This is strangling every American household through the higher prices paid at the market. Food is being expensively processed in order to be pumped into the car's fuel tank.
This makes about as much sense as anything else these liberal pansies have ordered us to do.
Air bags, seat belts, extra stop light in the rear, etc. etc.
ping
Ethanol shares sell at bargain prices
Poet LLC says future bright, offers to buy out other producers.
DIRK LAMMERS Associated Press Writer
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Poet LLC, the nation’s top ethanol producer, is in buyout talks with a number of ethanol companies, the company’s founder told The Associated Press on Monday.
“We just feel there is a lot of promise in the future of the ethanol industry,” said Jeff Broin, chief executive of privately held Poet.
He offered no specific timetable and mentioned no company names.
VeraSun Energy Corp., the second largest U.S. ethanol producer, sought bankruptcy protection Oct. 31 after it suffered significant losses in the third quarter due to a dramatic spike in the cost of corn it turns into fuel.
Shares of smaller ethanol players such as Pacific Ethanol Inc., Aventine Renewable Energy Holdings Inc., and Biofuel Energy Corp. are trading at a fraction of what they once were, creating an environment in which it may be cheaper to buy an ethanol company than to build new plants.
Broin said Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Poet is looking to add plants that are in the right location with the right amenities.
“I think, quite honestly, some of the plants out there may be stranded capital. They were built in the wrong locations,” Broin said. “But there are some that we have significant interest in.”
Broin said he is examining “entire company opportunities.”
Many Wall Street analysts remain bearish on biofuels.
JPMorgan analyst Terry Bivens said consolidation could benefit the industry.
He said he expects depressed gasoline prices to lower demand for corn-based ethanol, but the long-term outlook is more favorable.
According to auto club AAA, the national average price for regular fell to about $1.91 a gallon overnight, less than half the cost when fuel hit record highs in July.
“We expect gas prices to eventually rebound and ethanol production capacity to consolidate,” Bivens wrote in JPMorgan’s 2009 alternative energy outlook.
With slim profit margins already weighing on the biofuels industry, VeraSun, which also is based in Sioux Falls, found itself in a liquidity crisis after locking in at higher-than-market corn prices.
Farmers have objected to VeraSun’s ability to reject corn contracts it signed before seeking bankruptcy protection and challenged its ability to do so Friday with the Delaware bankruptcy court.
Broin said Poet’s hedging actually boosted the company’s financial standing, and allowed it to pursue acquisitions in a rough year for the industry.
Poet, which has been making ethanol from corn for more than 20 years, operates 26 plants that collectively can pump out about 1.54 billion gallons of the alternative fuel each year. Broin said the company has brought three plants online in the past 70 days.
Poet has plans to start building at least two new plants in the spring, but an acquisition could trump that timetable if the company’s design and construction division is tied up retrofitting newly added facilities.
Ethanol FUD ping!
It is said that ethanol causes auto engines to wear prematurely. Don’t know how true that is but I have seen it written several times.
Gasoline is food? Whoda thunk it!
Food grains are not used in ethanol production, only seed quality grains. Ethanol production has not affected food prices but the high costs associated with $120.00+ oil for fuel, taxes on transport and sales taxed sure have had their effect. No, I am not pro ethanol as I know it makes a piss poor motor fuel and is very hard on engines.
You know, I have supported the ethanol industry since the early 1970’s after the 1st OPEC oil embargo. But we were given the choice about to use or not to use.
BAck in the 70’s there was a lot of alternative energy talk.
Oil prices went down. We found more foreign supplies to offset the new, hard line EPA restrictions.
Of all those technologys introduced during that period, only ethanol kept in production.
Wind the clock forward to 2004 when oil prices began spiking (and imports were over 60% compared to 30% in the 70’s) and the talk came back about all those wonderful technologies that will deliver the energy we need to our doorstep.
The difference between then and now is that now the government is forcing consumers to make choices on alternate energy, instead of the free market making those choices. We have plenty of domestic oil in North America.
But since government requires, and issues the permission slip to develop those oil fields they have taken away our choices. Free enterprise no longer dominates the energy market (or any other market for that matter).
All energy alternatives require government sponsorship to succeed. Since government lacks success as a viable, fiscal, business operation, how can we depend on their leadership when there is no accountability of the leaders?
Ethanol is good for many people. Not good for many. Let them make that choice. Government is inept at making logical choices for the people.
I lose about 5-6 mpg in my hybrid every time I am forced to buy the ethanol blend. With gas prices back down, it doesn’t seem so offensive, but when the price was over $4 a gallon, looking at that mpg gauge brought to mind every stupid decision the Bush administration made in the past eight years.
I hate the myth that ethanol raises food costs. The surplus corn used for ethanol wasn’t going to anyones table anyhow. And the distillers grains are fed to livestock anyhow so very little food value is lost.
