"YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK"

DOE Selects Six Cellulosic Ethanol Plants for Up to $385 Million in Federal Funding

Funding to help bring cellulosic ethanol to market and help revolutionize the industry
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Samuel W. Bodman today announced that DOE will invest up to $385 million for six biorefinery projects over the next four years. When fully operational, the biorefineries are expected to produce more than 130 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year. This production will help further President Bush’s goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive with gasoline by 2012 and, along with increased automobile fuel efficiency, reduce America’s gasoline consumption by 20 percent in ten years.

Funding for these projects is an integral part of the President’s Biofuels Initiative that will lead to the wide-scale use of non-food based biomass, such as agricultural waste, trees, forest residues, and perennial grasses in the production of transportation fuels, electricity, and other products. The solicitation, announced a year ago, was initially for three biorefineries and $160 million. However, in an effort to expedite the goals of President Bush’s Advanced Energy Initiative and help achieve the goals of his Twenty in Ten Initiative, within authority of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct 2005), Section 932, Secretary Bodman raised the funding ceiling.

DOE

From the initial pork barrel size of $160 MILLION Dollars last year to even bigger porker size of $385 MILLION Dollars, the Celluloisc Ethanol backers must be drooling at the lips at the thought of that much of YOUR money they can get their paws on for their Ethanol Factories.

Cellulosic Ethanol Factories use not corn, but plant wastes from industrial processes (sawdust, paper pulp) and agricultural plant wastes (corn stover, cereal straws) to produce ethanol.Cellulose Energy

This is probably the type of plant that a certain company is wanting to build in the Ozarks. It makes fiscal sense for them to use waste products from the lumber industry, of which there are numerous sources in the Ozarks.

Using corn, which is not grown in the Ozarks and would have to be shipped in, makes no sense. The added shipping costs alone would be prohibitive.

But using one of the Ozarks natural resources, like forest products, does make sense for the local ethanol factory.

To sell this boondoggle, pork laden project to the locals, one could envision the old "bait and switch." The "bait and switch" involves selling someone a suspicious product, but dressing it up to look like something else that can be sold.

By the time the customer realizes he's been swindled, it's too late, the flim-flam man has high-tailed it down the road, looking for another "investor."

Between clear-cutting the Ozarks forests and polluting and depleting the Ozarks Aquifer, there's nothing to be gained from having an "Ethanol Factory" here in the Ozarks.