Whenever discussions of ethanol come up, remember these two numbers: 98 and 190.

Those numbers are essential when considering the amount of energy the U.S. gets from oil and natural gas versus the amount the country gets from ethanol. They are also germane to the cap-and-trade legislation recently approved by the House which includes a provision that could require new cars to be capable of burning fuel containing 85% ethanol.

Add that item to the ever-growing list of Congressional favors for the ethanol industry. Indeed, Congress continues the ethanol madness even though the U.S. gets about 98 times as much energy from natural gas and oil as it does from ethanol and biofuels. But here’s the real outrage: when measured on a per-unit-of-energy basis, Congress lavishes the ethanol and biofuels industry with subsidies that are 190 times as large as those given to the oil and gas sector.

Those numbers come from an April 2008 report by the Energy Information Administration: “Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007.” The 274-page report is dense with tables and jargon. But Table ES6 contains the gold. It lists a number of domestic energy sources that get subsidies. In 2007, according to the table, the US consumed nearly 55.8 quadrillion Btus, or about 9.6 billion barrels of oil equivalent, in the form of natural gas and oil. That’s about 98 times as much energy as the US consumed in the form of ethanol and biofuels, which totaled 98 million barrels of oil equivalent.

While those numbers are noteworthy, the genuine insult in Table ES6 can be found in the column titled “subsidy per million BTU.” Ethanol and biofuels are getting $5.72 per million BTU of fuel produced. That’s 190 times as much as natural gas and petroleum liquids, which get $0.03 per million BTU of fuel produced. Furthermore, Table ES6 shows that the ethanol and biofuels industry is more heavily subsidized – in total dollar terms – than the oil and gas industry. In 2007, the ethanol and biofuels industries got $3.25 billion in subsidies while the oil and gas industry collected $1.92 billion in subsidies.

And here’s another shocker: that $5.72 per million BTU figure may only be a fraction of the actual subsidy. As pointed out by Robert Rapier, the engineer who writes the R-Squared Energy Blog, that figure ignores the fact that the actual energy yield of ethanol is miniscule. Rapier explained it in a July 7 email to me: “Consider that since most of ethanol's BTUs come from fossil fuels, the bulk of the subsidy really goes toward subsidizing fossil fuels. Now take only the energy that was 'created'; that is to say the renewable piece. Calculate the subsidies on that and you get something like $25 to $30 per million BTU of renewable energy.”

Despite these enormous subsidies, the ethanol lobby is queuing up for more favors. And they are doing so at the very same time that the Obama administration and Congress are pushing to eliminate the relatively modest subsidies being given to domestic oil and gas producers.

This makes no sense at all. The Democrats want to cut drilling subsidies while simultaneously trumpeting their desire for “energy independence.” Indeed, the caption on the cap-and-trade bill says that it aims to “create energy jobs” and “achieve energy independence.” And the drilling subsidies are being targeted even though domestic gas producers have proven their ability to produce astounding quantities of methane from shale deposits -- like the Barnett Shale in Texas and the Marcellus in Pennsylvania -- that just a few years ago were thought to be hopelessly uneconomic.

Nevertheless, President Obama’s 2010 budget calls for the elimination of two tax breaks: the expensing of “intangible drilling costs” which allows energy companies to deduct the bulk of their expenses for drilling new wells, and the allowance for percentage depletion, which allows well owners to deduct a certain amount of the value of the production from their wells. Those breaks provide the bulk of the $1.92 billion in subsidies listed above.

In May, Obama called the tax breaks for the oil and gas industry “unjustifiable loopholes” that do “little to incentivize production or reduce energy prices.”

That’s just flat not true. The deduction for intangible drilling costs encourages energy companies to plow huge amounts of capital into more drilling. And that drilling has resulted in unprecedented increases in natural gas production and potential. An April report from the Department of Energy estimated that the newly available shale resources total 649 trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s the energy equivalent of 118.3 billion barrels of oil, or slightly more than the proved oil reserves of Iraq.

Eliminating the drilling subsidies will make natural gas more expensive. Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., a Houston-based investment banking firm, estimates that eliminating the intangible drilling cost provision could increase U.S. natural gas prices by $0.50 per thousand cubic feet. Given that the U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet of gas per year, simple arithmetic shows that eliminating the drilling subsidies costing taxpayers less than $2 billion per year could result in an increased cost to consumers of $11.5 billion per year in the form of higher natural gas prices.

Amid all this, Growth Energy, an ethanol industry front group, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt a proposal that would increase the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline from the current maximum of 10% to as much as 15%. (The comment period on the proposal closes July 20.) That increase would be yet another gift to the corn ethanol producers who have never been able to make a go of it despite decades of fat federal subsidies and mandates. And Growth Energy is pushing the change even though only about 7 million of the 250 million motor vehicles now on U.S. roads are designed to run on fuel containing more than 10% ethanol.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that gasoline with 10% ethanol is already doing damage. In January, Toyota announced that it was recalling 214,570 Lexus vehicles. The reason for the recall: the company found that “ethanol fuels with a low moisture content will corrode the internal surface of the fuel rails.” Furthermore, there are numerous reports that ethanol-blended gasoline is fouling engines in lawn mowers, weed whackers, boats, and other equipment. And all of this ignores corn ethanol’s lousy record on food prices, water quality, and greenhouse gases.

Lawyers in Florida have already sued a group of oil companies for damage allegedly done to boat fuel tanks and engines from ethanol fuel. They are claiming that consumers should be warned about the risk of using the fuel in their boats. There is also corn ethanol's effect on food prices. Over the past two years at least a dozen studies have linked subsidies that have increased the production of corn ethanol with higher food prices.

Obama has been pro-ethanol – and anti-oil -- for years. But he and his allies on Capital Hill should understand that removing drilling incentives will mean – guess what? -- less drilling. That will mean less domestic production and more imports of both oil and natural gas.

That’s hardly a recipe for “energy independence.”