3-24-08 by dugan
Leave it to the Canadians to stay calm. Consider Frank Dottori, founder and former CEO of a multibillion-dollar forest products company. Nowadays he’s heading a project to turn forest and urban waste into ethanol. He grasps all the faults of corn ethanol and sees cellulosic ethanol as the future. But he’s suspicious of the hysteria-mongers, as he told the Toronto Star:
"I think there’s a lot of disinformation out there. Corn is being blamed for the
price of tortillas in Mexico, or driving up the price of food
generally. But if you look at the price of oil, it’s gone from $20 to
$100, and everybody uses oil to do farming. I think that’s a
bigger part of the problem than ethanol."
He points to the fact
that in
the past year, wheat prices have jumped 180 per cent, much higher than
the 31-percent hike seen with corn.
"Virtually
no wheat goes into making fuel," says Dottori. "So I think there are
people who rain on anything, and I don’t think they’ve got their facts."
(Here’s a story right from the farmers’ mouth about the squeeze of oil prices on the farm.)
If, as appears likely, ethanol producers reach industrial capacity in the next few years, and can actually make the fuel for $1 or so a gallon (as some claim), drivers will be trampling the doomsayers to get at it.