The Big Biofuels Blog

Now its Big Biofuels fault that gas prices are so high and fuel efficiency of cars running ethanol blends in the states is so poor. Well that's the conclusion of Rob in North Dakota.

I think he's wide of the mark blaming Big Biofuel, for a couple of reasons, firstly compared to big oil, big biofuel is like a flea on the back of a rhino and secondly biofuel companies are usually squeezed between the consumer, and the farm companies that dominate the US corn market.

If I was going to blame anyone, and I'm not into the blame game as a rule, I'd blame the shareholders/owners of firms like ADM and Cargill first before the biofuel people.

Fundamentally, if you're only getting 19 mpg from your motor on gasoline, maybe you should buy Japanese or something. Unless you have to haul building materials/farm animals around.

Otherwise taking the tariff off imported biofuels (you're right Bob, that should happen) will only fuel the US' addiction to unnecessarily large and unnecessarily uneconomic cars.

This may seem a long post about a chap called Rob in North Dakota. And it is.

Who is he? How influential is he?

I don't know but he is representative of a group of people in the US that the biofuel industry needs to persuade that there is a point to swapping to ethanol blends, because otherwise, when the chickens come home to roost about the unstainability of corn ethanol it will have a difficult time persuading people that cellulosic ethanol, is different and better for the environment.