Getting real about ethanol's true promise

Former Vice President Al Gore took center stage recently when he said was wrong about the environmental and national security promise of ethanol as a fuel to power automobiles. Ethanol was, he allowed, overhyped – by him more than anyone – and after years of subsidized development, it fails to fully deliver.

Far less visible now is a detail looming before Congress in its lame duck session: The massive tax subsidies and foreign tariffs designed to bolster America's ethanol production will expire at the end of the month. The tax credit alone costs America more than $4 billion a year in foregone revenue. Ethanol, constituting 10 percent of most gasoline purchased at the pump, is quite expensive.

This needs fixing. Congress should sharply reduce, and possibly eliminate, the current 45-cents-per-gallon tax credit it gives to gasoline makers for blending ethanol into their products. And it should cut or eliminate the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff we charge to major foreign producers, such as Brazil, itching to sell here.

Ethanol has gotten a pass for years because it is green. We like green things, too. Ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline, releasing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; and for every drop of ethanol we make on our soil we buy that much less in Mideast oil.

But ethanol's real story is less about curbing greenhouse gases or securing America's fuel supply than it is about corn and this country's flat-out inability to think a big idea through. Ethanol, a form of alcohol not so far from moonshine, has become the distillate of a great corn boondoggle.

Nobody planned it that way. Gore's early, near-messianic work in Congress to create big tax breaks for ethanol were based in belief as much as fact. New technologies for ethanol's production had seemed promising, and stepping up ethanol's use by everyone would create a national appetite for the day when cheap, abundant cellulosic plant matter could replace agriculturally intensive corn to make cheap, abundant ethanol.

But it's decades later. Cellulosic technologies lag, and corn remains the core of ethanol production. Along the way, big Midwest corn-growers reconfigured to meet ethanol's call, at times driving food prices upward in corn-dependent countries while posing environmental challenges only beginning to surface here.

Among worries outlined by the federal Government Accountability Office are whether groundwater supplies are hammered by corn, a thirsty crop with a need for intensive herbicides and pesticides; and whether acreage supporting soil-restoring crops has been converted to corn, depleting the land and water.

But the biggest worry of all is whether ethanol's first benefit – C02 reduction to the atmosphere – is offset by the fossil fuels used to farm, harvest, transport, and process corn, as well as to distribute ethanol made from corn.

Nobody thought these things through when ethanol seemed a shining answer to our energy and global warming woes.

We believe ethanol can, however, be part of the answer. But we also believe fuel blenders who are required to mix ethanol into their products should do so by competing more widely for their ethanol – and, when it makes sense, finding ethanol made from things other than corn.

That's where Oregon can play a smart part.

Pacific Ethanol in Boardman employs 40 people who annually make 40 million gallons of ethanol, virtually all of it from Midwest corn. While Pacific continues to sell yet more of its product to blenders who must meet rising federal ethanol-use mandates, several Oregon companies, among them ZeaChem in Boardman, will press on in developing a naturally occuring feedstock that is profuse herabouts and could break corn's tyranny: woody biomass.

Congress, meantime, needs to sober up on ethanol and cut or eliminate a tax scheme built for a dream that just keeps refusing to play.

source: oregonlive