Tom Friedman's Visionary Car

Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer-winning columnist for the New York Times, is one of my favorite reads. He is articulate, knowledgeable, and literate. Qualities I think not sufficently prized in these times. He is however, perhaps not entirely numerate. Here he talks about a visionary automobile which will save us from energy dependence:

Tom Friedman's 500MPG Option

I think Thomas has been shopping in the Something-For-Nothing aisle of the supermarket.
Like most, I am not one to let facts get in my way, but the facts here are a little too large to ignore.
. Electricity Generation (US): 3,870 gigawatt/year
. Power to move a car 1 mile: 2 KW (highly approximate)
. Oil Consumption (US): 20 million barrels/day
. Gasoline Consumption (US): 12.5 billion gallons/year
. Theoretical yield of ethanol from corn: 120 gallons/ton
. Water required to process biomass: 25 gallons H2O/ gallon C2H5OH
Thus;
1. To charge 100 million cars that have travelled an average of 20 miles would place a load on the electric grid of 4 gigawatt/day, 1400 odd GW/year. To put it poetically, What Is The Sound of 100,000,000 Cars Plugging Into The Grid? Answer; The Sound Of Silence (as every circut breaker in the country flips).
2. To replace eighty percent of the gasoline currently consumed with ethanol would require us to produce 10 billion gallons of ethanol (assuming ethanol produced the same energy per gallon as gasoline, which it doesn't; it produces about 2/3 the energy) would require 80 million tons of thirsty corn which would take 30 milion acres to grow along with some amount of irrigation water which I didn't look up. After harvest, shipment, delivery; generating ethanol from the corn would require 250 billion gallons of water! Most of this water can be reclaimed, but it would take some amount of energy to purify it, in addition to the energy required to process the corn to begin with.
In fairness to Thomas, and everyone who spotted my primary assumption here; ethanol can be made from any biomass. It Thailand, there's a village school that's generating cooking gas (CNG) from elephant ummm, byproduct. Two elephants can supply a village of 200 people! Mixed paper, a common recyclable, can produce about 90% as much ethanol/ton as corn.
Still, looking at the numbers (found in these locations):

World Resource Institute database

a report on ethanol Pproduction

I think Thomas should stick to Iraq. He's wrong there too, when he talks about a way to "do it right", because there is no way for us to impose rightness (whatever that means) on that country, but it is his area of expertise.