Biofuels might not be the greenest of alternatives Could gasoline be more green than biofuels, the farm-grown darlings of Iowa farmers and Willie Nelson? The counterintuitive, provocative question has been posed by several University of Texas researchers in a pair of recent papers that look at how much water is required to produce fuels such as gasoline and ethanol. The papers underscore the trade-offs at play as the United States plots its energy future. An analysis by the researchers, postdoctoral fellow Carey King and mechanical engineering professor Michael Webber, shows that the entire biofuel production cycle — from growing irrigated crops to pumping biofuel into a car — can consume 20 or more times as much water for every mile traveled than is used in the production of gasoline. "We're trading off foreign oil for domestic water," Webber said in an interview. Webber is also associate director of UT's Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy. Biofuels make up only a fraction of the fuel at the pump and the federal government has locked in subsidies to encourage biofuel production. Under a current mandate, at least 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel must be blended into motor-vehicle fuel sold in America by 2012. By 2030, Americans are set to get about 15 billion gallons a year from biofuels. Water consumption by light-duty vehicles, in turn, will increase from 1.4 trillion gallons a year in 2005 to nearly 2.7 trillion gallons in 2030, according to a second paper written by King and Webber, along with Bureau of Economic Geology associate director Ian Duncan. The paper was presented in August at the International Conference on Energy Sustainability, organized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers....