Crop Prices Shutting Down Ethanol Plants -- And Plans

EcoGeek:

Ethanol plants based on food crops are taking a serious hit because of the price hike for grains and the flooding in the Mid-west that has wiped out a significant number of crops. In just the most recent news, Heartland Ethanol is tossing plans to build seven corn ethanol plants in Illinois, and even worse, they're dissolving the company - all due to feedstock prices. VeraSun Energy is delaying construction at two of their plants because of the flooding.

With corn passing $8 a bushel and a 10% drop in production over the last year, it seems that corn ethanol is finally reaching the end of its popularity (of what little it had left) and corn ethanol plants are either already in, or nearing the red without the prospect of getting funding thanks to the credit crunch.

Read the whole story: EcoGeek

Comments

[javaman]

really? you mean the ethanol will save us all bullsh*t by moron* has a hole in it's logic? who could have predicted that!!!

[darthdarcy]

HEMP HEMP HEMP...!

It's the number one Bio-Mass Plant on Earth...

Renews every 4 months...

You get 10 Tons of Bio Mass per Acre...

380 Gallons of what would replace gasoline per acre

The seeds are used to make diesel and stalks cellulose bio fuel..

Along with so many other products..­including animal feed..

It eats tons of CO2 and spits out loads of Oxygen...

Hemp will grow almost anywhere and so it could be refined easily all over the country meaning our fuel supply would be more secure not as subject to storms or enemy attack...

Grow Hemp...

[nomoredead]

Patricia Woertz is the CEO of ADM after a career in Big OIL. Which way do you think the price of corn or ethanol will go ? You can bet it will be $10 a gallon soon.

[mamacat]

Scientists and economists have pretty well discounted the practicality of growing corn for use as a fuel for our cars. On the other hand, plants such as switch grass, which can grow on land that is not good enough for corn, and which takes very little in the way of water and fertilizer, is many times more practical for conversion into ethanol than is corn.

[Photofarm]

I don't see switch grass working very well. Like usual, people don't understand how hard it is to harvest the grass, and the challenges of moving the material. There is also not that much ground that can work to harvest switch grass that can't also raise corn.

[leduck]

corn ethanol is was and always will be a loser

only famers like it

[Photofarm]

No, corn ethanol is just another piece to the puzzle. The critics always forget that you still get much of the feed value out of the corn and makes great cattle feed in the form of Dried Distillers Grains. They also use the one wrong study from 30 years ago that is not at all economically accurate.

[jsarets]

Humans make lots of waste. Waste can be gasified into a mixture of CO2 and H2. Bacteria can convert those gases directly into pure ethanol via an enzymatic pathway (the Calvin Cycle), some of which is used to fuel the gasifier. Bacterial waste-to-liquid. Now doesn't that make a whole lot more sense than cultivating, fermenting, and distilling "energy crops"? A more accurate name would be "waste crops". As if we don't already waste enough organic matter, so we need to grow more. Right...

[KillTheMessenger]

Thanks to energy conservation you can not "waste" more energy than you eat. What you eat is approx. 2500kcal/day (and that's too much already). That's about 10.5MJ of energy. Most of that we use to heat our bodies and keep our biochemistry going. What's left in the waste is a couple of MJ/day. In comparison, a single gallon of gasoline contains 130MJ. In other words, a single person's waste can at most give us the equivalent of a couple of gallons of gas worth a year.

[williamina]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aXJVtfxd0bWM

[Raymondf]

Solar, wind, clean coal, and oil is all we have you may as well face it. We could start getting oil from coal within 6 months. Solar, and wind would take about 6 years. There is no quick fix except coal. Even with coal it would be a year before prices start coming down at the pump. I live in West Virginia there are 40 coal mines within 40 miles of my house, probably 150 state wide most of which have 30+ years of coal. You have pennsylvania with twice as many, you have Kentucky with as much as w.v. you have Virginia with numerous coal fields, and you got Wyoming, Alabama, Georgia. I think coal is the way to go as long as the state and federal governments make them reclaim the land when a mine is mined out. but for all the clean coal to be mined in this country it would take 300 years to mine it all.

[KillTheMessenger]

We don't need a quick fix. Even if peak oil happened to be today (which it might), we would have as much oil left in the ground as we have used so far. That's enough to carry us trough the next 20-30 years with increasing conservation measures. Coal to liquids is an enormous environmental disaster in the making.

[leduck]

at current rates of production
which keeps rising year after year
so there isn't 300 or 250 years of corn

plus it fallows a bell curve and peaks too
just like oil

[richardgordon]

Its like God finally said, "this was a stupid idea in the first place. I'll take care of the problem."

[Raymondf]

Last year I bought corn for 4 ears for a dollar this year because of the floods I'm paying 1.00 per ear.

[Raymondf]

You cannot use corn or sugar to make alternative fuels. People world wide would start starving in 1o years everywhere. Man will be eating man just to survive. There are to many food products that depend on corn and sugar.

[Photofarm]

Wrong, you don't understand nutrition, or what most corn gets fed for today.

[CaptainVideo]

Let's hope that this puts an end to this destructive boondoggle. It takes almost as much petroleum to produce gasohol from corn as the amount of petroleum it saves. There is very little gain here. All this does is increase the price of food by increasing the price of feedgrain and by causing farmers to swich from other crops, like wheat, to corn. The subsidies should be phased out P.D.Q. That will help moderate the increase in the price of food. The money currently being wasted on the subsidies should go to subsidize hybrid cars instead.

[Photofarm]

Another wrong post, from all of the misinformation campaign put out by many people. Ethanol is actually reducing food prices, as the largest component of food prices is energy prices. Ethanol has lowered gasoline prices 30-40 cents a gallon.

[AngryDan]

Thank God this silliness is ending.

If we're really bound and determined to use food crops for fuel, why aren't we using sugar cane, which has 8 times the yield of corn? Corn ethanol takes more energy to produce than it yields!

And with any luck, we may be able to make cellulosic ethanol on a decent scale soon. That won't involve crops necessarily. Imagine all of the switchgrass in Montana being harvested for fuel instead. Or other non-edible plants, or what we consider waste (like, say, corncobs).

Just please please get away from corn ethanol. It's a loser.

[dadw5boys]

That price is artifically high because of news.

They planted 22% more corn than last year but losing 8 % from the flood that leave 12 % increase and pretty good growing conditions too.

[KillTheMessenger]

Because of news? Not really. It's high because of demand. People who make cost projections on a grand scale usually fail to take into account that the price of something will NOT stay the same if they want to buy 40% of the total market size. Ethanol might work if the price for corn is low because we make more than we need. It does not work when we need more corn than we can make.

They call that economics 101.

[Raymondf]

Then you use 10% for fuel that leaves 2%, not much

[Photofarm]

dadw5boys,

Your numbers are wrong, big time wrong. The USDA has already stated that we are down corn acres from last year.

There are multiple reasons for high corn prices, not the least of which is horrible commodity prices, over the last 15-20 years.

The big difference is that world wide weather problems, and increased demand for all crops, has changed the dynamics of grain production, so that we aren't over producing everything like we were for most of the 19990's.