Obama, Vilsack and Salazar: The Ethanol Scammers’ Dream Team

Over the past few weeks, Obama’s delusions about ethanol have become even more pronounced. On December 16, Stephen Power of the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama’s transition team has been talking to the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) — the trade group funded by the corn ethanol producers — about a bailout for the ethanol industry. Two days later, Obama announced that the former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, would be the next Secretary of Agriculture and that Colorado Senator Ken Salazar would be the next Secretary of Interior. Obama said Vilsack and Salazar would be part of the “team we need” to strengthen rural America, create “green jobs” and “to free our nation from its dependence on oil.”

The fact that Obama continues to repeat this line about “dependence on oil” shows a near-complete ignorance of the scale of America’s energy needs.
The U.S. currently has about 251 million registered motor vehicles, 8,200 commercial aircraft, 224,000 general aviation aircraft, and 12.7 million recreational boats. And nearly every one of those machines runs on oil.

Nevertheless, Obama appears ready to feed more money to the ethanol industry in the mistaken belief that doing so will have a significant effect on US oil needs. According to Power, the RFA provided Obama’s team “with some ideas on how to craft the language” on an economic recovery package. Those suggestions include the creation of up to $1 billion in short-term credit facilities that could allow ethanol producers to finance their operations” and “a $50 billion federal loan guarantee program to finance investment in new renewable fuel production capacity and supporting infrastructure.” The RFA also wants the feds to require that any automaker getting federal bailout money must begin producing fleets that are “flex-fuel” – thus, able burn fuels containing up to 85 percent ethanol – no later than 2010.

The idea of a bailout for the ethanol industry goes beyond the absurd. As energy blogger Robert Rapier pointed out in a recent post, “Here is an industry that can’t survive even with a combination of mandates and subsidies – and our government couldn’t see any of this coming. So the industry asks for more subsidies, and our kids get the bill.”

Fine. Let’s look at the numbers for cellulosic ethanol.

Let’s assume that the U.S. wants to replace 10 percent of its oil use (by volume) with cellulosic ethanol. The US consumes about 320 billion gallons of oil per year. New ethanol companies like Coskata and Syntec are claiming that they can produce about 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of biomass, which is also about the same yield that can be garnered by using grain as a feedstock.

The math is straightforward: to produce 32 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol would require the annual harvest and transport of 320 million tons of biomass. Assuming each trailer holds 15 tons of biomass, that volume of biomass would fill 21.44 million semi-trailer loads. If we further assume that each trailer is 48 feet long, the column of trailers holding that quantity of feedstock would stretch almost 195,000 miles – that’s nearly the distance from the earth to the moon.

Energy Tribune