COAL TO BE BURNED AT ETHANOL FACTORY?

Carbon cloud over a green fuel

An Iowa corn refinery, open since December, uses 300 tons of coal a day to make ethanol.

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Late last year in Goldfield, Iowa, a refinery began pumping out a stream of ethanol, which supporters call the clean, renewable fuel of the future.
There's just one twist: The plant is burning 300 tons of coal a day to turn corn into ethanol - the first US plant of its kind to use coal instead of cleaner natural gas.

The trend, which is expected to continue, has left even some ethanol boosters scratching their heads. Should coal become a standard for 30 to 40 ethanol plants under construction - and 150 others on the drawing boards - it would undermine the environmental reasoning for switching to ethanol in the first place, environmentalists say.

"It's very likely that coal will be the fuel of choice for most of these new ethanol plants," says Robert McIlvaine, president of a Northfield, Ill., information services company that has compiled a database of nearly 200 ethanol plants now under construction or in planning and development.

TEXT

Is this the future for that ethanol factory slated to open in Webster County? Burning 300 tons of coal per DAY? Considering that coal costs are 1/3 of natural gas and that the BN Wyoming coal trains run right past the Webster County property, the prospect that coal will be used to fuel the ethanol factory is more than just speculation.

Add in the fact that BN has plans to nearly double the amount of rail traffic thru Webster County--to around 50 freight trains per day--and the inescapable fact is that the thick, acrid smell of coal smoke will soon be wafting over Webster County.

Between the cancer causing coal smoke and the diseases caused by locating this TOXIC TERROR in a residential area, plus the pollution and depletion of our drinking water, the Ozarks Aquifer, there is nothing to gain from that ethanol factory and plenty to lose... like your health and life.