TIME TO STOP THE ETHANOL SCAM!
I have little confidence in the United Nations ability to do anything meaningful, but I did read a report recently that made some sense. Quoting, in part, from the article, “The United Nations Climate Conference in Bali, Indonesia, wrapped up on December 14. During the conference, debate intensified over … climate change agreement and greenhouse gas emission targets for developed countries. Like many experts and economists, conference participants showed little enthusiasm for biofuels produced from agriculture—primarily corn-based ethanol. Biofuels are hitting consumers at the pump, at the grocery store, and even at tax time. Without a doubt, the extremely high cost of biofuel production outweighs its supposed environmental benefits; biofuel production may actually harm the environment more than it helps. One survey presented at the Bali conference polled 1,000 respondents from 105 countries. Biofuels from agricultural crops finished dead last of 19 possible choices of answers to the world’s energy needs.”
Washington D.C has yet to get the message. The US Senate energy bill includes an even higher mandate to increase the nation's ethanol supply. The House will soon return to work on its version of the bill and could avoid this mistake. Congress should remove biofuel mandates from the energy bill and let the market discover the best energy solutions.
Let’s take a brief look at the logistics involved in cellulosic ethanol. Aside from the negative issue of using food (corn) for fuel, there are many other problems. The logistics of collecting and storing a million tons of corn stubble (or other materials) each year for a single ethanol plant is mind-boggling to say the least. Cellulose (corn stubble, etc.) is not very energy dense, which makes transporting it a real problem. One three-year study showed that an 80-million-gallon ethanol plant would require corn stubble from 500,000 acres of corn within a 50-mile radius of the plant and 500 acres to store it after harvest. From what I can read, a million tons of corn stubble might produce 80 million gallons of ethanol. It would take 67,000 semitrailer loads to haul the baled stubble out of the field. That's 187 truckloads a day or one every eight minutes. The need for trucks, machinery, and manpower would come during harvest time which is already the busiest time of the year on the farm. Switchgrass is even less dense than corn stubble and ethanol has yet to be produced from switchgrass except in the laboratory on a very small scale. Those, including our government officials, who keep tossing the switchgrass/ethanol term around simply have not done their homework on the subject.
To meet just current gasoline demands, we would need 2,500 of these ethanol production facilities to meet the U.S. needs, not including diesel, fuel oil, or jet fuel. We cannot ignore the energy required to supply these plants. How many gallons of fossil fuels would it take to run all of those semi-trailer trucks to take the stubble to the plant? How much diesel would it take for the trains to haul the ethanol to market? How much natural gas and electricity would be required to distill off the ethanol? What about the air and water pollution that is produced from each plant? What about the tremendous amount of water required for each plant? There are many more questions and very few answers concerning ethanol production from cellulose.
Granted, the above figures are open to debate depending on the many variables, but I feel that both our state and federal governments should remove the subsidies from this dead-end project. Other countries have already done this including Communist China. We should allow the free market to decide if ethanol is a viable alternative to our oil energy problems. It is time that our politicians get the message about this waste of incentive and subsidy tax dollars.

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Multiply, not divide: 9.2 million barrels is 386 million gallons.

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