US ethanol advocates slam critics

18 September 2008 17:48  [Source: ICIS news]

AUSTIN, Texas (ICIS news)--With the US Senate currently considering new renewablue-fuel legislation, ethanol trade participants offered on Thursday a full-throated defense of their industry at the Third Annual Texas Biofuels Conference and Expo.

“Our industry is under siege. We're under attack from the front and from the flanks," Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) Director of Research Geoff Cooper told the audience.

"Big oil folks don’t like you taking their market share away," he said. "They’re threatened by notion of 36bn gal/year [136bn litres/year] of renewable fuels displacing their product by 2022.”

Cooper characterised critics as “ivory tower academics”, “environmental extremists” and the “Big Food” industrial complex as he defended ethanol from charges that the biofuel contributed to the recent spike in global food prices.

The corn-starch-based fuel contributed only 4% to the total price increase, he said.

After factoring in ethanol’s role in reducing retail gasoline prices to the additional food costs that could be directly attributed to it, the average US household saved up to $511/year (€358/year), he said, citing RFA statistics.

Bob Young, Chief Economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, also defended ethanol and biodiesel from charges that farmers switching to corn and soybeans were harming the environment and driving up crop prices.

The changing diets of populations in China, India and South America - all with growing middle classes - was a bigger factor in causing farmers to change their land use than growing crops for renewable fuel, he said.

“If you want to be perfectly environmentally friendly, you’d have to nuke China,” Young told the audience.

Ethanol producers would still have to accept some criticisms, however, as it became a large player in an increasingly crowded US renewable fuels stage, he said.

“There are times we may have overpromised. There are times we’ve said we can lead to energy independence," Young said.

"But in the US, we’re going to have put our hands on every energy source we can within 15 years,” he said.

($1 = €0.70)

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By: Ben Lefebvre
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