Or perhaps he’s just not happy with the growth of a renewable fuel like ethanol being produced here in America to replace our dependence on foreign sources of oil while also contributing to the cleaning up of our environment. Whatever the reason (you make your own conclusion) ABC Rural reports that David O’Reilly who is the CEO and Chairman of Chevron Corporation publicly said that “biofuel production from corn and other grains is not sustainable.”
It’s just another example of someone making wild and unsubstantiated claims in an attempt to derail enthusiasm and support for the building of a new industry that will not only help our country and environment but relieve our dependence on foreign sources of fuel.
I like his statement about needing new technologies that would use things like waste to make fuel. Duh. Like that’s not also being worked on here in America? Many forms of alternative and renewable energy are being developed simultaneously and will continue to be. Let’s see if Mr. O’Reilly is willing to put his investments where his mouth is. How about contributing to the solution instead of whining and complaining?
Jim McClaren with StrathKirn, Inc. is preparing some excellent corn facts resources.
Here’s a graph from the first one showing “the real cost in chained-2007$ for corn feedstock based on proportional allocation of grain (starch) and conversion rates to ethanol (saccharification and yeast process).” The cost is obviously declining.
In the fact sheet which you can download here (Word doc) he concludes:
Despite recent increases in nominal price for corn, the overall trend remains down and hence corn grain remains a very attractive feedstock for ethanol production. At present, and excepting sorghum grain, there are no other large-scale commercially acceptable feedstocks, and it is doubtful that any economically viable approach can be developed within the fore-seeable future. Thus, it might be advisable to ensure that corn receives the R&D attention required for continued improvement.
In a recent cover story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch you kind of get a sense of where the reporter is slanting his piece right from the get go. It’s titled, “Betting the farm • Behind the ethanol boom Gains obvious, risks evident.” You can download the piece online for a small fee.
In the article the author makes a good case for how well the ethanol boom is benefiting farmers and rural communities but he can’t leave it there. He has to find a dissatisfied person to make a case that just because business isn’t better at their little store ethanol somehow isn’t helping with rural development. To me this is a good example of how a reporter can use their platform to inject what may very well be their personal bias into a story.
Contrast that with a paper just released by Ethanol Across America describing what is being done by our USDA office of Rural Development in this area. In his report, USDA Undersecretary for Rural Development Thomas Dorr says:
Energy and rural America have always been closely linked, but now we face an unprecedented opportunity to create wealth, new jobs and increased economic activity through production, instead of consumption. The 2002 Farm Bill was the first one to contain an energy title. The next farm bill is also expected to address America’s energy needs.
The American Lung Association of Minnesota has a YouTube video about their “Path to Cleaner Air” exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair. It focuses on how “Biofuels like E85 (ethanol) and biodiesel are making Minnesota’s air cleaner and greener.”
Thanks to Bob Moffitt, Communications Director, Clean Fuels & Vehicle Technologies Program, American Lung Association of Upper Midwest, for bringing it to our attention.
Do you think we should add it to our “Worth Watching” list?
Corn growers and ethanol supporters are really making their voices heard in comments to the misinformation about food, fuel and ethanol in the New York Times “Wheels” blog post “Ethanol and the Tortilla Tax.” This may have been a totally ignorant article to start with, but you have to be impressed with the forum this creates for debate.
At my last count (noon on 9/8), there were 110 comments on the post – including three of my own. Others include Rick Tolman of the National Corn Growers, Bob Dinneen with the Renewable Fuels Association and Don Hutchens with the Nebraska Corn Growers. But there are many others, including growers themselves, that posted comments defending ethanol and American agriculture. I counted at least 40 positive comments, 27 negative, and about 20 that advocate some other alternative – like sugar, speed limits, hemp, electric, solar, butanol, etc. There are also another 20 or so that I put under the category of “Huh?” that were kind of bizarre or just off subject.
Here are a few examples:
“The critics ignore the production cost of gasoline and raise the issue with ethanol as if it were unique.”
“(Ethanol has) a 105 octane rating and is better than gas.”
“Corn prices have smaller impact on food prices than energy and marketing costs.”
“The price of food is going up so that the U.S. can develop a system of self-sufficient energy production. Is this bad or wrong?”
“What you are seeing is a semi-capitalistic system groping to find a replacement for oil. Give it time to work.”
“The “high” price of corn is not so high, really. A $4 bushel of corn is 56lbs (7 cents a pound).”
“I don’t know if ethanol is the ultimate answer to our energy dilemma, but it’s not a bad short term approach to bridge the gap until something greater is viable, like hydrogen, which none of us is likely to see happen.”
