corn ethanol

Poet, seeking patronage

November 24, 2009

Jeff Broin knows his way around a corn field. The 44-year-old CEO of Poet, which is the largest ethanol producer in the world, grew up in Minnesota on a family farm. He lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Poet’s 26 ethanol plants are scattered across the midwest.

Jeff Broin

Jeff Broin

Broin also knows his way around Washington,  which he visits about once a month. Smart move. Without an array of subsidies and mandates from a farmer-friendly Congress, no one would invest in corn ethanol.

Which doesn’t mean that Broin is satisfied with the status quo–to the contrary, he’d like more help from the powers-that-be in your nation’s capital, which is where we met last week. We talked about the subsidies, about the challenge of competing with Big Oil and about Poet’s big plans to make cellulosic ethanol from corn cobs.

“While the corn cob is a very small item, it can have a very big impact,” Broin says. “We have the potential to replace gasoline in this country with ethanol.” [click to continue…]

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Biofuels: burning up (your) dollars

July 8, 2009

Farm state politicians, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have sold biofuels to rest of us as a way to revive rural America, attack the problem of global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

In response, investors and taxpayers have poured many millions of dollars into corn ethanol. The returns have been skimpy.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a new report from the Worldwatch Institute called Red, White, and Green: Transforming U.S. Biofuels. The unhappy news is that we don’t seem to have learned much from our dismal experience with corn ethanol, and unless things change in Washington, we’re going to burn a lot more of it.

“From an environmental perspective, corn ethanol has not delivered in terms of climate benefits,” says Alice McKeown, an author of the report.

Worse yet, we could repeat the problems all over again with so-called next-generation biofuels. That’s sorghum, below.

sorghum

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