corn

biofuels production

Nearly 10 percent of US ethanol plants have stopped production over the past year, the drought having pushed commodity prices so high that ethanol has become too expensive to produce.[read more]

The U.S. Now Uses More Corn For Fuel Than For Feed: For every 10 ears of corn that are grown in the United States today, only 2 are consumed directly by humans as food. The remaining 8 are used in almost equal shares for animal feed and for ethanol. And, for the 12 months from August 2011 to 2012, the U.S. biofuels industry used more...[read more]

Well the race is on.  Three visionary crusades are playing out in the ethanol industry right here in the United States.  With oil prices soaring and the uncertainty over ethanol and farm subsidies, plans to build the nation's first sugar beet bio-fuels processing plant in North Dakota was unveiled at statewide press conferences...[read more]

Following my inclusion in the Top 10 list of ethanol enemies, I sought to Set the Ethanol Record Straight on my actual views on ethanol. I set out three broad tenets that shape my views. They are: Tenet One: We must transition from fossil fuels with a sense of urgency. Tenet Two: We need to develop systems and services with a much lower...[read more]

People worldwide are being affected by a rise in the price of food. The causes are complex and interacting: last summer's drought in Russia, the price of oil, speculative trading in commodities, economic instability, political unrest on the Middle East, you name it. As Tamino mentions, some people sceptical of efforts to reduce...[read more]

Driving across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, it's impossible not to be struck by the dominance of corn cultivation in this part of the Midwest. Those "amber waves of grain" in the song look more like amber waves of corn tassels, here. My family makes this drive every few years, and my unscientific impression is that we see more...[read more]

What should we do with corn? Shove it into cows that become fatty, high-cholesterol meat that contributes to heart disease? Turn it into cheap sugars that make people fat or sick? Or use it to produce biofuels that will help reduce the U.S.’s dependence on Middle East oil, improve our balance of payments and  create jobs instead of...[read more]

Via Mankiw via Thoma:From the MIT News Office (via Mark Thoma), econ prof Bob Pindyck is interviewed about the two candidates' energy policies. An excerpt:Q: Would either candidate's energy proposals make much impact on energy costs in the short term? A: Neither of the candidate's plans would have any impact. The one exception would...[read more]

The NY Times reports that at least one major livestock producing state is objecting to the use of corn for ethanol, because it diverts corn away from, and raise the price of, animal feed: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ever-...[read more]

About this time every year the predictions for the size of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone are made. This year they are predicting a record large dead zone. And just like last year they blamed what was predicted to be a record large dead zone on ethanol.This year's dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to be the largest on record and...[read more]

Executive Summary: The current cost to produce a gallon of ethanol is approximately $3/gal. The current price of ethanol is $2.86/gal, which explains why ethanol producers are shutting down. If corn and natural gas prices remain high, I think ethanol has to rise to something like $3.40-$3.60/gal to make it worthwhile to ethanol...[read more]

Couple of ethanol-related stories of note in the past few days:Corn prices hurt ethanol industry Iowa's ethanol industry is being squeezed by high corn prices that are partly due to the estimated 3.3 million acres of crops that have been destroyed by spring floods, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey said Friday."These kinds of...[read more]

The ongoing debate about the growing connections between food and energy has focused mainly on the influence on food prices of high energy prices and the diversion of crops into biofuel production. We are about to get our first real taste of the other side this relationship. There is a serious prospect that the direct and indirect...[read more]

July corn on the CBOT rose 16.4 cents today to settle at $6.15 a bushel. The Reasoning: - A "wet May" in the corn belt has taken a substantial toll on the crop. In the first crop progress report of the year, the USDA revealed that only 63 percent of the corn crop is in good to excellent condition, compared with 78 percent a year ago....[read more]

At the end of February, I blogged on a Fortune article that had the sub-head, “The ethanol boom is running out of gas as corn prices spike.” That article noted: Spurred by an ethanol plant construction binge, corn prices have gone stratospheric, soaring from below $2 a bushel in 2006 to over $5.25 a bushel today. As a result, it’s...[read more]