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Posted on Sat, May. 06, 2006email thisprint this
Investors and farmers alike hope this time is the charm for ethanol
By Michael O\\'Neal and Greg Burns
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - Richard Branson, the globetrotting chief of Britain\\'s Virgin Group Ltd., is a true believer. So is Microsoft Corp.\\'s Bill Gates, the world\\'s richest man.
Vinod Khosla, arguably Silicon Valley\\'s most successful venture capitalist, is throwing his weight behind it. Investment powerhouse Goldman Sachs is right on his heels.
Then there\\'s Frank Mackaman, the mayor of little Pekin, Ill., a Corn Belt town with a giant ethanol plant on its outskirts.
"If ethanol is the latest gold rush, I\\'d like to be part of it," he said. "We are in the right place at the right time."
With oil sloshing past $70 a barrel and angst over global warming and national security at a fever pitch, ethanol is back. The buzz about the corn-based "biofuel" is crackling from Wall Street conference rooms to the 6 a.m. coffee klatches at your average downstate Denny\\'s.
President Bush reopened the fractious debate about federal protections for the corn-based bio-fuel on Friday when he proposed lifting a 54-cent tariff on imported ethanol - a move that could take some of the air out of high-flying stocks like Decatur, Ill.-based Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Pacific Ethanol Inc.
But with Bush, Congress and some of the world\\'s most savvy investors also giving the industry heavy political and financial support, the long-term momentum isn\\'t likely to ebb so easily.
For anyone who has been seduced and disappointed by ethanol\\'s siren song over the past 30 years, the question raised by all of this is obvious: Why is anything different this time?
But scientists are providing compelling evidence that ethanol may be approaching a crucial tipping point. And plenty of people are listening.
"The world is facing a self-inflicted catastrophe," said Branson, who devoted as much as $500 million to ethanol investments after a visit from former Vice President Al Gore. "At Virgin we\\'re playing our own part with our planes and trains. We decided we have to do something about it."
While Gore may have helped Branson see the environmental imperative, the transportation and entertainment magnate didn\\'t build a $2.8 billion fortune by making foolish business decisions.
What he and others are banking on is that the market for clean-burning, plant-based ethanol will benefit not only from chronically high oil prices but also breakthrough advances in molecular biology.
Genetically modified organisms that can unlock the valuable sugars in everything from prairie grass and poplar trees to manure and wood chips promise to make ethanol production much more feasible, raising hopes that it could, indeed, help wean the U.S. from its troublesome dependence on Mideast oil.
"It\\'s the power of biotechnology," said James McMillan, a top scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. "We\\'re very close to this stuff being a no-brainer."
The knock against ethanol has always been that without the billions in federal and state subsidies it receives annually it would never be competitive. As it stands, said David Bullock, an economist with the University of Illinois, federal ethanol policy deliberately distorts the marketplace to the benefit of rural communities in the Midwest.
But at a current price of more than $2.50 per gallon, double its level a year ago, the economics have become irresistible with or without subsidies. A bushel of corn costing barely more than two bucks can be brewed into almost three gallons of ethanol, providing an enormous profit margin for a commodity product. Uncle Sam further sweetens the pot with a tax break amounting to $1.50 or so per bushel. And once fermentation is complete, even the leftover grain byproducts can be sold for livestock feed.
"You do the math. It\\'s just a bonanza," said Dan Basse, analyst at Chicago\\'s AgResource Co. "They\\'re just making so much money."
Bernie Punt, the general manager of Iowa-based ethanol producer Siouxland Energy and Livestock Co-op, said the gusher has transformed his community. After collecting their fat distribution checks this past year, co-op members helped out needy neighbors, contributed to school systems and followed through on long-deferred equipment purchases, he said.
They\\'re also coming back for more. Equity drives to fund expansion across the state are "packed" with farmers "writing out checks for $5,000, $10,000, $50,000, $100,000," he said. His co-op plans to expand 40 percent.
"That\\'s how hungry farmers are for value-added," Punt said. "It\\'s great for the economy. It\\'s great for the farmer."
The big question, of course, is can the boom continue?
Ethanol got a big push last year when the Energy Policy Act mandated increased production. It has also benefited from a switch by oil refiners from a substance called MTBE - which has been found to contaminate groundwater - to 10 percent ethanol to provide a cleaner burning blend.
But Basse voices a common concern when he says that the boom can\\'t go on forever. Over the next 18 months or two years, today\\'s ethanol fortune-hunters will be using up so much corn that food costs inevitably will start to rise. Already, corn diverted to ethanol production at ADM generated a spike in the price it charges soft-drink companies for corn syrup.
"That gold rush mentality is going to sap corn from traditional uses," Basse said. "It becomes a real food fight."
Scientists point to government studies concluding that there\\'s more than enough land to support a robust ethanol industry without impinging on the food supply. But getting there will require using genetic science to turn non-food "biomass" like switchgrass or wheat straw into something called cellulosic ethanol, which has yet to be produced commercially.
Even the most optimistic advocates concede that ethanol isn\\'t likely to supplant oil for many years. Despite state-mandated blending requirements, it still only makes up 3 percent of the nation\\'s 140 billion-gallon annual demand for gasoline.
