Ethanol production in the United States is growing so quickly that farmers expect to sell as much corn this year to ethanol plants as they export overseas.
The Tall Corn Ethanol plant in Coon Rapids, Iowa, reached its 150,000 gallons per day capacity 12 days after it opened.
The 40-acre distillery is part of an expanding industry turning about 20 percent of the nation's entire crop corn into ethanol fuel and reducing dependence upon foreign oil.
Farmer Lynn Phillips helped raise the money for the farmer-owned Tall Corn plant as a way to make more money by locally processing every kernel corn:
"We saw train cars after train cars of raw material being shipped away and value being added somewhere else," said Phillips. Now, the corn "is still going out on train cars -- it's just going out in the form of ethanol and distillers' grain."
With ethanol demand expanding, so is production. In Iowa alone, three new ethanol plants opened last month. The expansion is likely will outpace the Congressional goal of 7.5 billion gallons a year by 2012. By the end of this year we’ll probably produce about 5.5 billion gallons.
Lawmakers are now considering requiring even more ethanol for U.S. automobiles, up to 60 billion gallons of ethanol and soy-based biodiesel by 2030. Reaching that goal will require going beyond corn ethanol. We must learn to economically produce ethanol from cellulosic biomass materials such as corn stalks, switch grass and wood chips.
Does this mean that the price of Bourbon is going to skyrocket?
Posted by: Thomas Paine's Goiter | Tuesday, June 06, 2006 at 04:35 AM