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Construction of a proposed ethanol plant at the Port of Victoria should begin later this year.
Lone Star Ethanol received air and water permits from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in February and is currently completing engineering and financing, executive director Ron White said. He hopes to have the $180 million plant on a 49-acre spot producing ethanol from Texas corn and sorghum in 2010.
Unrelated issues delayed project efforts, but those are resolved and the ethanol plant is back on track, White said. White has no plans for producing biodiesel yet, but it’s a possibility later on.
“Our Lone Star Ethanol project is very much alive and we definitely intend to push it forward,” White said. “We still have a great deal of interest in Victoria.”
An ethanol plant producing 100 million gallons a year would create 1,600 jobs in all sectors of the economy, according to an ethanol impact report with the State Comptroller’s Office. Texas has two operating ethanol plants, two under construction and more planned.
But people have been misled about the idea of alternative fuels, Chester Barnes, chairman and CEO of American Alternative Energy, Inc., said.
Ethanol plants can’t make any money without government help and take cattle feed out of the market, Barnes, who now lives in Cuero, said. Ethanol uses too much water from farmers having to irrigate their corn to the process of making it taking 3.5 gallons of water for one gallon of ethanol.
If a plant produces 100,000 gallons of ethanol, that requires 350,000 gallons of water, he added.
As former owner of a biodiesel company in Houston, he knows biodiesel can be more efficient than ethanol as a fuel. He said it takes less water to produce and with crops like jatropha, whose inedible seeds can yield 40 percent vegetable oil, biodiesel doesn’t have to use food crops.
Ron Lamberty, vice president and director of market development for the American Coalition for Ethanol, agrees ethanol cannot solve all the country’s fuel needs, but added plenty of misinformation exists about ethanol.
“It’s part of the solution,” Lamberty said. “We need to do a lot of things to be more energy secure and ethanol is one of them.”
An E10 blend would reduce fuel economy a few percent on a tank of gas, Lamberty said. Without ethanol blends, he predicts gas would cost 60 cents more a gallon.
Ethanol makes up 7 percent of the nation’s fuel supply, Lamberty said. That’s more ethanol in one year than what oil the U.S. get out of Iraq, he added.
Ethanol extends the amount of fuel available, John Urbanchuk, agricultural economist and director of LECG, said.
In response to Gov. Rick Perry’s request to waive 50 percent of the Renewable Fuel Standard, he estimated the impact that removal would have on gas prices. The standard calls for the use of 9 billion gallons of renewable fuels in 2008, as updated by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
Urbanchuk found that removing 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol would result in an additional $1,033 per year cost at the pump for the average American household.
Without ethanol, we would need more crude oil,” Urbanchuk said. “You’re making the same gasoline supply go further.”
Tara Bozick is a reporter for the Advocate. Contact her at 361-580-6504 or tbozick@vicad.com.