Thank you for the link to the earlier Muckraker article, "Warts and Ethanol", which is excellent. It, in turn, links to another one by Amanda Griscom Little, "Coal ... er, I mean Corn at the Right Time", also excellent. (And so is the discussion that accompanies it.)

Here's a suggestion for a Muckracker story: have yourself or Amanda interview some of the journalists who write about ethanol (and some of the op-ed writers, like The Mustache), and ask them from where they get their information and how they make sense of it. It might prove interesting.

These are only my personal opinions.

The Yuma (Arizona) Sun reports that a local physician is hopping on board the booming ethanol trend. Dr. Sultan Lalani's motivation is classic:

He wants to do the project, located at Avenue 47-1/2E and Highway 80, because he believes it will be good for the environment and good for Yuma County.

Lalani, an ear, nose and throat doctor in Yuma, said the idea to build an ethanol plant grew out of conversations with his daughter, Anita, who is a staunch environmentalist. They created Agrinext Ethanol LLC to try to make that happen.

People do not normally pursue $125-million projects in completely new businesses lines -- dealing in grain is not the same as processing it -- except when governments (in ethanol's case through mandates, subsidies and loan guarantees) have made such investments so lucrative that it is hard to lose money on them.

Even more disturbing, however, is the fuel that might be used:

Lalani's project was recently met with opposition while receiving a rezoning [i.e., it was approved] from the Yuma County Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Greg Ferguson voted against the plan because of concerns about fires and the power that would be used to operate the plant. He questioned whether the plant would be so environmentally friendly if polluting fossil fuels have to be burned to create the ethanol.

Lalani said Agrinext hasn't decided on a power provider but is leaning toward clean-burning coal to run the plant. [my emphasis]

What clean-burning coal is Dr. Lalani talking about? And why didn't the reporter press him on this claim? What about the Supervisors who voted for the plan; what was their opinion?

By the way, Agrinext Ethanol hopes to break ground in May or June this year and to be producing ethanol at a rate of 55 million gallons a year by the latter part of 2008. Note the capacity of the plant: just under the 60-million-gallon-a-year limit, so that it will no doubt qualify for the "small" ethanol producer tax credit of 10 cents a gallon, in addition to the usual 51 cent Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC).

So, once again we have an ethanol plant being proposed where water is scarce, coal is cheap, and experience is not a prerequisite.

These are only my personal opinions.

Same here with fuels.   Look, the whole effort is to extract energy.   Quite frankly you know what the best fuel to put in our cars is?   A lump of coal.  Yep, we should simply have the equivalent of the hopper on the backs of our autos, just like an old steam engine, and we should go to the coal yard once a week and shovel in a bunch of anthracite.

Oh, but wait, I'm not suggesting just burning it.  I'm saying, there's no reason we couldn't invent a Coal Fuel Cell that would extract the hydrogen and leave the carbon in some neutral format.   Maybe it could be turned into fertile ash that could be spread on farmland?  

I'm just saying, just because a fuel is black and solid doesn't mean it can't be used in a 21st century way!

Meanwhile, while you're beavering away in your lab, government subsidies and other policies will continue to underwrite unsustainable energy developments. Big time.

These are only my personal opinions.

And oh, yeah: clean coal. Brilliant.

Victual Reality

Coal-powered fuel cell aims for efficiency
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7891

A new coal-powered fuel cell may lead to a more efficient way of extracting energy from the fossil fuel than simply burning it.

"The idea was to look at a way of converting the chemical energy in coal directly into electrical energy," says Douglas Weibel, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. Weibel led the team with colleague Roman Boulatov, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US.

It's still a prototype, but see, the idea is sound.  And, so, why not have coal powered cars with fuel cell converters?  

It shows that if you produce ethanol sustainable -without Fossil fuel inputs- you could only displace 3% of u.s. gasoline consumption if you use 100% of all U.S. corn.  It also shows that ethanol, because of weather induced corn yield fluctuations, is inherently more risky than relying on oil (I don't think the study was promoting gasoline. Rather just using gasoline as a benchmark to demonstrate ethanol had poor energy security characteristics). Anyway, its an interesting study.