Click and Clack tackle cost effectiveness of ethanol {Autoblog Green}

Jul 11th 2006 10:28AM Interesting discussion. I did not listen to the NPR program, but can get the gist from the comments made here and the cartoon above. I would like to address Howard Lee Harkness's statement about ethanol producers using "dinofuel" to produce ethanol. I can't say what ADM uses in their plants for energy (though I'm guessing a fair amount of it is electricity and natural gas), but I own a part of a farm, a big part of which is growing corn for our local ethanol plant. For the last 10-15 years we have been slowly switching as much of our fuel consumption over to biofuels as possible. When MN was one of the first states to instantiate E10 gasoline blends, we immediately switched over. Newer vehicles have been flex-fuel capable where possible (all but our oldest field pickup now runs E85). We also switched to BioDiesel when it became available for all of our tractors, trucks, and combine. Almost none of this has shown a financial benefit to our operation, it just seems like the right thing to do and it's obviously in our best interests to set an example (not that anyone will notice out here in the middle of nowhere ;). My main point here is we may still use "dinofuel," but it's not really by choice, and we keep it to a minimum. If all of our machines could run with 100% biofuel and we could get it fairly economically, we would switch in a heart beat.

Another point about the energy shortfall that must be taken into consideration is the fact that an ethanol plant does not necessarily produce only ethanol. From what I understand, not all of the corn kernel is converted to ethanol and the leftover mash is used as feed (for cows, pigs, etc.). That would surely have to be figured into the calculation. Just my $.02