Ethanol Coming to Fayette County

The Pal-Item reports today that Whitewater Valley Ethanol is putting together a $200 million dollar plant in rural Fayette county:

Annual ethanol production for the $200 million project is estimated at 110 million gallons. The plant will employ 55 to 65 people with an average annual wage of $45,000, said Troy Flowers of Whitewater Valley Ethanol. Additional support jobs also would be created in the community.

“This, without a doubt, will be the largest rural economic development project Fayette County has seen,” Flowers said. “It will inject $60 million into their economy year in and year out. It won’t matter if labor gets cheaper in Mexico or China. We’ll be here forever. We want to support local growers.”

Link

The plant will use “millions” of gallons of water per day, and promises to pay a premium for local grain producers’ crops. This is the local result of the US push into ethanol production, reflected by the recent partnership announced with the world’s leading ethanol producer, Brazil.

This push into using corn for fuel flies in the face of the science which informs us that corn is a rather inefficient crop to use as an ethanol source:

To achieve Brazil’s results, the U.S. would have to turn all of its crop-producing acreage over to corn and use all of the corn for ethanol, said Eric Wittenauer, a St. Louis-based energy analyst at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.

Link. (LA Times)

In fact, the only factor that makes corn a viable fuel source at this point is the government subsidies that go into corn production, and a 51 cent per gallon subsidy for ethanol producers. Brazil’s prime source for ethanol is its sugar cane crop, a much more efficient crop for ethanol production. The only thing that permits US corn growers to compete with Brazil’s muscular sugar cane based ethanol industry is the 54 cent per gallon US tariff on Brazilian ethanol.

I cannot find the cite, but at some point in a local debate over an ethanol plant, a farmer questioned the wisdom of burning the last 6 inches of topsoil in the Midwest in our gas tanks - instead of saving it for food production.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.