Volume 143, No. 154 covering the 1st Session of the 105th Congress (1997 - 1998) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE MERITS OF ETHANOL” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Senate section on pages S11891-S11892 on Nov. 6, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE MERITS OF ETHANOL
Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN. Mr. President, several months ago, during the debate on the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, some of my colleagues called upon Congress to end its commitment to ethanol.
Ethanol, as my colleagues are aware, is an alcohol-based motor fuel manufactured from corn.
These lawmakers, predominately from oil States, drew their daggers in professed horror, branding Federal support for ethanol as a ``deficit buster,'' or a conspiracy of ``corporate welfare.''
While I know this mantra has become popular and convenient for many in Congress in recent years, the truth is that, in this instance, it is simply false. I would like to urge my colleagues to examine an excellent essay recently printed in the Wall Street Journal which illustrates the truth about ethanol, and which, I am hopeful, will convince critics to reconsider their position.
The article, entitled ``Alcohol and Driving Can Mix,'' and authored by former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, outlines the environmental and energy benefits of replacing gasoline with alcohol fuels, like ethanol.
Mr. President, the concept of alcohol-based fuels is not new. Fifty years ago, an Illinois lawmaker named Everett Dirksen encouraged policymakers to consider ``processing our surplus farm crops into an alcohol of 10 percent.'' In doing so, Dirksen believed, we would
``create a market in our own land for our own people.''
Half a century later, this idea has become reality. Today, demand for ethanol is estimated at 1.5 billion gallons. There are approximately 50 commercial facilities producing fuel ethanol in more than 20 different States across the country. By 2005, 640 million bushels of corn will be used to produce 1.6 billion gallons of ethanol.
Ethanol has a wide range of benefits, such as its effects on the environment. Ethanol burns more cleanly than gasoline, and, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, diminishes dangerous fossil-
based fumes, like carbon monoxide and sulfur, that choke our congested urban areas.
Oil tankers will not spill ethanol into our oceans, killing wildlife. National parks and refuges will not be targets for exploratory drilling. When ethanol supplies run low, you simply grow more corn.
Ethanol also strengthens national security. Ethanol flows not from oil wells in the Middle East, but from grain elevators in the Middle West, using American farmers, and creating American jobs. With each acre of corn, 10 barrels of foreign oil are displaced--up to 70,000 barrels each day.
And for farmers, ethanol creates value-added markets, creating new jobs and boosting rural economic development. According to a recent study conducted by Northwestern University, the 1997 demand for ethanol is expected to create 195,000 new jobs nationwide.
The bottom line is that ethanol is the fuel of the future--and the future is here. Illinois drivers consume almost 5 billion gallons of gasoline, one-third of which is blended with ethanol. Chicago automotive plants are assembling a new Ford Taurus that runs on 85 percent ethanol. More and more gas stations are offering ethanol as a choice at the pump.
Isn't it worth cultivating an industry that improves the environment and promotes energy independence? Isn't it the responsibility of Congress to foster an economic climate that creates jobs and strengthens domestic industry? Don't we have a commitment to rural America, and a responsibility for its economic future?
Mr. President, I think the answer to these questions is a resounding yes, and that's why I will work to ensure that the Federal commitment to ethanol is kept.
I ask that the text of this article be printed in the Record.
The article follows:
Alcohol and Driving Can Mix
(By R. James Woolsey)
President Clinton's global-warning proposal includes some
$5 billion in tax breaks to encourage the development of new technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions. But promising technologies may already be in the offing. New microbes and biocatalysts with names like zymomonas mobilis and KO-11 have been genetically engineered to produce ethyl alcohol not just from feed grains but also from other plants and common organic wastes. The production of ethyl alcohol from biomass may turn out to be as revolutionary as the production of integrated circuits from silicon, vastly affecting the world's distribution of wealth and the fundamentals of international security.
Replacing gasoline with biomass-derived ethyl alcohol would greatly reduce man-made greenhouse-gas emissions--estimates put carbon dioxide emissions at 1/10th or less than those for gasoline over the life cycle of fuel production and use. Other changes in transportation would be far more costly: Fuel-cell cars, for example, would require retooling Detroit's factories; other efforts would need a vast new infrastructure for fuel distribution; and a major shift toward mass transit seems implausible in many of today's fast-growing, sprawling cities.
