Producing ethanol is much more expensive than producing gasoline.
It costs around $1.74 per gallon to produce a gallon of ethanol while it costs only around $0.94 per gallon to produce a gallon of pure gasoline.
But ethanol is very important to allow the gasoline we have to last a lot longer and keep our vehicles going and although ethanol costs more to produce it's much better because ethanol is a renewable resource that can be renewed faster than pure gasoline.
If you didn't have ethanol then eventually we would run out of gasoline and then our gasoline vehicles would not be able to be driven anymore.
In my area ethanol based fuel is much cheaper due to the fact we have an ethanol plant in the same town.