President Joins the Debate Surrounding Ethanol

Jan. 23, 2007 — -- President Bush, delivering his State of the Union address for the first time to a Democratic Congress, preached energy reform, proposing that the country reduce its gasoline consumption 20 percent in 10 years.

How to do that? There's no one way, says the White House, but a major weapon is ethanol -- long promoted by Midwestern members of Congress, long derided by opponents on the left and right.

"It is in our vital interest to diversify America's energy supply," said the president, "and the way forward is through technology."

Ethanol, or ethyl alcohol, is a fuel derived from plants such as corn, sugar cane and wood. Its makers say it is already blended into 46 percent of the nation's gasoline.

The White House proposes that production of ethanol and other alternative fuels be raised to 35 billion gallons by 2017. Last year, 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol were produced.

But is a jump in ethanol production practical or desirable? Many different groups have their doubts.

"The United States desperately needs a liquid fuel replacement for oil in the near future," writes David Pimentel of Cornell University in a press statement. "But producing ethanol or biodiesel from plant biomass is going down the wrong road, because you use more energy to produce these fuels than you get out from the combustion of these products." Pimentel and Tad Patzek of the University of California at Berkeley published a study in 2005 on the relative merits of ethanol and conventional gasoline.

Environmental groups complain that while increased use of ethanol could be a good thing, it has to be done aggressively to make a difference. Today, most ethanol blends are about 85 percent gasoline -- creating more pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, and doing little to reduce the output of greenhouse gases, which are blamed as contributors to global climate change.