For all the reasons to badmouth ethnol, the food to fuel arguement is the lamest. Blame the high cost of diesel fuel instead. Blame congress. Don’t blame the farmers. They are just trying to survive within the means government regulations allow them.
This fits in perfectly with the liberal doctrine, in creating artificial scarcities that result in a huge profit to a few, who may be strictly regulated by the dominant political power, while providing no net benefit to the rest of the population.
Now, part of the planned transition to “new sources” of energy would include natural gas, which we have in plentiful supply here in the US, and there are alternative sources to vastly expand the recovery and use of natural gas, which is primarily methane.
Compressed natural gas, CNG, has a rather low energy density per weight unit, as compared to a commonly used motor fuel, gasoline, and Diesel fuel has an even higher energy density per weight unit. Ethanol, however, is far lower energy density than either gasoline or Diesel fuel. For that reason alone, ethanol as a motor fuel is a failure.
The petrochemical technicians are rather clever lads, and over the years, they have developed several processes to convert very thick, heavy crude oil fractions into much lighter gasoline and Diesel fuel. By a reverse of this same procedure, compounds like methane may be converted to higher energy density hydrocarbons, producing a much cleaner-burning fuel than that produced from petroleum alone.
There shall be no severing ourselves from carbon based fuels, ever. Not even from the form of “fossil” fuel with the highest energy density of all, coal, or its derivative, coke, which is just about pure carbon. Back in the early 20th Century, German scientists had perfected a number of processes to convert coal directly to a liquid fuel, using steam injection into a bed of coke that had been heated to incandescence, resulting in conversion to carbon monoxide and free diatomic hydrogen, both potent and high-energy fuels when burned in the presence of oxygen. Or the free agent hydrogen and carbon monoxide could be forced through a catalyst layer, and reformulated into various hydrocarbons, creating a synthetic fuel mixture that is both more pure and more consistent than that extracted from distillation of petroleum.
But the liberal mindset has expressly prohibited this route to energy independence for this country.
Weyrich must work for the oil cartels.
Major driver behind food prices is cost of inputs—check out land, fuel, fertilizer, seed, and pesticides. I wonder about your experience in agribusiness? Please enlighten me.
Ethanol is a huge poke in the eye to the oil magnates in the middle east, venezuela, etc. Ethanol is mainly captured sun energy just as oil is but on an annual basis instead of millions of years.
The EPA is so stupid that they could hurl themselves at the ground and miss.
Haven’t we already PROVEN ethanol is a failure?
Haven’t we already wasted enough time and effort trying to re-invent or repeal the laws of thermodynamics?
The EPA is way out of control and needs to be held accountable for its actions. Criminally accountable, in most cases like MTBE.
Mythanol (not miss spelled) is an evil farce forced on Americans and those who depend on America for their food.
Nice to see Paul catching up. Just think of all that ADM and Cargill and all their minions in the House and Senate have done to assist the other side in this war with this delusional “solution.”
Why not point out that it helps the other side not ours?
At one point President Bush said he could “almost feel us growing out of” our dependence on foreign oil. Yeah, right.
Stop using food crops to produce it. How about the Kudzu which I hear is becoming such a problem in warmer wetter states? Very prolific, no care required. Energy content, that I don’t know.
E-85 is more expensive than regular in my hometown. Poor fuel mileage, gov. subsidies and costs more to boot. Isn’t that nice.
Bump
nonsense. Corn growers were subsidized long before ethanol ever came along to be promoted as alternative fuels through farm subsidy programs, and still are.
The billions in subsidies is simply to build more ethanol infrastructure, modernize older less productive plants, and fund biotech research.
Ethanol is an excellent fuel with excellent potential, except to those who haven't a clue how an engine runs in the first place.
And no, "food" isn't being used to put in gas tanks. Ethanol production uses feed corn, which isn't even digestible to humans. The by-product of ethanol production is -animal feed. Nothing is taken away from the food industry by ethanol production. Again this is myth propagated by those who haven't a clue how ethanol is made, nor how many types of corn is grown and for what reason. Ethanol is also a superior fuel. IF it's burned in an engine designed to burn ethanol.
Stranghe how it is that people wouldn't dare put diesel fuel in a gas engine, and expect it to run, but they will put ethanol in a gas engine and expect it to run.
Sure it will, but it won't run as good as it could had the engine been built to burn ethanol, or at least very high ethanol/gasoline blends.
This requires completely different engine timing, much high compression ratios that gasoline today simply cannot tolerate.
The "Flex fuel" stupidity that came out of detroits auto plants is a bone headed idea. With ethanol available in many states, at a cost of $1.87 pure ethanol engines, and ethanol diesel engines should be powering cars, and would be twice as efficient as crappy gas engines made today.
More ethanol in fuel ahead? If this keeps up I’m gonna have to cut back on my morning grits and lunchtime cornpone.