Take a closer look at this photo. I love it! It's from a New York Times article earlier this week
on ethanol. And it serves as a perfect introduction to today's hot topic: has the president gone green?
In his State of the Union speech president Bush said he wants to reduce gasoline usage by 20 percent over the next decade. But, if he is really serious about reaching that 'Twenty in Ten' goal it's going to be a tough hill to climb - and a very green one at that.
Bush’s plan rests largely on raising alternative biofuel production - principally ethanol and biodiesel - to 35 
billion gallons by 2017. That's almost five times more than the current target of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. (see photo of Bush's visit Wednesday to DuPont's biofuel research facility in Wilmington, Delaware. Click here for report on his visit.)
The president also called for greater use of wind and solar energy, expanded use of clean diesel vehicles, and accelerated research into the batteries needed for ‘plug-in hybrid’ vehicles. But he offered few specifics, and also made no mention of increasingly popular ‘green building’ practices which experts argue can save large amounts of energy. Not did he mention another of my favorites, creating energy by gasifying municipal waste to biogas (or 'syngas').
Instead, biofuels appears to loom much bigger on his horizon.
While ethanol production from corn has been growing like gangbusters of late in the Mid-West, we can’t rely on corn to meet this giant leap in production, producers warn. In fact, corn won’t get us beyond 15 billion gallons.
Part of the shortfall could be made up by foreign imports, according to Bush.
This is an idea which appears to feed off an ethanol import strategy
advocated by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. (see my Dec 18 post on Jeb's advocacy of a hemispheric trade in ethanol to boost US relations with its neighbors while also relieving dependence on foreign oil.)
When I asked Jeb Bush that question last night by email he messaged me back a straightforward answer: "It creates the opportunity we needed," he wrote.
But, imports aside, the president - and his brother, by the way - are both counting on a dramatic increase in domestic ethanol production. That’s why, for the second year running, Bush threw out the words, ‘cellulosic ethanol,’ in his speech. To most people that may sound like scientific gobbledygook, but to biofuels experts it’s the Holy Grail.
I nearly fell off my chair when the president mentioned it last year. Many of us tracking the biofuels debate had no idea that the idea of cellulosic ethanol had risen all the way to the Oval Office. The president even did a good job of pronouncing it!
So, now he's said it twice. Clearly, Bush is banking on cellulosic ethanol’s still unproven technology as the solution to his biofuels gamble. And, it's not a bad bet.
Cellulosic ethanol technology can extract sugar for the production of ethanol from a wide variety of plant fibers using enzymes or bacteria. This enormously increases the diversity of available feedstock for making ethanol, and could be bonanza for Florida which does not grow corn but could produce other suitable feedstock, such as switchgrass or sorghum, as well as forest residue.
Cellulosic technology isn't yet ready for commercial use. Biofuels advocates are confident that the industry is close to cracking the code for cellulosic technology, which is currently twice as expensive to produce as ethanol made form corn. In R&D terms, that is getting close to going commercial.
“I think we are getting there sooner than many people think,” Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association in Washington DC., told me today.
"The private sector continues to work furiously, both on their own and in partnership with government," John Mizroch, head of the Dept of Energy's Office of Renewable Energy, said Wednesday. "But there have been no major breakthroughs."
Three major companies, Abengoa Bioenergy, Iogen Corp and Broin Companies, are currently working on pilot programs in Nebraska, Idaho and Illinois. Abengoa recently teamed up with Dyadic, a Florida company specializing in commercial use of enzymes.
I've gotten to know Dyadic's president, Mark Emalfarb, pretty well in recent months (see photo). “It’s a proven 
concept,” he told me when I called him yesterday. “It’s not about the science anymore, it’s about economics and which enzyme breaks down which plant fiber, and how effectively.”
Emalfarb is a registered Republican, but he voted Democrat for Congress this year over energy policy. "I think George Bush is getting the message that ethanol is a solution," he added.
See what Bush told staff at DuPont in Delaware on Wednesday:
“The good news is that we’re on the verge of some
unbelievable technological breakthroughs... 
You’re employing the best minds
possible to address the problem of economic and national security and
environmental issues, because we’re dependent on oil.”
- “There (are) all kinds of opportunities to make
energy to power your automobiles from that which had been discarded as
waste in the past.”
