That was ten years ago. The ethanol industry has grown, but we are again at a crossroads due to the problems caused MTBE, which is putting the future of the reformulated gasoline program and the oxygen requirement in jeopardy. Knowing that we have a great product, we still must deal with the reality that the petroleum industry, essentially both our customer and our competitor, controls the entire fuel infrastructure our product is distributed through, and if they didn't have to use ethanol to meet certain clean fuel goals, they wouldn't use it. Cost is irrelevant to them since the customer pays the final cost regardless of what the product is, and they would much rather have the customer buy their petroleum product versus our ethanol product. It is good for our country to require the use of fuels other than petroleum if they are able to be incorporated into our transportation infrastructure with little or no cost to the consumer.
Ethanol meets that test.
The question then becomes, how do we best incorporate a growing ethanol industry into our national energy policy. To answer that question we need to look at what are the values of ethanol. First off, ethanol has value as an oxygenate. Adding ethanol to gasoline undisputedly reduces automotive emissions. This has value to areas of the country where automotive emissions lead to poor air quality.