Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest)  Well, that’s an absurd headline, isn’t it? False, false and false.
It’s ridiculous, misleading and harmful to conclude that 10 percent of the US corn harvest is used for ant repellent – just because 10 percent of the US corn crop is shipped to starch processing plants that happen, amongst their many products, to provide starch for use in the ant repellent industry.
In the world of formal logic, it’s the “fallacy of the affirmative disjunct”. Interestingly, no less a firm than PriceWaterhouseCoopers fell for it, in a report they prepared for the National Council of Chain Restaurants, on ethanol’s impact on corn prices, released this week.
…In fact, ethanol producers, by weight, produce as much grain for cattle feed as they produce ethanol. The process they use is fractionation, and in this case only the corn starch fraction is used for ethanol production. The protein and oil fractions are used for other products.
For this reason, you can imagine that the American Coalition for Ethanol got pretty steamed up over the release of a PwC report funded and released by the National Council of Chain Restaurants on the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).
…“In denying recent requests to waive the RFS on November 16,” (ACE Executive Vice President Brian) Jennings added, ” EPA said it analyzed 500 different market scenarios and found that in 89 percent, “we see no impacts from the RFS program at all” on corn, food and fuel prices.
“In the 11 percent where there was an impact, EPA said the RFS on average increased the price of corn by just 7 cents a bushel. In consultation with the USDA, EPA also estimated how these projected changes in corn prices would influence U.S. food prices. They found that a $0.07/bushel decrease in corn prices would result in a 0.04% decrease in the food consumer price index (CPI). Furthermore, a $0.07/bushel decrease in corn prices would result in a reduction of U.S. household expenditures on food equal to $2.59 in 2012/2013.”
… “Americans notoriously pay much more for eating out, not because of ethanol or even the food served at chain restaurants, but because of marketing, transportation, labor, and other expenses driven by the price of oil,” said Jennings.
“We refuse to take criticism from an industry that charges consumers four times what fast-food companies pay for food, and then literally throws millions of dollars’ worth of food in the trash every year. Our industry manufactures more than 33 million metric tons of distillers grain every year, which is enough cattle feed to provide every person in the U.S. with 4 quarter-pound hamburgers every week for a year.”  READ MORE and MORE (National Retail Federation) and MORE (Barn Online/National Corn Growers Association) and MORE (Renewable Fuels Association)  Download report
 
Excerpt from Barn Online/National Corn Growers Association:  “Further, the study falsely states that more corn goes into ethanol than other uses. Its reliance on the general USDA categories without diving deeper ignored the fact that nearly twice as much corn is used for livestock feed than for ethanol. On such a complicated issue, it’s important to take a more comprehensive approach.”  READ MORE