Ethanol Home Still

MELROSE — James Bostwick grows sorghum on 5,000 acres near this Eastern New Mexico community. His lonely farm is a long way from the oil fields of the Middle East, but he believes people like him are key to America’s energy future. Bostwick sells his grain to an ethanol plant in nearby Portales, where the sorghum is distilled and mixed with conventional fuel to power American cars and trucks.Bostwick is a believer. "As long as it’s $70 a barrel for the petroleum, we can compete with that," he says. "And it leaves the money at home rather than sending it overseas."Not everyone agrees. "The United States desperately needs a liquid-fuel replacement for oil in the near future," says David Pimentel, an agriculture professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "But producing ethanol or biodiesel from plant biomass is going down the wrong road because you use more energy to produce these fuels than you get out from the combustion of these products." .

THE Australian biofuels sector is still continuing to attract big money despite the failure last week of the Global Ethanol Holdings IPO to raise $470 million to build plants in the US. Closer to home, investment bank Babcock & Brown is looking to build a $US100 million ($130 million) ethanol plant near Leeton in southern NSW.

The plant would have the capacity to produce 150 million litres of ethanol a year that would be manufactured from wheat and barley, and supplied to oil refiners in Sydney and Melbourne.

B&B has signed a memorandum of understanding to lease out land from cattle company Rockdale Beef which would take by-products from the plant such as distillers grain. The project is at the feasibility stage, but is expected to secure government approvals and final go ahead within the next six-to-nine months.

It's pretty obvious by now that global warming is a major problem. It's also obvious that not enough is being done to combat it here in America, where the Bush administration continues to promote lax environmental standards. It may be true that Bush has passed more environment-related bills than any previous president, but nearly all of them have weakened environmental policies put into place by previous administrations.

So what are we doing to promote sound energy policy and conservation at UF? Luckily, we are doing something.