Caroline Lepczyk

Thursday May 16th

Today we toured the corn ethanol plant, Lincolnway Energy, in Nevada Iowa. The plant used coal energy to turn a bushel of corn into 2.8 gallons of ethanol to be used as fuel. The resulting ethanol can provide 1.3 times as much energy as is required to create it. I was surprised at how simple the process of creating the ethanol was. With the proper enzymes, the process was fairly easy and straightforward. Like the high fructose corn syrup, it struck me as something that would be quite simple to create in a home.

More important than the proof of the ethanol, what we have been hearing a lot about recently is that the energy required to make ethanol from corn is much higher than the energy to make ethanol from sugar cane. Corn ethanol can only produce about 1.3 times as much energy as is required to create it, while sugar cane ethanol can produce 8 times as much energy as is required to create it. The issue then is, why do we not use sugar cane ethanol? The corn lobby teamed with its sugar counterpart to put a tariff on sugar cane ethanol, and so it protected the corn ethanol industry. Under intense pressure, Congress allowed that tariff to expire in December 2011.  We are still waiting to see the impact that lifting the tariff will have on the ethanol industry.  Lincolnway Energy seemed to be functioning quite well during our visit.  Perhaps in the future, the more environmentally and economically friendly sugar cane ethanol will be widely available in the United States, but for now it seems that we are stuck with corn ethanol and gasoline.