Ethanol's Growing List of Enemies

Business Week ^ | March 19, 2007 | Moira Herbst

[thackney]

Paul Hitch has spent his entire life raising cattle and hogs on a stretch of the Oklahoma panhandle he says is "flat as a billiard table." His great-grandfather started the ranch in 1884, before Oklahoma was a state, and now Hitch, 63, is preparing to pass the family business on to his two sons.

But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged.

"This ethanol binge is insane," says Hitch, who's president-elect of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. (NCBA). "This talk about energy independence and wrapping yourself in the flag and singing God Bless America—all that's going to come at a severe cost to another part of the economy."

The ethanol movement is sprouting a vocal crop of critics. While politicians including President George W. Bush and farmers across the Midwest hope that the U.S. can win its energy independence by turning corn into fuel, Hitch and an unlikely assortment of allies are raising their voices in opposition. The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies, solar-power idealists and free-market pragmatists (see BW Online, 02/2/07, " Ethanol: Too Much Hype—and Corn").

They have different reasons for opposing ethanol. But their common contentions are that the focus on corn-based ethanol has been too hasty, and the government's active involvement—through subsidies for ethanol refiners and high tariffs to keep out alternatives like ethanol made from sugar—is likely to lead to chaos in other sectors of the economy.

[greasepaint]

ethanol cuts the ragheads out of the deal.


that, is worth some supposed inconviences

[dalereed]

uat uwe the hundreds of years of oil in California!

[hedgetrimmer]

Its amazing that the American people don't rise up and do something about the corruption.

Home of the brave? If so, we'd better start showing it.

[Leisler]

As you know, you can design an special built engine to burn most anything.

Eth-heads remind me of the bio-diesel heads. (Imagine getting your organic chemistry/physics/distribution facts from Willie Nelson, the Al Gore of bio-diesel)

How many decades have we all been listening to greenie delusions of...
We can power our houses with roof top...solar panels
Electric cars.
Wind energy is free, free, free...like the wind..la de da.
Nuclear energy is dangerous and going to kill us all.
Oil is running out in 1920, 1938, 1962,......20???
LNG ships will blow up.
If you travel fast in a train the air will be sucked out your lungs.
Ethanol, bio-diesel, bla,bla,bla
A study...a report... a scientist...they're doing it in Seattle already... But then again, what do I expect in a world were half of the people believe a flunked out divinity student ( Al Gore) for complex science?

[hgro]

The oil companies are trying to panic cattle growers but the truth is, with the ethanol plants being built, feed will end up cheaper than ever. People are being duped and prefer to put money into the pockets of Saudis, Iranians and the other oil producing countries in Arabia.

[Leisler]

Most smart corruption is presented/sold as something other than it is. Basically people have to be tempted( greed ) or threatened. Whether it is a young girl, or boy now adays with statutory rape, or a elderly with a aluminum siding salesman in their house for hours making them buy the $30K, financed siding, the story is the same.

I have great hopes with the low cost of the Internet to provided obscure information to those that wouldn't have access otherwise. This is why lefties and governments everywhere are trying to limit the Internet.

[razved]

The (National Corn Grower's Association) cited Argonne energy balance is a transparent fake.

The basis for the gasoline energy balance is the potential energy of petroleum in the ground.

The basis for the ethanol balance is the finished energy content of diesel, gasoline, NG, LPG, and coal. An inferred energy credit is claimed for a non-energy coproduct, "animal feeds". The coproduct represents 36.5% of the claimed energy production.

Using two different starting points for energy balance comparisons is an invalid practice.

[greasepaint]

I don't care what the ******* bunch sez

ethanol cuts the ragsheads out of the deal

one tenth of the input, comes from liquid-Raghead energy.

the rest is cheap-homegrown-coal.

[Balding_Eagle]

Thanks for your fact filled posts.

I notice you get few/no replies.

It's pretty hard to have a comback to the way thing REALLY are, as compared to the way many IMAGINE they are.

[Leisler]

I hate to tell you but the US farmer is becoming dependent upon imported fertilizer. What are we going to do next, subsidize the domestic fertilizer industry? Subsidize fertilizer to subsidize corn?

Naturally these subsidize will not show up in ethanol prices, just the tax bill....and eth heads will continue to say their product is efficient.

