Ethanol is anything but.
It is highly corrosive, does not pump down existing pipes, and is so corrosive that it needs specially designed train carriages to take from where we grow the stuff to where we (the majority of the population) burn the stuff.
As for forests, check out:
Monbiot.com Worse Than Fossil Fuel
Don't forget that biodiversity is at stake here. Extinction is forever. Growing palm oil in Indonesia is leading to an absolutely reprehensible ecological catastrophe as forests retreat, Orangutans disappear and biodiversity vanishes.
The ONLY liquid fuel I'm aware of that could potentially scale up is the algae method mentioned on my page, but that is 40 thousand square miles of high-tech algae greenhouse farm to satisfy just America's oil needs. Advantage? It grows in sewerage waste and can be grown in the deserts, in urban areas closer to where we use the fuel, or on other wastelands. The disadvantage? We should have started 20 years ago and we are within 5 to 10 years of oil production starting a permanent 5% per annum decline.
That will make today's economic crisis look like a dress-rehearsal.