“Bottom line is food prices are not up significantly, no matter what lazy reporters would have us believe.”
“I am sick and tired of the media demonizing corn and the people who grow it….Corn to ethanol is a first step in using renewables to supply part of the world’s growing energy needs. As farmers, we take a balanced approach and provide corn for feed, exports, fuel and for new uses such as biodegradable plastics….As Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield.”
“Wouldn’t it be great for…the NYTimes to be celebrating our ability to quickly ramp up production of home-grown energy and the positive economic impact for rural America and our environment rather than advancing unfounded and poorly researched opinions?”(more…)
This is the kind of response that every ethanol supporter out there should be writing.
It appears in “The Kansan.com” and was written by Dana Shifflett of Newton, who is apparently a wheat grower. I did not see the original editorial, but this writer makes excellent, well constructed points. Here are just a few – you need to read the whole thing and memorize it to fight back with some good facts.
Ethanol and the cost of food: Ethanol has increased the value of the crops we grow, but the cost of our crops is a very small portion — 4 percent to 6 percent, I believe, of the price you pay for food.
The majority of your money goes to the manufacturers and marketers. Rising energy costs mean higher transportation and manufacturing costs, and I believe that accounts for most of our recent food and consumer goods price hikes.
For perspective: In the summer of ‘99, I paid 68.9 cents for a gallon of gas at the Sam’s Club in west Wichita, and my wheat sold for $2.25 a bushel. Today, gas is roughly $2.80 — or four times as much — and the diesel that fuels our trucks, locomotives and barges is up a similar percentage. Wheat, at $6.55, is 2.9 times as much.
I don’t grow corn, but I think it’s up even less.
Fuel mileage: The writer claims E10 will cut your mileage by 7 percent to 8 percent. That is not my experience.
I keep logbooks for my vehicles, and I figure gas mileage and, since 1981, I’ve consistently found a 3 percent mileage improvement with E10 even though it has only 96.7 percent as much energy as straight gasoline.
I think I know why, but rather than make a long story longer, I’ll let those of you with a background in physics or mechanics consider the effect of ethanol’s higher latent heat of evaporation on an engine’s intake charge and compression stroke.
Read it all.
While you’re at it, check out this article from the New York Times and make sure to read all the comments. The article is very negative towards ethanol, but the comments are running about 50-50, although there is a massive amount of misinformation on both sides. This is the kind of article that ethanol supporters need to comment on.
An interesting story came out at the end of last week on TheNorthwestern.com. Apparently some gas stations (42 of them) are upset with an ethanol production company (Utica Energy, LLC) for selling fuel below the state’s strange minimum markup law. They’ve filed a lawsuit for $12 million dollars against the company and it’s retailer, Renew E-85. Now all this “under the price law” selling took place apparently at a 2-pump station. How that had a $12 million impact on other gas stations seems a mystery to me.
The story says:
According to court records, the gas station owners claim Renew’s two-pump station on Lineville Road in Green Bay sold fuel below the minimum price allowed under the state’s Unfair Sales Act, also referred to as the minimum mark-up law, for 143 days straight from Aug. 12, 2006, to Jan. 1, 2007. Based on unspecified injuries, each station owner asked the court to order Utica Energy and Renew to pay each station a total of $2,000-per-day per-violation, or $286,000.
At the least that sounds a little excessive wouldn’t you think? The story quotes Utica and Renew attorney Bruce Bauer. “He argues in a response to the gas station’s lawsuit that the gas station’s claims are more about the threat ethanol producers pose to “big oil” than anything else, saying the stations “ganged up” on Renew and Utica.
“The obvious goal is to put not just that station, but Renew itself, out of business,” a March 29 filing reads.”
Doc makes a variety of points, starting out with saying that the efficiency, or lack thereof, of ethanol production “doesn’t matter.” He compares it to rocket fuel, which is a new angle. He writes:
How much energy it takes to make rocket fuel is irrelevant to considerations of weight and thrust that can be attained. If rocket fuel takes 10 times or a 1000 times as much energy to produce as it contains, it is what it is because it needs to be that compact and lightweight in order for the vehicle to lift itself beyond the bounds of earth’s gravity. If the rocket fuel doesn’t do that, it is NOT rocket fuel, it is something else.
That’s really the perspective we have to get across to the nay-sayers on the efficiency issue of ethanol. Granted, we don’t really want to expend 10 units of fossil fuels to produce one unit of renewable fuels. But at this point some of the manufacturing processes, like making a tractor, are too remote from us to have a significant impact of the percentage of fossil fuels used in that process. Yet, there is no reason that one has to assume that the tractor itself is burning fossil energy while it is planting or harvesting a bioenergy crop. It could just as easily be using biobutanol (without modifications to the typical gasoline engine tractor) or biodiesel (for diesel engine tractors). If it “isn’t”, it can be argued, that is partly a matter of the alternative fuel availability which will never change if we block the creation of the alternative fuel by complaining it is “inefficient”.
