If you want to base ethanol viability solely on an economic platform... there will be times when you can make use of cheap natural gas prices and cheap corn prices in the cycle where ethanol will make a lot of money. If you want to base it on a thermodynamic platform then ethanol will never break even.
One of the primary rules of thermodynamics is that you can't get more energy from a system than you put into the system. Not only that... but you can't break even either.
With that in mind... corn production by any measure is a petroleum based system. We use petroleum to produce our fertilizer. To fuel our machinery. To move corn around... herbicides. Everything we do consumes energy. When you do that to feed hungry people you shrug that off and do what you have to do... but when you're feeding it into a zero sum equation to feed an engine it really doesn't make any sense. I know some will jump up and argue that corn harvests the sun's energy and that's added to the equation... which is true... but it doesn't harvest enough as far as I'm concerned. There's always loss of energy in any system and the corn probably only captures enough to mabey cover the losses. The other argument is that we can feed the DDG's to cattle so that's not a complete loss... and to an extent that is also probably true... but when you get to the point where you saturate the market for DDG's... then what? Then it's a total loss from the energy cycle. As far as I'm concerned, ethanol is a loser, and a big loser when measured on an energy basis. On an economic basis it will cycle based on the price of corn, natural gas and gasoline.
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