The 2007 International Fuel Ethanol Workshop & Expo (FEW) opened June 27 in St. Louis, Mo., with a general session unlike any before. A sea of chairs spread across the floor of the Edward Jones Dome, ready to accommodate the largest FEW crowd to date. When the empty seats were replaced by FEW attendees, the scope of the venue didn't go unnoticed by Mike Bryan, CEO of BBI International, which hosted the event. "I know many of you have heard over the last few days and over time, how the Fuel Ethanol Workshop has grown in size," Bryan told the general session crowd extending from the stage near the middle of the dome to the arena entrances in the distance. "You know, the first Fuel Ethanol Workshop was held here in St. Louis in 1984. I think there were between 38 and 40 people at that first Fuel Ethanol Workshop, and no exhibitors. This year we have about 5,200 registered … and nearly 700 exhibitors."
The manifold increase in the number of attendees mirrors the growth in the ethanol industry. The 40 attendees in 1984 represented an industry that produced less than 500 million gallons in the United Sates. Many of the nearly 5,400 gathered this year come from a domestic ethanol industry that is expected to produce 7 billion gallons of ethanol from grain feedstocks in 2007 and is working feverishly on the next generation of ethanol from cellulose feedstocks.
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Renewable Fuels Association President and CEO Bob Dinneen brought excitement and optimism to the stage as he stood before many of the people he represents in Washington, D.C. "I've said it before and I'll say it again," he said. "We will be unrecognizable as an industry five years from now, because we're certainly unrecognizable from what we were five years ago. And the changes that are coming to our industry are all for the better."
The changes to the industry in the past calendar year included the rising cost of building ethanol plants, the spike in corn prices and the phasing out of methyl tertiary-butyl ether from the gasoline supply in the United States. Although the industry is dynamic, there is one change in particular that Dinneen would like to see come to fruition: widespread availability of E85. "The oil companies like ethanol as a blend component, in a way they can use it, they can control it," he said. "They're not real wild about E85, but that's OK. We're going to get there, too. We're going to build beyond just being a blend component in gasoline."
The E85 issue is a bit of a which comes first the chicken or the egg dilemma because more E85 fueling stations are needed to supply consumers across the United States and more flexible-fuel vehicles are needed to ensure a demand for more E85 stations. However, Dinneen believes that where there's a will in Washington, there's a way to get the job done. "The oil companies will—by hook or by mandate—get to the point where they're putting in the infrastructure for that refueling. We will get there, but there will be challenges before that."
Industry challenges were a recurring theme throughout the general session and the FEW as a whole. The push to bring cellulosic ethanol from pilot and demonstration to commercial-scale production has been on the front burner for some time now. The joke within the industry is that cellulosic ethanol has been "five years away" from reality for the past 25 years. Whether the next five years of research and development will deliver commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol is yet to be determined.
Gerald Tumbleson, chairman of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), told the crowd that the state of the ethanol industry has been a long time in the making. "We drove those gasohol cars and tried to get things moving back in the early '70s and even before that. [We] couldn't get it done because the 20th century was a hydrocarbon economy," he said. "The 21st century will be a carbohydrate economy."
Countering the Critics
One symptom of the ethanol industry's rapid growth has been a higher profile in the American press and public. Although it's currently enjoying a great deal of cheerleading from politicians on both sides of the aisle, ethanol producers also have a fair amount of detractors. The most heavily debated topic by ethanol opponents is the so-called food versus fuel debate. With demand for corn being augmented by the ethanol boom, rising prices for the commodity have led some to question the value of fuel ethanol given its effect on the food market.
"The food versus fuel discussion that we're hearing today, we need to address head-on," Dinneen said. "We need to be the ones to inform people that when we process corn into ethanol, we're not taking food out of the mouths of babies. We're borrowing the starch and we're leaving behind a very high-value, high-protein feed product that is going to those food markets."
Dinneen went on to explain that high-priced gasoline has a much greater impact on consumer food prices than a bushel of corn. "You buy a box of Special K in the grocery store, it’s five cents of a bushel of corn in that box. All the rest is packaging, marketing, transportation—which is all impacted by the price of oil," he said.
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