The State, SC
07-06-07
Corn stretched to its limits
Some call for move to other plant material as renewable fuel source
By DAN CHAPMAN - Cox News Service
“We ask a lot of the corn plant,” said the Iowa State University economist.
Take the all-American summer barbecue. Corn on the cob. Corn-fed cows turned into hamburgers. Corn fructose in Cokes and cookies. And, increasingly, corn ethanol blended with gasoline to power the fire engine down Main Street.
Corn is the country’s main renewable fuel source. President Bush has called for
35 billion gallons of alternative fuel annually by 2017. The Senate, in the energy bill passed in June, set a 36 billion-gallon bench mark by 2022.
But corn — the every grain for every purpose — can’t fill the nation’s insatiable appetite for food, feed and fuel.
“There’s only so much corn you can grow in this country,” said U.S. Sen. Saxby
Chambliss, RGa. “We’ve simply got to move away from (corn) and have some alternative products, and cellulose is one of the most promising re sources.”
Chambliss, ranking minority member on the Senate Agriculture Committee, has introduced legislation to boost fuel derived from pine trees and other “cellulosic” sources. Georgia, lo and behold, is home to 24 million forested acres.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced $125 million in grants to boost cellulosic research. The University of Georgia received $20 million of that amount. Georgia Tech got $5 million.
Politicians, scientists and investors are rushing to embrace the latest energy panacea, just as they did corn until recently. Questions, though, abound.
“Can we make it commercially viable?” asked Hart, an agriculture economist. “Is it cost-effective for energy producers and consumers to create fuel from plant material? That’s the stage we’re at. We’ve proven the technology to do cellulosic.
Now we’re working on lowering the cost.”
Even with a bushel of corn flirting with $4, corn ethanol remains the renewablefuel choice. And, with prices expected to fall, it’s too early to drop dirt on corn’s coffin.
“Farmers across the country planted the most corn since World War II,” said Matt
Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association, a Washington trade group. They’ll produce “more than enough corn to satisfy the needs for food, feed and fuel. All industries that utilize corn will be able to thrive. Corn ethanol is here to stay.”

However, in a May report, Iowa State University “very conservatively” estimated that consumers will pay $47 more per person for food due to higher corn prices.
Nationally, that comes out to $14 billion in increased food prices.
In a June 8 letter to Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Chicken
Council
— along with Coke, Kellogg Co. and other food companies and producer groups — wrote that “rising food prices, coupled with the rising energy prices we are seeing throughout the country, pose a threat to the health of our national economy.”
Hartwig says it’s “disingenuous” to blame corn’s popularity for the price increases, especially with prices for petroleum — used to grow, package and ship foodstuffs — notching record highs.
Washington, to its alternative-fuel critics, practically guarantees profits to corn ethanol producers, distillers and distributors. In 1978, ethanol blenders were guaranteed a 51-cents-per-gallon tax credit. Two years later, a 54-cents-pergallon tariff was slapped on ethanol imports in an effort to boost domestic production.
In 2005, Congress passed and Bush signed the Energy Policy Act that established the Renewable Fuel Standard and mandated that minimum levels of alternative fuel — again, mainly corn ethanol — enter the nation’s automotivefuel stream. By 2012, 7.5 billion gallons a year were expected.
Production, though, soon will zip past that barometer. In this year’s State of the
Union, Bush proposed the 35 billion-gallon threshold and asked Congress for legislation to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next decade.