Then we will have a situation like we have now with subsidized sugar. Domestic candy manufactures are going out of business because domestic sugar is so expensive it is cheaper to import candy made from world sugar prices at half of domestic price.

But hey, trust the government. Trust ADM. Trust farm state politicians. They'd never put it to anyone, naw, never. And no one here on FR would fall for something like that? Naw, never.

[TKDietz]

"First off, butanol is a much better fuel, much closer in potential energy to gasoline. Secondly, it's easier to get from a wider selection of sources. And most importantly (IMHO), you're not setting up a competition between foodstuffs and energy sources."

Butanol is a type of alcohol. Most of it today is made from petroleum, and it's a lot more expensive than gasoline. It can also be made from crops, using the same feedstocks we use for ethanol. The problem is that it is good bit more expensive to produce than ethanol. If per acre yields and production costs were similar to ethanol yields and costs, there wouldn't be a fuel ethanol industry, there would be a big growing bio-butanol industry instead, and people would be making the same "food or fuel" arguments because we'd be using the same feedstocks for bio-butanol that we use for ethanol.

[Leisler]

"There is no great conspiracy..."

One word. Congress.

US domestic price of sugar is twice the world price. It is illegal to import sugar. Ditto peanuts and hosts of other products.

If law. The force of government. Arrest. Fines. Prison sentences aren't at least an open conspiracy, I don't know what is.

Ethanol fans should at least remove the quotas on imports and 'save' and 'help' the consumer. After all this is the reason they are such fans of ehtanol. Right? Right? Money, profits are secondary. Of course, once this tax/money shuffling farm scam really gets big, and farmers get even more hooked on the public tax teat....then they'll demand, demand I say, demand, Congress open up the US market to cheap foreign ethanol. Right. Suckers line up please. What ever the prospects of ethanol, you can rest assured the the US will be the high cost nation. Which means all energy users will have higher priced goods, more difficult to export.

[gogeo]

The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies..

The hippies may have finally found some allies for whom the lack of personal hygeine won't create a gag reflex.

[Leisler]

You're scaring the children and the ethanol Elmer Gantrys.

[thackney]

do you know how to read?

Apply those comments to yourself first. Your initial claim of liquid energy 10/1 was to a comment that didn't limit the energy comparison to only the portion that makes ethanol look good.

the rest is coal-etc, that cost pennies.

And Natural Gas (directly as well as electricity) and nuclear and other resource they are not giving away. Pennies, well lots and lots of pennies.

If the process is so cheap and great, why does it take government mandates and subsidies?

[razved]

Apparently, the principles of material and energy balances are alien territory for many.

They are ignored at some great peril. Rudolf Clausius must be spinning in his Bonn grave. Boltzmann and Georgescu-Roegen could rotating in sympathy.

As Piet Hein said, "A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong."

[TKDietz]

If you have figured out a way to make a gallon of pure ethanol from just ten pounds of sugar you should go get a patent and become a zillionaire. It takes everyone else fourteen pounds of sugar or starch to make a gallon of ethanol. With your new method and your supply of ten cent a pound refined sugar you ought to get rich. Where do you find sugar prices like that in the U.S. anyway? I just checked U.S sugar prices and it's going for more than twenty cents a pound. It's close to ten cents a pound on the world market, but of course we can't really buy sugar on the world markets here without paying massive tariffs. Look for "Sugar #14" for U.S. commodity contract prices next time you check, not "Sugar #11," which would show you the world market prices as opposed to U.S. prices.

Chuckles, no offense intended here, but do you really believe there is some grand conspiracy on the part of corn growers and ethanol producers to use nothing but corn for ethanol production? That's just silly conspiracy theory nonsense. Now, no doubt American farmers, corn producers and sugar crop producers alike, do try like crazy to protect themselves from foreign competition. Our sugar industry is extremely protectionist. Sugar crop growers have been actively fighting against attempts (paid for by companies that use sugar to make food products who want to remove protective tariffs on foreign sugar) to subsidize their crops like corn or cotton or wheat or whatever because they know that they will go under as soon as the price supports disappear and the door opens up to foreign competition. While farmers do spend a lot of money lobbying for protection against foreign competition, as far as American grown crops go, corn really is the cheapest one out there for use as an ethanol feedstock, and that's why it ends up being the one our ethanol producers use the most. There's no grand conspiracy to use corn and only corn. If they had a better feedstock they could grow on a huge scale here and thereby reduce the costs of ethanol production American farmers and ethanol producers would switch to that feedstock and in the end make a lot more money.

