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Dec 19, 2007 - Devil In The Details

There's an 822 page energy bill headed for President Bush's desk that mandates increased fuel efficiency for car and trucks, and increased use to ethanol as a fuel source.

It also bans 100 watt incandescent light bulbs by 2012, so maybe it's a good thing that newspapers are dying and we read everything online because it appears that things will be getting darker... that or we'll simply turn on enough lights to be able to see.

But to get back to ehtanol...

The U.S. currently produces nearly 7 billion gallons of ethanol, all of it made from corn, thanks in large part to government mandates and subsidies included in the 2005 energy bill. The 2007 bill, which passed the House Tuesday and the Senate last week, mandates 36 billion gallons by 2022, with 21 billion gallons coming from so-called cellulosic ethanol.

That's all well and good, but perhaps we should have come up with a profitable way of producing ethanol before deciding that we're going to ramp things up.

And how do we grow enough of anything to meet this mandate and avoid hurting the environment (it takes a lot of water to produce ethanol) or having adverse effects on our food supply in the form of shortages and increased prices? Oh right, this will be from cellulosic ethanol.

"In this industry, they always say cellulosic is five or six years away, but they've been saying that for the last 15 years," said David Swenson, an associate scientist in economics at Iowa State University.

As always, the devil is in the details.

Read more at the International Herald Tribune and the Baltimore Sun

6:21 am | Categories: ethanol Permalink | Alert Administrator

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