I have also examined celluslosic ethanol quite a bit. I wrote an article in December 2005 about research into cellulosic ethanol daing back to the 1980s by professor Lonnie Ingram at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
I also noted in another article how it was gaining the interest of venture capitalists such as Vinod 
Khosla, the former founder of Sun Micro-Systems who has invested heavily in a bunch of ethanol start-ups. (see photo)
“If this didn’t make economic sense I would be investing somewhere else,” Khosla, wrote to The Fueling Station the other day, defending his advocacy of ethanol from critics. (see his comment on my Jan 6 post, Food v Fuel corn debate. The other day I also posted a link to Khosla power-point presentation on ethanol, 'Think Outside the barrel.')
Skeptics question whether the president's plan will give cellulosic ethanol the boost it needs. The 2008 budget provides $179 million for the President's Biofuels Initiative, a modest increase of only $29 million over last year.
A White House statement said the upcoming Bush Farm Bill proposal would include
more than $1.6 billion of additional new funding over 10 years for energy
innovation, including bio-energy research,
energy efficiency grants, as well as $2
billion in loans for cellulosic ethanol
plants.
Ethanol blenders do benefit from a 51 cent per gallon tax credit at the pump. It's due to expire in 2010. Were the president to extend it until 2017, it's estimated that could be worth $17.8 billion.
But federal funding is dwarfed by private sector investment in these new technologies. Oil giant BP recently announced it was investing $500 million to build a biosciences institute.
The new Democrat-controlled Congress could ratchet up federal funding. Last week the House passed legislation creating a $14 billion clean energy fund at the expense of tax incentives for oil companies.
Renewable energy advocates are concerned that Bush is offering far greater resources for increased research into non-renewable energy sources. That includes giving $650 million in tax credits for producers of ‘clean coal’, which environmentalist say is one of the worst offenders in climate altering carbon emissions. That also comes on top of the $1 billion clean coal received last year.
The president also says he proposes doubling the capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (the nation's stockpile of oil for times of scarcity) over the next 20 years. At today’s prices, it would cost $38 billion to double the reserve, which currently holds 691 million barrels.
“That’s real money,” said an upset Carol Werner, director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute in Washington D.C.. “Why aren’t we investing that kind of money on the renewable side?”
Electric car advocates, many of whom also back plug-in hybrids powered by a mix of gasoline and electricity, are disappointed that the president had so little so say in his speech about what they maintain is the cleanest and cheapest fuel technology.
I went this afternoon to a splendid lecture at Florida International University by Sherry Boschert, a San Francisco journalist and author of ‘Plug-In Hybrids. The car that will recharge America.’ (see also The Fueling Station's post on Monday)
Boschert said she felt Bush’s speech was “nowhere near as forceful as a year ago when he said 'America is addicted to foreign oil.'” Bush even stomped for plug-ins during several trips around the country, including a speech at the Oak Ridge National Energy Laboratory in Texas, and a visit to a major battery manufacturer, Johnson Controls, in Milwaukee.
“What I heard last night was business as usual," Boschert lamented. "The government isn’t doing anything to make car companies do anything different.”
Her lecture explained in masterful detail how the technology already exists to build fuel efficient electric-hybrid cars. “It’s not rocket science, it’s just not the way we have been doing things,” she says.
She says auto manufacturers say electric cars won't be commercially available before 2009 at the earliest. What a pity the government isn't doing more to accelerate this technology. (photo left, the Chevy Volt)
Bush did refer to plans to reduce fuel consumption by 8.5 billion gallons by 2017 through reform of the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) requirements. The CAFE requirements have been notoriously exploited in the past by auto manuffacturers to produce large SUVs with greener, 'ethanol-ready' engines. But until biofuels become more widely available those vehicles will continue to guzzle gasoline.
Experts say the government could do a lot more to provide incentives for electric cars, as well as building the infrastructure to allow for better biofuel distribution nationwide. That includes converting gas station storage tanks to handle ethanol which is more corrosive than gasoline. Ethanol and biodiesel are only currently available on a limited basis, with ethanol largely restricted to the Mid-West corn states.
Click here for an excellent story on ethanol, the past and the future, in Tuesday's New York Times.
Click here for story on Bush's DuPont visit in the Delaware News Journal. There is of course some irony in this visit given DuPont's membership of the US Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of top corporate executives with environmental activists, which on Monday called on the White House to take much firmer action on gloabl warming.
- David Adams
Remember when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger kept talking about a hydrogen highway so he could combat global warming and still drive a Hummer? 
Click here