The reason they wouldn't use refined sugar for instance is that we don't and can't produce nearly enough of it here to supply all the ethanol plants, and in big part because of our artificially high sugar prices in this country it would end up being way too expensive to produce ethanol from sugar here. They don't use refined sugar for ethanol production in Brazil either though. There is no need to refine the juice from the cane into table sugar before converting it into ethanol, and it's not as easy as you might think to ferment refined sugar for that matter anyway.

[anglian]

In the end, even the most generous analysts estimate that it takes the energy equivalent of three gallons of ethanol to make four gallons of the stuff. Some even argue that it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than you get out of it, but most agricultural economists think that's a stretch.

Making ethanol is so profitable, thanks to government subsidies and continued high oil prices, that plants are proliferating throughout the Corn Belt. Iowa, the nation's top corn-producing state, is projected to have so many ethanol plants by 2008 it could easily find itself importing corn in order to feed them.

But that depends on the Invisible Hand. Making ethanol is profitable when oil is costly and corn is cheap. And the 51 cent-a-gallon federal subsidy doesn't hurt. But oil prices are off from last year's peaks and corn has doubled in price over the past year, thanks mostly to demand from ethanol producers.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070310/ethanol_q_a.html?.v=2

Consumers will soon feel the effects of high corn prices as well, if they haven't already, because virtually everything Americans put in their mouths starts as corn.

Demand for corn driving up meat prices

The Columbus Dispatch Friday, March 9, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Strong demand for corn from ethanol plants is driving up the cost of livestock and will raise prices for beef, pork and chicken, the Agriculture Department said Friday.

The cost of feeding chickens has gone up 40 percent, according to the National Chicken Council. http://www.columbusdispatch.com/news-story.php?story=251975

[TKDietz]

I was talking about crops that can be grown on a massive scale in this country, which knocks sugar crops out of the running. But if we are going to talk about imports, who lobbies for protection of the American sugar industry? It's not American ethanol producers or corn farmers. It's American sugar crop growers. They're the ones who want to keep sugar prices high because they know good and well they wouldn't survive if the going price of their product was cut in half. Ethanol producers, including ADM, would be happy to use sugar or molasses if they could get it cheap enough. They can't though and I'm not so sure they could if they could buy it on the world market without all the tariffs either. Tariffs aside, importing feedstocks for ethanol production will probably always be more expensive than just having the ethanol produced right where the feedstocks are grown and then importing the final product.

[Leisler]

"..who lobbies for protection of the American sugar industry? It's not American ethanol producers or corn farmers.."

Ah, yeah. What you wrote is kind of a political truism.

Already there is a 54 cent/gallon tarriff on imported ethanol. Let me guess, was it the candy manufactures that lobbied for this? Was it the daily, urban auto commuter that did?
I
don't
think
so.

I'll take a guess. Farmers, ethanol producers, ADM.

Only and idiot would import low value feedstock for ethanol. They'd convert to higher value ethanol, and import that, which as I have stated, domestic subsidized greed heads that tell me ethanol is lower cost, has higher efficiencies than petroleum fuels....and that's why consumers have to be forced to buy it...but, not from cheaper imported ethanol sources.

At best ethanol is a stunt. Right now it is a pork-barrel, or I should say a ethanol barrel scam, ripping off the driving public, raising the cost of living and manufacturing and making the country less effective. It is a perfect storm of green delusion, greenback greed and political hackdom. As in Soviet socialism the only thing that makes this whole racket work is government force. Just as the socialist depend upon government force, that should give you a market signal as to the acceptance of the good or service by a free willing buyer. Lastly I am led to believe that cain is near eight times more productive than corn. I suspect that growing cain like plants for third world countries is very attractive. So, I don't see the US ever being able to produce ethanol as cheap as Brazil and Africa. So that means that the domestic producers, just like the domestic sugar producers will expect the American citizen to pay more, to be taxed more, for their ethanol scheme. End use fuel users will find themselves in the same squeeze as domestic producers. We saw this when President Bush kept the steel quotas up for a few loser mills. Steel end users complained that they couldn't make refrigerators, autos, ships with high steel costs. Just as these industries suffered so shall anyone that uses higher cost domestic ethanol fuels.