On a brisk morning in early November, the semis are lined up four deep outside the front gate of the Corn Plus plant, waiting before a sign that warns, in big red letters, NO SMOKING. In this corner of sleepy Winnebago, a small town in southern Minnesota, smoke billows from stacks, and a hum from the plant shatters the silence of the countryside. A sour scent, redolent of a brewery, hangs overhead.
The "plus" at Corn Plus is ethyl alcohol, better known as ethanol. In a day Corn Plus takes the kernels of corn hauled by 45 trucks and turns them into 122,000 gallons of fuel. Tank cars wait on railroad sidings behind the plant, ready to carry it to New England, to Chicago, to California.
With the price of crude oil at record highs, times are good at Corn Plus, and the roll is likely to last. The expense of making ethanol has fallen steadily over the last decade, even as some energy analysts predict we might never see gasoline below $3 a gallon again. After a much-quoted warning that "America is addicted to oil" in this year's State of the Union address, President Bush called for "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years." The ultimate objective: "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."
It was a remarkable position to take. In Washington, D.C., ethanol is commonly viewed as little more than a sop to the farm lobby. The conventional wisdom has become so entrenched that even fictional politicians embrace it: The presidential candidates on TV's West Wing, campaigning in faux Iowa caucuses, all criticized ethanol. "It takes more oil to transport it and fertilize it than we save using it," griped Representative Russell. Senator Santos complained about the logistics: "Transportation is difficult; storage is a nightmare. . . . Supporting ethanol's a mistake."
Still, the president's initiative was less an announcement of a new endeavor than an acknowledgment of work well under way. Nor is it as ambitious as it sounds; oil from the Persian Gulf accounts for just around 16 percent of U.S. consumption. Yet the researchers who know ethanol best believe that it represents an extraordinary opportunity. With a serious new push, they say, ethanol could displace 30 percent of domestic gasoline consumption within 25 years. Because ethanol is made from plants that pull carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, it could drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles, the second largest source here, behind power plants. Although President Bush did not say as much, the Department of Energy is also pursuing an even more ambitious outcome—a "biorefinery" that could make not only fuel but also plastics and other products currently derived from petroleum.
