Congress Must Eliminate the Cellulosic Ethanol Mandate

    Michael McCoy has a 2-page article in the October 8 issue of C&E News entitled, "Enzymes Poised for Cellulosic Success".
    The article covers the commercial use of enzymes in converting corncobs and cornstalks to sugars, which are then available for fermentation by yeast to produce ethanol. The ethanol would then be used as an additive to gasoline, in order to reduce the need for petroleum.
    Presently, ethanol for such uses is produced from corn kernels, which are much easier to hydrolyze to sugars.
    The objective of the project is to use waste products, such as corncobs and cornstalks in preference to the edible kernels. However, such plant material is normally not considered waste. It is usually ground and stored as silage for cattle feed.
    There are number of companies involved in the development of enzymes for cellulose hydrolysis. One effort this has been a grant of $34 million by the US Department of Energy for projects run by Novozymes and three other companies.. In back of that, Congress has previously mandated production of 36 billion gallons of biofuels (ethanol) by 2022 and has specified that 16 billion gallons of that must be derived from cellulose.
    The challeng has been to get the cost of the enzyme portion of the ethanol production process to lower values. It had originally been $6 per gallon of ethanol produced, and quickly dropped to $1 per gallon.. It is now $.50 per gallon and is anticipated to drop to $.30 per gallon of ethanol produced.
    While all those numbers are interesting, there are other aspects. The first is how those costs compare with the cost of hydrolysis using acidic hydrolysis of cellulose. More importantly, how does the cost of ethanol itself compare with the cost of gasoline derived only from petroleum, while also taking into consideration the fact that one gallon of ethanol has a lower energy content than 1 gallon of petroleum derived gasoline.
    Congress passed the mandate requiring 16 billion gallons of cellulose derived ethanol some years ago. That was a time when petroleum production technology was at a considerably lower level than at the present. Congress made the mandate to relieve US requirement for petroleum imports, but that is no longer necessary because of the probability recent pressures on the Federal Administration will eliminate many of the present restrictions and lead to considerably increased US production of petroleum.
    However, it will be up to Congress to eliminate the mandate, and obviously the sooner the better in order to avoid continued frittering away of substantial taxpayer funds on a non-justifiable project.