Florida is betting big on ethanol; however, the promise of cheap energy may not actually pan out.
At his global warming summit in Miami last year, Gov. Charlie Crist held out ethanol as a major tool in reducing greenhouse gases. No state, he said, can match Florida’s capacity to produce ethanol. Since virtually all the ethanol in the U.S. is made from corn, Crist was anticipating a time when Florida entrepreneurs could take various forms of cellulose that are plentiful in the state — citrus waste, sugar cane waste, plants and trees — and distill ethanol from them.
Following Crist’s green lead, the Legislature this year mandated that all gas sold in Florida have at least 10% ethanol by the end of 2010. That translates into Florida needing some 861 million gallons of ethanol annually in less than three years. At May’s going price for a gallon of ethanol, that’s $2.4 billion worth each year — money that the lawmakers don’t want to flow only to corn farmers and ethanol distillers in the Midwest. To spur production in Florida, the Legislature allocated $8 million this year for bioenergy project grants and another $7 million for renewable energy and efficiency grants.
That’s on top of the $60 million the state already has given to would-be ethanol developers and other biofuel researchers in Florida. “About every state has a cellulosic ethanol initiative,” says University of Florida professor Lonnie Ingram, who has a $20-million state grant to build a cellulosic ethanol demonstration plant with sugar maker Florida Crystals in Palm Beach County. “There’s a lot of money being put into this area.”
Read the entire story at Florida Trend. There is a lot of good information there; enough to make me doubt the efficacy of sinking lots of money into ethanol research.
This article goes into detail about some of the Florida problems with ethanol brewed from cellulose materials; i.e., citrus waste, bagasse, and wood byproducts are already in use. I’ve previously posted an article from the University of Iowa that pointed out that corn stover was essential in maintaining soil health and would be detrimental for farmers in the long run (but not for farmers who rented the fields) to be sold to cellulosic ethanol plants. Another article here points out the same problem facing wheat farmers; wheat residue provides organic material to the soil.
Doing anything that will harm the economic interests of the people that the government officials are supposedly elected to protect is going to make those same government officials look like complete imbeciles if “global warming” isn’t. The ocean isn’t warming. The globe isn’t warming, it is cooling. Sea levels have been falling, contrary to hysterical rhetoric from people with a vested financial interest in AGW.
