Does the manufacturing processes used to produce E85 auto fuel use more petroleum than it saves?

Question

Counting the fuel used by farmer's tractors, the transportation of the raw materials to the distillery, the distillation process, and then on top of it, you only get 60% of the fuel mileage. It hardly seems like a solution.
What are the advantages?

Answer 1

The only advantage is that it would use local resources. The numbers about the tractors, transportation, and distilling are based upon assumptions about how these things would be done that may not be correct depending on technology choices.

The main problems with ethanol as a gasoline replacement are that (1) The combustion energy for ethanol is so much lower than that of gasoline that a larger quantity would be required to replace it. (2) Using agricultural resources to produce the quantity of ethanol required would use nearly all of the current food crop capacity in the USA.

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E85