Gasoline is made from non-renewable petroleum. There is only so much oil in the ground. But we can grow more corn and sugar cane every year. It's easy to see that the more ethanol we use in our gasoline, the less we rely on fossil fuels. And the closer we get to cleaning up our air.
Brazil leads the world with more than four billion gallons of ethanol produced each year.
It doesn't matter if you're using corn or sugar cane, the process of making ethanol is virtually the same. When corn is used to make ethanol, it must first be ground up to expose the starch in the kernels. The starch is then processed into fermentable sugar. When using sugar cane, converting starch to sugar is not necessary since the sugar is already in the cane. In both the corn and sugar processes, yeast is added to the sugar to convert it to a low concentration of alcohol.