Doc then goes off on several tangents involving a refrigerator from Sears, methane from livestock and permafrost in the Arctic. He finally lands on the topic of ADM investing in biodiesel production in Brazil and compares Brazilian subsidies for biodiesel production with the US “ethanol subsidy” – although he does not clarify what he means by subsidy – whether it is the tariff on imports or incentives for blenders, or what.
Let’s contrast just for a moment the biodiesel subsidy in Brazil to the ethanol subsidy in the USA. The factor they have in common is not the feedstock, it is ADM being the biggest player on the field. Did the subsidy created in the US federal Farm Bill require ADM to build roads, or clear shipping channels, or provide new storage facilities before the ethanol subsidy was put into effect? Does it limit the applicability of the ethanol subsidy to sources originating on small, financially struggling, family farms? Whose legislators end up looking more responsive and responsible to their electorate?
And then he talks about Richard Branson’s Virgin Group investing in biobutenol. Like I said, quite a ramble, but some interesting points.
The Iowa Corn Promotion Board is recognizing September as Corn Month by issuing several news releases. They’re reminding consumers about the economic importance of Iowa corn and the many products that use corn.
Here’s an excerpt from their first release titled, “The Straight Story: Iowa’s Corn Crop Delivers Food, Feed, and Fuel.”
Iowa corn growers harvest nearly two billion bushels of corn each year, or about seven percent of the world’s total production. With increased demand for corn, Iowans have planted 13 percent more acres of corn this year. That crop is then transformed into livestock products that put protein on the world’s dinner plates, ethanol that fuels more cars and thousands of other essential ingredients and products. Corn is used in more than 4,000 food and non-food products and Iowa’s farm sector supplies nearly $15 billion to the state economy each year.
The Iowa Corn Promotion Board (ICPB) believes that agriculture will continue to meet the nation’s growing demand for both food and fuel. In addition to farmers planting more corn acres, new studies shatter the myths about the relationship between the price of corn, ethanol production and food prices.
The holiday weekend caught up to us before we could get the following thoughts from the Farm Progress Show, held in Decatur, IL, posted at the end of last week. However, they’re still relevant. Thanks to Lou Malnassy, NCGA, for sending them along.
At a time when high-speed internet connections have tied growers and their suppliers closer together than ever before, the idea of thousands of people traveling to a farm show may seem out of date. In fact, say two National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) officers, today’s farm shows are better than ever.
“Farm shows are still the best way to get a look at all the new technologies,” said NCGA First Vice President Ron Litterer. “I’ve seen new seeds, new implements and many other things here for the very first time.”
Despite his exposure to new products and ideas, Litterer was impressed by what he’s seeing at this year’s Farm Progress Show, in Decatur, Ill.
“We’re seeing developments in biotechnology and genetics that are still several years away from being introduced,” he says.” There’s nothing like a farm show for that type of preview.
NCGA First Vice President-elect Bob Dickey sees the appeal of shows extending beyond agriculture.
“These shows attract the attention of non-farmers as well as farmers,” he explains. “They’re an opportunity to educate consumers about agriculture.”
Litterer and Dickey also agree that the shows provide a rare opportunity to meet and talk with fellow growers. Litterer sees the general mood as upbeat. “Weather is always a concern, but early harvest figures among those attending have been very good, and growers are generally pleased,” he says.
Dickey agrees. “These are exciting times,” he says. “You can feel that here.”
Jim McClaren with 
In a recent cover story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch you kind of get a sense of where the reporter is slanting his piece right from the get go. It’s titled, “Betting the farm • Behind the ethanol boom Gains obvious, risks evident.” You can 
At my last count (noon on 9/8), there were 110 comments on the post – including three of my own. Others include Rick Tolman of the 
An interesting story came out at the end of last week 
The story says:
There is an
Doc then goes off on several tangents involving a refrigerator from Sears, methane from livestock and permafrost in the Arctic. He finally lands on the topic of ADM investing in biodiesel production in Brazil and compares Brazilian subsidies for biodiesel production with the US “ethanol subsidy” – although he does not clarify what he means by subsidy – whether it is the tariff on imports or incentives for blenders, or what.
The Iowa Corn Promotion Board is recognizing September as Corn Month by issuing several news releases. They’re reminding consumers about the economic importance of Iowa corn and the many products that use corn. 