The Dirty Truth About Green Fuel

The Dirty Truth About Green Fuel

By Sasha Lilley, CorpWatch. Posted June 7, 2006.

Agribusiness giants want to produce the 'green fuel of the future' with their dirty coal-fired power plants. The Bush administration is eager to help.

The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a "City of Power and Progress." If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. The agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is the largest U.S. producer of ethanol, which it makes by distilling corn. ADM also operates coal-fired plants at its company base in Decatur, Illinois, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and is currently adding another coal-powered facility at its Clinton, Iowa ethanol plant.

That's not all. " plants themselves -- not even the part producing the energy -- produce a lot of air pollution," says Mike Ewall, director of the Energy Justice Network. "The EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) has cracked down in recent years on a lot of Midwestern ethanol plants for excessive levels of carbon monoxide, methanol, toluene, and volatile organic compounds, some of which are known to cause cancer."

A single ADM corn processing plant in Clinton, Iowa generated nearly 20,000 tons of pollutants including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds in 2004, according to federal records. The EPA considers an ethanol plant as a "major source" of pollution if it produces more than 100 tons of any one pollutant per year, although it has recently proposed increasing that cap to 250 tons.

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http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/37217/

...they'd be able to find a way to make clean fuel dirty. Gotta admire their ingenuity. And putting that filthy plant in a town called Clinton? Genius, pure genius.

I am see more and more long trains of coal traveling through Iowa these days.. Something you didn't see a couple of years ago..

in the best case you can dye it green. BTW if you use coal, it would be better to crack it down to gasoline (as the Germans did under WWII) because gasoline is far more efficient as fuel compared to ethanol.

has not yet figured out to control the industries and hijack them in the name of the futures rackets/markets.

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The story that is..

The Green house gasses that ethanol produce are the same gasses that the corn absorbs during growth making ethanol green house neutral.
Any energy source can be used to make ethanol including solar.


Leave the thinking up to the smart people please.

Thus adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than just the CO2 the corn itself absorbed. By using fossil fuels for this purpose, ethanol is most certainly NOT carbon-neutral in the real world.

Are always used to make ethanol, there is always an input from fossil fuels. In order to make fertilizer, bug sprays and herbicides, there is fossil fuel involved.