Ethanol & Northern Michigan

Ethanol refineries seem to be popping up all over America like, well... like corn a‘ popping. Even Willie Nelson is on the ethanol bandwagon to cook up biodiesel go-juice from crops such as corn, soybeans and switchgrass.
Ethanol has similarities to moonshine. It‘s a high octane alcohol created by the fermentation of sugar or a converted starch (ie. sugar cane, corn...). One acre of corn produces 300 gallons of ethanol. Typically, you mix a 15% solution of ethanol with 85% gasoline to get the optimum fuel ratio. A bonus is that ethanol is a cleaner-burning fuel that‘s easier on the environment, and of course, it takes us a step away from America‘s 66% dependence on foreign oil.
This isn‘t to say that you should start pouring whiskey in your gas tank, however, because then you‘d be driving under the influence, literally.
Modified vehicles can burn straight ethanol or its cousin, biodiesel. In fact, that‘s the case in Brazil, where 50% of the vehicles operate on pure jungle juice. Brazil‘s government started encouraging ethanol production back in 1973. Shortly after that, America had its legendary gas crisis under the Carter administration; but about the first thing Ronald Reagan did when he came to office was to vaporize federal alternative energy projects, so here we are today -- back to the future.
But what a future it seems to be. A review of projects on the Internet shows that the new refineries typically brew between 50-100 million gallons of ethanol. They‘re popping up in the most unlikely places (western New York State has four plants alone), and Michigan has four in the works along with an existing plant in Caro which opened in 2002.
So it‘s a pleasant surprise to hear that Northern Michigan also has a shot at the green gold rush. Currently, there‘s a proposal by NextGen Energy to build a $73 million ethanol refinery south of Kingsley on 65 acres along Summit City Road. The local media reports that the new plant would produce 40-60 million gallons of ethanol per year out of a mash of 18 million bushels of feed corn, half of which could come from growers in Northern Michigan. The refinery would also pump $110 million into the local economy and provide 50 new jobs.
Local farmers would benefit because it currently costs so much to ship corn to market that it‘s hardly worth the bother growing it. But the demand for ethanol will bump up the price of feed corn, making it profitable to grow.
“Now we can stop paying farmers to not grow crops and use their excess production as fuel,“ says automotive writer Vincent T. Ciulla.

QUESTIONS
One might observe, however, that a new $73 million ethanol plant located some 20 miles south of Traverse City is going to do its bit to fill that stretch along Garfield Road with urban sprawl all the way to Kingsley. That area south of town is filling up fast with new housing developments and businesses. Just today, a coworker mentioned that he‘d never seen so much traffic south of TC, which previously often had barely a car on the road.
But that‘s progress, isn‘t it? The supporters of ethanol (many environmentalists among them) haven‘t paused to question the wisdom of keeping our vast car culture on track. As a society, we could pursue detours into rail and bus networks similar to those found everywhere else in the world -- Europe, Japan, China, South America -- which provide a low-cost way to get around.
But commuter trains and new modes of personal transportation aren‘t the American way. We much prefer to remain slaves of the banks, the insurance companies and the energy corporations so that we can keep on puttering down the road.
The good news is that ethanol may have some unintended consequences along these lines: shipping hundreds of thousands of boxcars of corn to new refineries around the country will require upgrading our railroads. Hopefully, that will mean increased passenger service as well for those of us who‘d love to catch a train to Detroit or Chicago rather than being stuck in traffic.
And ethanol will inspire us to look further for alternative fuels. Biodiesel, for instance, a vegie-petroleum blend being promoted by Willie Nelson, produces 80% less carbon dioxide, up to 90% less particulates and nearly 100% less sulfur dioxide than standard diesel fuel. Nelson is currently touring with buses that burn his own brand of “BioWillie“ diesel to promote his new company.
Then there are plans for new coal-liquification plants in China, schemes to retrieve vast deposits of frozen methane from the bottom of the ocean, and the hydrogen-powered car. Other good news: with our new buddy ethanol, we can start thumbing our noses at the likes of OPEC and keep the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve free of drilling.
Life is good.
So if you‘re worried that the earth‘s natural gas and petroleum supplies are going to dry up at any moment and leave you freezing in the dark as has been reported in a slew of “peak oil“ books earlier this year... relax. You can spend your time fretting about Bird Flu instead.

View On Our Website