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- #21
Ah, ethanol. What market atrocity hasn't yet been committed in pursuit of the idea that we should power our cars from farmland rather than taking the fossilized stuff out of the ground?
In case you haven't noticed, the 30-year-old program for subsidizing ethanol production through tax credits has expired. Congress let it to happen over the Christmas holidays while hassling over how to fund the federal government for fiscal 2012. Republicans (minus a few farm state members) have long condemned the program while Democrats, who usually hail it as a triumph of the Carter Administration, finally decided it wasn't worth defending anymore. This means the tax credit for ethanol -- which started at 3 cents per gallon and eventually rose to 54 cents -- is now off the books. Also gone is the 46-cents-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol to protect the domestic industry.
Does that mean we're back to reality? Unfortunately, no. Still in place are the mandates adopted when the Bush Administration set phantasmagorical goals for ethanol production, particularly cellulosic ethanol, which brings us to our original subject.
The ethanol that we've been putting in our gas tanks for the last 20 years is made from corn seeds. The sugars and starches in the grain break down under heat and can be easily fermented into alcohol. We've been doing it since Neanderthal days (the Cave Men had a version of beer), so it's not too complicated. The problem is that the seeds make up only 15 percent of the corn plant. The rest is cellulose, the much tougher molecules that give the plant its structure and do not break down so easily. It can be accomplished with chemical enzymes or by evaporating everything and then combining it back to liquid ethanol, but both methods are far too expensive and energy intensive.
So the preferred techniques are biological. There are bacteria in the guts of cows and termites that break down cellulose but they are highly adapted and have trouble living outside their native environment. Only in 2010 did someone genetically engineer a strain of yeast that can do the same thing. But that is getting way ahead of the story.
Drawing on only 15 percent of the plant, we are now processing an incredible 40 percent of the 12 billion bushels grown on 400,000 farms into fuel ethanol. The entire world crop is only 25 billion bushels, which means that one out of five bushels worldwide is going into American automobiles. This has crimped the world food supply and set off riots in places as diverse as Mexico and Southeast Asia. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization regularly condemns ethanol as a "crime against humanity" but no one in this country pays much attention.
Always on the horizon of this effort, however, has been the vision that we will one day be able to process the remaining 85 percent of the plant -- the cellulose -- into a usable fuel as well. Then we wouldn't have to be taking food out of people's mouths.
Unfortunately, while it's been accomplished here and there in the laboratory, no one has ever been able to scale the process up to a commercial level. Nor is there any assurance that anyone ever will. People have been trying to domesticate morel mushrooms for centuries without any success. Somewhere around 2005, however, the environmental movement and its tagalongs in the Bush Administration came upon the perfect solution -- government mandates!
The American Spectator : The Ultimate Individual Mandate
Oh My!!! What Big Teeth You Have Grand Ma!!!