The oil blowout will mean more subsidies for the ethanol industry. That's bad news for consumers.

By Robert Bryce - Slate Magazine
Jun. 13, 2010

The most disgusting aspect of the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico isn't the video images of oil-soaked birds or the incessant blather from pundits about what BP or the Obama administration should be doing to stem the flow of oil. Instead, it's the ugly spectacle of the corn-ethanol scammers doing all they can to capitalize on the disaster so that they can justify an expansion of the longest-running robbery of taxpayers in U.S. history.

Listen to Matt Hartwig, communications director for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol industry lobby group: "The Gulf of Mexico disaster serves as a stark and unfortunate reminder of the need for domestically-produced renewable biofuels." Or look at an advertisement that was recently placed in a Washington, D.C., Metro station: "No beaches have been closed due to ETHANOL spills. ... America's CLEAN fuel." That gem was paid for by Growth Energy, another ethanol industry lobby group.

The blowout of BP's Macondo well has given the corn-ethanol industry yet another opportunity to push its fuel adulterant on the American consumer. And unfortunately, the Obama administration appears ready and willing to foist yet more of the corrosive, environmentally destructive, low-heat-energy fuel on motorists.

Advertisement Why does the ethanol business need federal help? The answer is so disheartening that after five years of reporting on the corn-ethanol scam, I find it difficult to type, but here goes: The corn-ethanol industry needs to be bailed out by taxpayers because the industry was given too much in the way of subsidies and mandates. And now the only way to solve that problem is--what else?--more subsidies and mandates. The BP mess provides the industry with the opening it needs to win those subsidies from the federal government.

In its 2005 energy bill, Congress dramatically increased the mandates (and subsidies) for corn ethanol. That resulted in a surge of new construction. Led by German financial giant WestLB AG, banks poured billions of dollars into new distilleries, which quickly created an ethanol bubble that mirrored the U.S. real estate bubble. Over the past five years, U.S. ethanol production capacity has more than tripled and now stands at more than 13 billion gallons per year. But that's far more capacity than the U.S. motor fuel market can absorb. In March, nearly 1 billion gallons of ethanol production capacity was sitting idle. And yet, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, the industry has about 1.4 billion gallons of additional distilling capacity under construction.

The bankruptcy court is the best place to comprehend the oversupply of ethanol. Over the past 18 months or so, bankruptcy casualties have included VeraSun, the second-largest producer in the United States; Pacific Ethanol; Aventine Renewable Energy; and others.

In industry parlance, the corn-ethanol sector is facing a head-on collision with the "blend wall." Ethanol producers depend on gasoline sales because their product must be mixed with conventional fuel. But thanks to the recession and the end of Americans' love affair with large SUVs, U.S. gasoline demand is flat or declining. That has left a smaller pool of gasoline to absorb all the alcohol the ethanol industry is producing. Or as Bob Dinneen, the president of the Renewable Fuels Association, has put it, "[W]e have lots of gallons of ethanol chasing too few gallons of gasoline."

Now the industry is counting on a president beleaguered by the made-for-TV crisis in the Gulf of Mexico to help it out. And he appears ready to do just that. On April 28, six days after the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, President Obama visited an ethanol plant in Missouri and declared that "there shouldn't be any doubt that renewable, homegrown fuels are a key part of our strategy for a clean-energy future." Obama also said, "I didn't just discover the merits of biofuels like ethanol when I first hopped on the campaign bus."

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