I am not a fan of corn or corn fuels however understand the struggle that we need something to motor around on.

Maybe this is the solution.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/08/08/farmer.fuel/index.html

I read a newspaper article a week or two ago about a scientist who is growing a salt water friendly plant on desert land by pumping water inland. He proposes to use this biomass to make ethanol. He has succeeded in a 1000 acre trial and is now trying to ramp up.

The future is algae. Met Council is studying the idea of growing algae with waste water. I know because I get samples from the project...

Growing algae in waste water takes no extra fertilizer or water, unlike most other biofuels. And the return per acre is amazing, between 5,000 and 20,000 gallons of oil per year. For comparison jatropha can produce between 58 and 73 gallons a year. Soybeans can produce up to about 17 gallons/ acre.

In fact algae can be so good at producing oil that we could theoretically replace all of our petroleum with algae. It would take about 15,000 square miles, or 1/7th the area that we now grow corn on. (all figures taken from wikipedia)

I have heard of this a bit while I was traveling in New Zealand, apparently the Austrailians rely on different algaes to produce various energies.