my point is that electric motors for transportation is a technology that has yet to be developed, whereas flex-fuel combustion engines that can take ethanol, gasoline, or methanol already exists and only cost a few hundred dollars more to manufacture than gasoline engines, though if you add in their replacement cycle the real cost might be greater, I don’t know.

“Until about 1950, ethylene was expensive and was obtained from frementation ethanol by dehydration—the reverse of the above processes [catalyzed ethylene hydration to produce ethanol]. With the advent of cheap ethylene from steam cracking, the petrochemical route to ethanol became more economical than fermentation. By the early 1970s, scarcely any industrial ethanol was made by fermentation in the United States, although there was a legal requirement in most countries that potable ethanol be made in the traditional way.

“In the United States in the 1980s, this trend was reversed when government subsidies were introduced to facilitate the production of ethanol by fermentation of corn starch.”

2) Brazil discovered huge oil reserves off their coast, bigger than the Saudi Arabian peninsula’s oil reserves. Only trouble is, it’s in very deep water, and new drilling technology needs to be made to get to it. Over a hundred years’ worth of oil for the whole planet are there.

It seems to be corrosive as well, although the article thinks that additives may solve that problem with minimal effort.
It seems methanol is currently recieving goverment support in Brazil, the last american program having been terminated in 2005. The main article also says methanol is used as a transportation fuel in china but does not elaborate.