But several years ago, the same sorts of arguments could have been made about Brazil. And today, that country is virtually energy independent because of ethanol.
Brazil is blessed with an abundance of sugar cane, which is more easily broken down and distilled into ethanol than corn. A government push to wean the country from imported oil has replaced 40 percent of demand with ethanol. That, coupled with its own oil reserves, has largely unshackled Brazil from external sources and freed up more than $50 billion for domestic spending.
At the typical Brazilian "fuel station," drivers can fill up with either gas or a blend of 90 percent ethanol-10 percent petrol. More than 70 percent of the nation\\'s cars are "flex-fuel," meaning they will run on either gas or ethanol. Three years ago, that number was closer to 4 percent, but auto companies began offering flex vehicles to drivers clamoring for cheap ethanol.
General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and Toyota are all pumping out flex-fuel vehicles for the U.S. market, even though only about 600 of this nation\\'s roughly 170,000 gas stations serve up an 85 percent ethanol blend called E85. Already, more than 5 million vehicles on U.S. roads have flex-fuel capability and more are on the way. The appeal to the auto companies is clear: Compared to expensive emissions controls, producing flex-fuel vehicles is cheap and politically correct.
All of this - plus the political push in Washington - has inspired a current building boom of traditional ethanol plants that turn corn kernels into alcohol formulated to power a car or truck.
ADM, the nation\\'s biggest producer, is spending billions to expand its current 1 billion gallon capacity. Bill Gates\\' Cascade Investment LLC last year gave $84 million to California\\'s Pacific Ethanol to build five plants on the West Coast - well outside the traditional Midwestern Ethanol Belt. Total industry capacity is around 4.5 billion gallons a year (about the same as Brazil) but is growing at more than 20 percent a year, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
Pacific Ethanol CEO Neil Koehler said the biggest surprise is that some of the major oil companies have been talking seriously about how to get in on the action. Exhibit A is Royal Dutch Shell Group\\'s support for a Canadian company called Iogen Corp., which has staked its future on cellulosic technology. Drawing on breakthroughs in molecular science, Iogen has formulated an enzymatic "cocktail" that can break down wheat straw into sugars that can be transformed into ethanol. It has built a $40 million demonstration plant in Ottawa that can continuously produce 1 million gallons of ethanol a year from the straw left in farmer\\'s fields after harvesting wheat.
Executive vice president Jeff Passmore said the effort has been a painstaking exercise in going back and forth between developing the enzymes and scaling the process up to industrial levels. What works in the petri dish, he said, doesn\\'t always work in a large metal fermenting tank.
But with support from Shell and a new infusion of $30 million from Goldman Sachs, Iogen hopes to build the world\\'s first commercial-scale cellulosic plant in Idaho, where it has already rounded up 320 farmers who can supply 400,000 tons of straw. That will require a U.S. federal grant of as much as $80 million under a subsidy program for cellulosic plant development contained in last year\\'s Energy Policy Act.
Critics would argue that this only provides further evidence that the government is propping up an industry that would fail on its own.
But proponents would counter that oil also gets tax breaks and that the wider promise of ethanol - both economically and socially - justifies the national investment.
"The government needs to be an investor in the first plants," said Charles Wyman, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Riverside. "You won\\'t get any benefit from this technology if you don\\'t have a plant" to begin working up the industrial learning curve.
What\\'s clear is that the technology answers many of the questions that have dogged the industry for years. First of all, it cuts the cost of production dramatically because it allows producers to use junk, not food, for raw material. Not only does that make it more competitive, but it also makes up for the fact that ethanol gets fewer miles per gallon than gas, despite burning cleaner, with better octane.
Cellulosic technology also allows for more ethanol from less land, neatly hurdling the inflation argument. The U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture released a study last year showing that existing "agriculture lands can provide nearly 1 billion tons of dry biomass and continue to meet food, feed and export demands." That\\'s enough, it concluded, to "displace 30 percent or more of the country\\'s present petroleum consumption."
Third, production of cellulosic ethanol creates far fewer greenhouse gasses than either oil refining or regular ethanol production.
The reason: a by-product of the process is a non-fossil compound called lignan, which can be burned instead of natural gas to power the process. It\\'s also true that most biomass doesn\\'t require fertilizer, which also sucks up fossil fuels in production.
Ethanol aside, the potential of industrial biotech can be dazzling. Scientists point out that once you have sugars in abundance, you can replace any number of messy substances that are now contributing to the petroleum addiction.
DuPont has programmed an organism to produce enzymes that break sugars into a compound called Bio-PDO, which the company will use to make its Sorona-brand apparel fabric. Sorona is currently produced from a petroleum-based polymer, but DuPont sees Bio-PDO as the first of many future bio-replacements.
"The notion that a cell is a factory can move in a lot of directions," said Thomas Connelly, DuPont\\'s chief science and technology officer. "The sugar is the feedstock, but the product doesn\\'t have to be ethanol."
To venture capitalist Khosla, what\\'s happening is nothing short of miraculous. As he put it in a March speech at Google Inc.: "This is a macroeconomic shift that will change the whole planet, I think. It relies on the power of ideas fueled by entrepreneurial energy."
Given the hurdles, it\\'s easy to argue that ethanol is just a pipe dream. But America has never been short on ideas and entrepreneurial energy.
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