A glimmer of hope, perhaps?

Their water usage (5 gallons per gallon ethanol) is higher than ours (3) because midwest US water is generally not as pure as Columbia river water. The largest use of water in an ethanol plant is used for cooling. It is evaporated. This is what creates the clouds coming out of a plant.

The water that does not evaporate becomes saltier. If it gets too salty, then it clogs your pipes. This limits how many times you can run it through an evaporation cycle, and so places that have nasty water use more of it.

In addition, some plants recycle their waste water, others do not. Recycling is accomplished by making it into a syrupy concentrate plus distilled water using an “evaporator”. Not doing this will increase a plant’s water consumption maybe 25%. Of course this works better if your plant’s water is more pure. In general, the more modern a plant, the less water it uses.

Most of the people fighting against ethanol either know nothing about it. The backbone of the fight is by people who want to eliminate all “factory farming”. For them, the concept of the world being covered by farms growing fuels is a nightmare of wall to wall industrialization.

Their preferred solution is to reduce consumption. Drive a bicycle. Live with a smaller footprint. They can’t imagine that any solution could possibly involve a huge machine built from glistening stainless steel and will fight against it. And getting back to water usage, here’s some photos of our beautiful stainless steel evaporator (water distillation / purifier) being assembled.

As a side note: This part of your article reminded me of a short story by Isaac Asimov titled /The Martian Way/. You should look it up if you haven’t read it already–and if you have a taste for Sci-Fi. He wrote it quite a while back, so the science is dated. Still, a good story.