Good news and bad news

As the title indicates, there’s good news and bad news on the ethanol front these days.

First the bad: the industry is going broke. There are a lot of leaks in the hull of the SS Ethanol right now, not the least of which are “volatile corn prices wreaking havoc on balance sheets…declining ethanol and gasoline prices…a massive slide in demand… [and] record-tight credit markets.” The full effect has been brutal. Ethanol plants are shutting down left and right as the companies backing them go under when banks don’t renew their loans or grant new ones. Renew Energy is the most recent casualty; they filed for bankruptcy earlier this week.

The good news is that the USDA wants to bail the industry out, going as far as releasing $25 million in biomass research funding last week, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that “the USDA has a role, I believe, in helping to develop and promote…practices that will increase and enhance management efficiencies, which in turn will allow more of these producers of ethanol to stay in business.” In English, that means the government will help ethanol manufacturers who know what they’re doing and why.

Also, researchers at the Dept. of Energy’s laboratory in Brookhaven have developed a direct ethanol fuel cell, which they say can “oxidize ethanol and produce clean energy in fuel cell reactions” by “breaking carbon bonds at room temperature and efficiently oxidizing ethanol into carbon dioxide as the main reaction product.” Ethanol is unique in that it produces carbon dioxide instead of acetalhyde and acetic acid, which don’t really do much for generating power.

So if nothing else, the government is willing to pitch in and help develop biofuels, which is pretty amazing when you consider how besotted with oil money our political structure is. Stay tuned to the Corn Car News Desk for further updates.