I'd like to propose a rebalancing for the sugarcane -> ethanol route, mainly through number changes in the brewery recipe.

The idea is, that you can work out the biodiesel recipe with (almost) equal sugarcane demand for each, seed oil and ethanol.

You craft 4 seeds from 2 sugarcane, so each cane yields 20 seed oil. You need 6 of that for each mb of ethanol.

Right now you get 100 mb bio mass from sugar cane which gives you 70 mb ethanol.

So 1 sugarcane on the ethanol side => 70 mb ethanol would need 6*70mb seed oil or 21 sugar canes. (While at it i'd like to change the brewery recipe, so that the voltage exceeds 8V so you dont have to manually tell each one to not overclock)

Let's say we make each sugar cane yield just 75mb of biomass.

That Would mean, that we'd need 75 * 7/10 * 6/20 = 15,75 sugar canes for the seed oil.

Reducing the ratio of 1 to 6 = 6 diesel to maybe 5 to 2 = 6:

75 * 7/10 * 2/5 /20 = 1,05.

So needing 1 sugar cane for the ethanol, and 1,05 sugar cane for the seed oil would need the following changes:

Brewery recipe:
1 sugarcane + 75 mb water = 75 mb biomass, 10 seconds, 9 EU/t (This condenses 3 Breweries into one and keeps the mb/t the same as the current recipe. Also, no manually disabling overclocking in lv breweries)

5b ethanol + 2b seed oil = 6b bio diesel

For pre-diesel setups this would change: Less breweries needed, more sugar cane needed energy output practically stays the same.

For diesel setups that would mean: 1 sugar cane previously meant 70mb ethanol * 192EU = 13.440 EU/cane.

Upgrading that to diesel with Seed oil (neglecting the source of the oil) Multiplies the amount by 6 and the eu/mb by 4/3 so 13.440 * 8 =107.520EU/cane.

After the change: 1 sugar cane means 75 * 7/10 * 192EU = 10.080 EU/cane.

With Diesel upgrade: 2,05 sugar cane means 75 * 7/10 * 6/5 * 256EU = 16.128EU
16.128EU /2,05 canes = 7867,32EU/cane.

These calculations obviously also neglect the energy demands of the fuel processing.

Ok, simplifying those changes to be readable:
nerfs:
75mb biomass, from 100(Missing the point)
Biodiesel from ethanol and seed oil now requires 5 buckets of ethanol(what, diesel is a heavy fuel, not a light one)
Biomass recipe now costs 9eu/t 200% increase
Buffs:
Biomass recipe time decreased by 75% reduction
Bio diesel from ethanol and seed oil only needs 2 buckets of seed oil.

Neutral:
biomass production cost unchanged, however is now a LV recipe. MV overclocking might be a valid option.

Reviews:

Issues: This ignores other sources of biodiesel mainly canola oil from the press, each canola provides 80mb of oil, with refined you can turn that into 80mb of refined canola oil.Withs 6 B of refined canola and 1 B of ethanol produces 12 buckets of diesel(At twice the cost and half the time with a MV recipe). Crystalizing the oil with a world crafting recipe will provide you with 24B(two batches of 12 buckets at 500mb of ethanol each and an extra hydroxide) if you want to be absolutely effecient.

Net result: biodiesel from sugarcane alone is now even less viable, Ethanol production gets massive buff from having 3x speed for biomass production at no additional cost. 11-12 machines now needed rather than 33-34 for max rate efficiency production.

Additionally since no cost increases have occurred and 9eu/t is quite minimal still, you could run all of those off of a single mv-lv transformer output still(with a bit of flicker on occasion), as each one only needs a packet every 3 ticks. MV overclocking to get more yield would be interesting, as with overclocking you could manage with 4-5 machines rather than the current 6-7 and the power cost would be much lower too at .

Overall: Massive(understatement) buff to sugarcane as both an ethanol and biodiesel source, because of less processing required. However as a sole crop source for biodiesel it is nerfed as a result of the huge ethanol production increase.

(Bio) diesel is supposed to be a heavy fuel, it is much higher fuel density than most other things and has a hard time igniting. Ethanol is a light fuel, similar to gasoline hence it's ability to be a swap in in some cases, easy to ignite but lower energy density.

You could drop the biomass value of sugarcane down to 10mb, and it would still be viable due to how much you can pump out in a small space.

Addendum as requested as I went on a slight tangent on it.

There already is a reason to go into bio-diesel. You can make far more canola oil or refined canola oil with less machinery. Diesel also can be upgraded into cetane boosted for crafting and even higher fuel density. Honestly the yield of seed oil is quite low across the board, it is almost pointless. The yield of canola oil and refined canola oil, is much much higher on the other hand. In any scenario, your suggestions actually improve the viability of scaling ethanol, or making it a serious input force to make diesel, to the point where it might be easier to scale it higher than get the boost into diesel.

If you were wondering about the "machines needed" part that is for the ethanol to be produced at a constant rate from input biomass, as it is right now, you need 34/17 brewing machines(ULV recipes only get 2x overclocking according to another discussion) and a distillery to maintain a constant 700mb/240 tick(12 second) output without serious overclocking. This really ends up around 560 eu/t for 35-18 machines of input as it is right now. The number of fluid extractors needed to process the 320(600 per batch, .7 batches biodiesel) seeds every 12 seconds would be 56(4201.6/12) or 28 if at LV OC, this however provides you with 6 the fuel of ethanol alone that fuel has 25% higher energy value. So with around triple the machine count you end up with 7.5 times fuel energy.

Yours achieves this with 13 with no overclocking needed 6 if you overclock the biomass side. Now you need 19(10 if OC) more machines to process seeds. So with your solution just makes making 1-2 more sets of machines and brute forcing more ethanol. So in the end you would yield either 6 buckets of bio-diesel, or 10-20 buckets of ethanol depending on if you overclock biomass to MV or not. And this is per 12 seconds, so if you go with overclock biomass at MV you would be able to produce around 1.5 buckets per second or 75mb/t which is 14.4k eu/t max output, or 57.6k rf/t. For the Overclock biomass to MV calc, you would need the 16 machines, 13 of brewing machines, each producing a batch of 75 biomass every 3.7~ seconds. You would get a bit over 3.1 buckets of biomass in 12 seconds. It takes 12 seconds for a distillery to produce a single batch of ethanol, so three are needed. The burst load(all request power at once) of this, using 13 MV and 3 lv would be only 1760eu/t but realistically is far far lower.

If you want to solve the machine cost issue for a "pure sugarcane" based bio-diesel production the solution isn't in the source material the problem is in the seed processing time and yields. Or you go with canola oil, where you only need around 4.4 canola per second, which can be used by itself or with fermenters to double your yield(you need a lot of them).

Note, this is completely overkill as you will be getting well into EV level outputs with this level of setup. At which point, you should start looking at the oil rig, as it outputs oil at 1 bucket/100 ticks. It also acts as an amazing sulfur source and gives nearly the perfect ratio for diesel, which is absurdly high fuel density and a better precursor for cetane boosted diesel (mostly for crafting imo) because of it's lower secondary requirements and better yield.

Early edit: messed up seed calc used wrong number.

Seed Oil is still too weak imo. But this isnt the way to go.