The Bankruptcy of Ethanol
By Monica @ 3:49 PM   
From Forbes:
VeraSun Energy Corp., the nation's second largest ethanol producer, is putting seven of its biorefineries up for auction as part of a bankruptcy court financing agreement.
VeraSun needs up to $12.3 million in additional funds to maintain its work force and plants in Ord and Central City in Nebraska; Albert City and Dyersville in Iowa, Woodbury, Mich., Hankinson, N.D., and Janesville, Minn., through April 30, according to a filing approved Thursday by a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware.
...
The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based company owns 16 biorefineries with the total capacity to produce 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol annually, or about 13 percent of the country's total capacity. But only four - Charles City, Fort Dodge and Hartley in Iowa and Aurora in South Dakota - remain operational, with the rest idled until market conditions improve.
Corn ethanol is an industry that the government is pouring billions into yearly. And all this government money isn't preventing VeraSun from going bankrupt. When you are making a product that takes more energy to create than you get out of it (thus, actually exacerbating the "problem" of CO2) it is not rocket science to figure out that it's not sustainable. The ethanol subsidy should have been eliminated in the most recent farm bill, not just cut ten percent.
This is what Obama's pick for secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, wants to spend your money on. Vilsack comes from a state of Corn (Iowa), is a friend of Big Corn and Monsanto, and has so far only said that corn ethanol is a bridge to cellulosic ethanol. That's his big admission, if you can call it one, that corn ethanol isn't working. Earth to Tom, earth to Tom! Corn ethanol is not a bridge to anywhere, and it's an outrage that even one public penny is being spent on this industry. I suppose VeraSun will be asking for a bailout next, claiming like GM has that if only they could have just a teensy tiny little bit of that government bailout crack, that they will straighten their act out tomorrow.
Need I say more?Labels: corn, Ethanol, Government Idiocy, Rants and Whines, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend
|
4 Comments:
"...it is not rocket science to figure out that it's not sustainable."
Excellent word choice to point out the contradiction in the green rhetoric.
Thanks -- corn ethanol is a huge pet peeve of mine. So is the rest of the pseudoscientific greenie crapola. :)
Don't we eat a lot of corn though? Don't we depend on it?
Who's "we"? I don't eat corn. I most certainly don't eat it directly. And I rarely eat it indirectly either.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home