Our Crop, Our Fuel, Our Country

Did you know that there are 113 ethanol-producing plants in the U.S., most located in the Farm Belt? And that there are another 77 under construction?

Wyoming has one in the former category in Torrington and one in the latter category in Worland. Both are not technically in the Farm Belt, since Wyoming is a bit too high and dry to be Iowa or even Nebraska. But corn-squeezin's and cellulose waste are getting to be almost as valuable as black gold oil and coal.

Once the Worland plant is up and running, Wyoming-grown corn will be in short supply. So some will have to be shipped in from Farm Belt fields, adding another step in the process and subtracting from the local quality of ethanol.

Timothy Egan’s Feb. 11 New York Times’ article, "Life on the Ethanol-Guzzling Prairie," takes a jaundiced view of this new gold rush. People on the region are putting one heck of a lot of energy into producing energy from corn and its leavings.

The new ethanol plants are cropping up in counties that "have been losing people since the Great Depression," writes Egan. "In barren counties with shuttered stores on Main Street, people see a renaissance. They see a biorefinery every 50 miles or so, turning out American fuel for American drivers from American crops. And, once the technology moves from corn to cellulose (as field waste is called), they see the essential stuffing of the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz providing a sustainable economy that also offers some answers for global warming."

He notes that 40-some percent of the new ethanol plants are locally owned, and not subsidies of giant conglomerates such as Archer Daniels Midland, which controls about 22 percent of the market.

So Torrington and Worland, Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and Burley, Idaho, get plants. A Canadian company is looking at Idaho as the site for a big plant to turn straw into ethanol. In Upton, Wyoming, an experimental facility by a South Dakota company plans to make ethanol from wood chips.

New words and phrases arise to describe what’s happening. We may soon have a "grass station" in every town. I’ve already mentioned "the new gold rush." Perhaps this "high-performance moonshine" will bring new life to dying towns – maybe even fuel cars at NASCAR races, a sport that has its roots in the high-rev moonshiners in the South of the forties and fifties.

In Wyoming, it’s great to have an alternative to petroleum fuels. I have to admit that the majority of the money that pays my state salary comes from severance taxes on coal, oil, gas, and trona dug or pumped out of the ground. Still, I like the fact that my seven-year-old Yuppie minivan burns ethanol available at only one gas station in the state capital (where are all these grass stations, anyway?).

And then there’s the fact that ethanol comes from home-grown sources and not from some jihad-supporting desert sheikdom. This could lead to a lot of jingoistic nonsense, which Americans are pretty good at. Egan reports that thousands of people turned out last summer in Laddonia, Missouri, for the opening of the state’s fourth ethanol plant. He noticed "a yard sign, fusing a picture of corn, a gas pump and the flag, carried the slogan that people are marching to: ‘Our Crop. Our Fuel. Our Country.’ "

But even Pres. Bush, the best friend oil company CEOs ever had, has promoted alternative fuels as a solution for our "addiction to oil."

He and V.P. Cheney have drunk deep from that well on more than one occasion. It would be boon for us, and for all the small-town G.I.s sent to secure Iraqi oil fields, to replace that addiction with some non-terrorist sources of fuel.