Bush's modest proposal
"We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol, using everything from wood chips to grasses to agricultural wastes."

Rob Price

That's what President Bush said in his State of the Union speech last month, and although the number of people who actually support the president would not fill the City of Binghamton, it's worthwhile taking a look at what he actually said in regards to alternative fuels.

The president was correct in criticizing our dependence on foreign oil; the question is whether he is serious about finding alternatives to imported fossil fuels. Electrically powered vehicles are getting some attention, but the bigger game right now involves ethanol.

The problem with ethanol production in the U.S. is its dependency on corn as the sole source of carbohydrates necessary for fermentation and distillation. Those two processes require heat, and the amount of energy required to produce a gallon of corn-based ethanol is nearly the same amount of energy that same gallon can provide in an internal combustion engine.

In other words, the numbers don't really add up, especially when you factor in the additional expense of transporting ethanol from the production plants to the market. What to do? Bush's words actually point the way.

"Wood chips," "grasses," and "agricultural wastes" refer to an alternative source of ethanol that goes by a variety of names, including "biomass" and "cellulose." Cellulosic ethanol, in fact, is an emerging alternative to corn-based ethanol that the federal government already is subsidizing through small experimental programs.

It deserves more attention from the federal government, and if President Bush has any idea what he was talking about, the fact that the reference to biofuels was included in his speech is encouraging.

Cellulosic ethanol production isolates carbohydrates stored in grass (and wood chips, corn stalks and paper pulp generated from the production of the newspaper you're reading). Extracting the carbohydrates from the bio-mass is the technologically challenging part of the operation, but companies already are emerging that have developed procedures. One company - Iogen, based in Canada - has partnered with the investment house Goldman Sachs to build a production facility in the U.S.

One of the things that make cellulosic ethanol interesting as a fossil fuel alternative is the fact it generates its own fuel for production. Once the cellulose is extracted from the bio-mass, the remaining material can be burned to generate the energy necessary for distillation. That's a major difference from cornbased ethanol production systems, and it's the difference that could make cellulosic ethanol a viable supplement to the gasoline we burn everyday in our cars and trucks.

That's the good news. The bad news is the extent to which U.S. agriculture is dominated by corn growers, who in turn can leverage their economic power politically. Presidential candidates like Barack Obama already are touting the benefits of corn-based ethanol - even though those benefits are minimal. But the potential benefits of the Iowa presidential caucuses are enormous; no candidate is going to ignore the fact that Iowa is basically one giant cornfield.

So national politics inevitably will play a role in how we develop alternatives to fossil fuel and imported oil. That shouldn't surprise anyone, of course. All the same, it was interesting to hear the president refer so specifically to an alternative fuel that does not tap into the national dependency on corn. And it will be interesting to see if the White House actually follows through in encouraging the development of these bio-fuels.

In the meantime, we can all do something locally, encouraging our economic development professionals to contact companies like Iogen, and inquire whether they would be interested in building a facility in western New York.

Locally, there are vast quantities of land that could be used to grow the grasses used in cellulosic ethanol production. We also have an interstate highway cutting across the region and railroad tracks that have been rehabbed for freight use. That strikes me as an ideal combination of the rural and industrial features necessary for ethanol production.

Surely, it's worth a try. The alternative - corn - doesn't work all that well as a replacement for fossil fuel. Encouraging its use as a source for ethanol will only increase the influence of giant agribusinesses operating in the Midwestern states. We won't end our need for foreign oil, and we'll only create another economic sheikdom in our own backyard.