A Few Things to Consider About Ethanol…

If finding ways to slowly ween America’s dependence on foreign oil is also a welcome opportunity to promote green, cleaner-burning alternatives, it’d be foolish — no — irresponsible not to embrace it right?

Well, when it comes to ethanol it’s not quite so easy. But it seems so simple … almost too good to be true: Grow corn, process corn into ethanol, blend with gasoline and go!

The ethanol industry has been growing for quite some time. Last week marked the 25th Fuel Ethanol Workshop and Expo (FEW) here in Denver. Every existing or under-construction ethanol producer and refiner in the country was invited. This industry expo was packed two years ago in St. Louis. Apparently this year, not so much.

Many of the big player companies are experience financial troubles (hey, who isn’t these days?). Don’t shed a tear though, taxpayers have been feeding these companies for years. Besides, while these companies try to figure out how to make ethanol more profitable, they aren’t above asking for more tax dollars (we’ll stop short of calling it a “b-b-b-bailout”).  Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. has received more than $10 billion in subsidies to encourage its expansion in the ethanol industry since 1980. That’s a lot of greenbacks for green fuel.

What did those tax dollars get us? Depending on who you ask, the answer could be: 1.) An exciting biofuel, 2.) An exciting expo, 3.) A worrying food crisis. You’d have to ask someone else how rockin’ the Colorado Convention Center was last week, so let’s look at biofuel and food.

Think back to last summer. Gas prices were soaring. Americans were shelling out three, maybe four or more bucks per gallon at the onset of a recession. That’s bad news bears for most of our pockets and it’s no coincidence folks started looking for cheaper ways to get around. Did you see a few more bicycles around town? Moped and scooter sales sure shot up. (You can buy an archived story I did on this last summer for the Palladium-Item in Richmond, Ind. Goofy newspapers selling web articles. Tsk Tsk.)

You know what else was expensive this time last year? Food. Why? Corn was being diverted from mouths to gas tanks. Experts argued the true cause of last summer’s worldwide food shortage and perhaps unsurprisingly the teams went something like this: Politicians from farming states (U.S. Sen. Grassley of Iowa) said there was no connection, the United Nations said ethanol was a “catastrophe” for poor people around the world.

Now we see the conundrum that is ethanol. What’s ostensibly a green, eco-friendly product (and this itself is another debate, though ethanol generally yields 34% more energy than it takes to produce) that can also help American farmers earn a living, is instead a sort of Jekyl and Hyde “solution” to gasoline. Whether you buy into the food-fuel trade-off argument, one thing is for sure: We’ve barely used enough ethanol to put a dent into our gasoline use. A lot of gas stations have had 90-10 mixes of gasoline and ethanol, or “gasohol,” for years. Yet overall, alternative fuel use overall checks in at 2-4% of our fuel consumption and of that ethanol is only a slice of the slice of the pie. Imagine the volume of corn needed to see a bigger piece. Or imagine what a drought year might do to ethanol production, much less food production. This “boom-bust” ethanol complex has investors scared.

Gen. Wesley Clark gave the keynote speech at the FEW expo, claiming the food-fuel debate was hogwash and that our goal should be freedom from dependence on foreign oil. But with some analysts predicting that ethanolcan at best cut out 3-4% of our oil dependence, maybe the message is good but the solution is rotten.

What’s the alternative to the alternative? Perhaps an exercise in PR and message-management after heated debates over ethanol, this year FEW looked to find asylum in the broader, more general “biofuel” buzzword. Biofuels present a lot of the same problems though. Does it feel like we’re running out of places to look for green, eco-friendly, renewable fuels? Fear not.

The biofuels that FEW might want to focus on next year — and that might be a better use of taxpayers’ dollars — are those that turn organic waste into energy. “Biodiesel” doesn’t get the same press coverage as ethanol, fuel cell batteries, electric cars or solar panels. That’s because there are a lot of different groups (often privately held companies or research labs) still developing the techniques.

There isn’t one accepted way to turn, say a Butterball factory’s turkey waste into something you can run your car on. But a private company called Changing World Technologies is doing it. Scientists have discovered enzymes that break down corn plant waste and turn it into biofuel.

Remember the guy that helped map the human genome faster and almost a billion dollars cheaper than the government funded project to do the same? His name is J. Craig Venter. He thinks he can create a synthetic bacteria by manipulating its genome so that it eats waste and excreets biofuel. This is groundbreaking stuff, folks.

The unfortunate truth is that while we can find ways to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, the only real eco-friendly alternatives are still some way off. As a matter of national pride and independence, it’s important not only that we find a way to battle our oil addiction, but also that we lead the charge in new and emerging research. Ethanol serves a very limited damage control function when it comes to oil dependence, with the unfortunate side effect of possibly contributing to worldwide food shortages.

If ethanol’s future is murky, it may be time to clear a path for new alternatives and start subsidizing and funding them like we mean business before our options are few and far between.