There's definitely a lot of Bravo Sierra going on with ethanol production these days too. We've got an ethanol plant that is supposedly being built in our town, but so far all they've managed to do is get a depressed town of 2500 people all excited about a proposed 120 jobs...oh, and they've pushed a bunch of dirt around. And let's not forget the soy bio-diesel plant that's supposed to be going up in the next town over that has also promised big job numbers and has yet to even push dirt. From where I sit, it's a bunch of horse hockey.
There's another problem with ethanol on the horizon too - airplanes. Piston engine airplanes are still using leaded fuel, for the most part. Due to the physics of how these engines work, you can't just tell them to go unleaded, and you REALLY can't start feeding them ethanol. There are a few airplanes that have been converted to run on unleaded pump gas. They are not, under any circumstances, allowed to run fuel that has any amount of ethanol in it. The ethanol tends to do bad things to the seals and gaskets in these engines, and it doesn't handle the cold temperatures at altitude very well. That means that if I owned such a converted airplane, I couldn't go to my local Wal-Mart and fill a transfer tank to fill my airplane because I just noticed that their pumps say they are running up to 10% or 15% (I don't remember which) of ethanol in the fuel now. I see those stickers popping up all the time now.
Thankfully, it looks like the salvation of piston driven airplanes may be diesel. There are two companies right now making aviation diesel engines. One company, SMA, came up with a clean sheet design for a 230hp 4-cylinder diesel that runs on Jet A or Jet A1. The second, Thielert, took a Mercedes diesel engine core, replaced about half the parts, and certified it as a 2L 135hp version, with a 350hp 6-cylinder version in development. The future of Jet A is bright, as it seems that you can make it from any number of sources including biodiesel technology. The future of leaded avgas is not so bright. No matter how hard they try, finding the right blend of additives to replace the tetraethyl lead in avgas has proven fruitless for well more than a decade. The current fear is that one day the EPA is simply going to pull the plug on 100LL avgas, or the refiners are going to quit making it because it causes them so many headaches. Transporting it is a pain because you can't transport any other gasolines in a tanker that has been used for avgas because the lead will get into that gas, and it's the only product refined today that still uses TEL.