In contrast, very little such new investment would be necessary for ethyl alcohol to become a major share of transportation fuel. Older cars' engines are able to burn gasohol (10 percent ethyl alcohol); and a computer chip in the fuel systems of this year's midsize Ford and Chrysler minivans permits the use of up to 85 percent alcohol. Federal fuel economy standards encourage these new ``flexible fuel vehicles,'' and they have fortuitously arrived just as the new technology is ready to reduce alcohol costs. Mixing these fuels with gasoline is now done easily at filing stations that sell gasohol. Environmental costs go down with alcohol: its wide use would lead to a substantial improvement in air quality. And an alcohol spill on an Alaskan shore would produce nothing worse than dispersal, evaporation and possibly some inebriated seals.
volatile costs
The one real barrier to ethyl alcohol's replacing a large share of gasoline is production cost, which today is comparatively high and volatile. Alcohol's current feedstock, corn, is subject to the caroming behavior of feed markets. In 1995 its price, normally around $100 a ton, nearly doubled, and the production of alcohol for transportation consequently had to be cut by a third. Ethyl alcohol feedstocks have been limited because the yeast that has been used for millennia in fermentation can only convert food crops. But advanced biocatalysts and genetically engineered microbes now make possible the cost-effective conversion of cellulosics: grass, trees and biomass waste.
Even at today's fossil fuel prices, it is likely that as ethyl alcohol's cost declines it will come to be used as the emission-reducing oxygenate that is added to gasoline. But the key issue is whether alcohol derived from biomass can become cheap enough to begin to replace gasoline. Over the past 15 years the cost of producing a gallon of alcohol from corn has been cut in half, to about $1 a gallon. If the new technology were to make it possible for costs to fall another 30 to 40 cents, alcohol would become competitive with gasoline when oil reaches around $25 a barrel.
Is such a reduction in cost plausible? Consider switch grass, common on the prairie. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates twice as much alcohol could be produced per acre from it than from corn. Since switch grass requires almost no tilling, planting, fertilizing or other use of fuel or chemicals, using it as a feedstock would yield several times more energy than would be consumed during production--far better than with either gasoline or corn-derived alcohol. Switch grass and many biomass crops enrich the soil instead of depleting it. Vastly more of the earth's surface is available to grow such grasses, fast-growing trees and aquatic vegetation than is available for feed grains. For example, thinning forests by removing underbrush and small trees reduces forest fires and preserves wildlife habitat--and some cousin of zymomonas would doubtless love to dine on such scrap brush.
Will oil prices hit $25 a barrel in a few years, making it possible for even unsubsidized alcohol to replace a large share of gasoline? The Energy Department forecasts a flat market, but the oil bulls have a strong case because of perennial instability in the Mideast and because demand will burgeon as a growing share of the growing population in Asia moves into cities. Fortune magazine noted two years ago that once China's and India's energy consumption per capita reach South Korea's current level, these two countries alone will need almost 120 million barrels of oil a day--nearly double what the world uses today. In spite of oil discoveries elsewhere, it is likely that at least three-fourths of any new demand will be filled from the huge reserves of the Mideast, transferring more than $1 trillion over the next 15 years to the autocratic (and worse) states of the unstable Persian Gulf alone, in addition to the annual $90 billion they receive today.
Thus, if genetically engineered microbes and advanced biocatalysts can start a transition from fossil fuels to biofuels, a major Middle East war involving the U.S. would become less likely. We would become freer to support democracies and our friends--Israel, Turkey, Jordan--without weighing whether we might offend an oil state. At the same time, subsistence farmers in Africa and Latin America, paid to grow transportation fuel, would begin to climb out of poverty; Ukraine, rich in fertile land, would become more independent of oil-rich Russia; China would feel less pressure to befriend Iran and to build a big navy to dominate the oil-rich South China Sea.
rural prosperity
What's more, new markets for biolfuel crops would help rural America to prosper; substantial improvements in air quality would let EPA Administrator Carol Browner stop worrying about our power lawnmowers and let Detroit produce four-wheel-drive sports vehicles to its heart's content; and the U.S. trade deficit would shrink substantially, reducing Wall Street's propensity to panic whenever the Japanese prime minister gets grumpy about holding U.S. debt.
Who would lose? Chiefly oil-exporting states. But many others would need an attitude check; oil companies, if they resist diversifying; bureaucrats who don't like flexible-fuel vehicles, because they aren't subsidized in their particular fiefdom; environmentalists who don't like them either, because they permit Detroit to build larger cars (the more they burn alcohol, folks, the less you should care); Archer Daniels Midland, which will have to get used to losing its near-monopoly of the ethanol market; and of course Roger Tamraz, because struggles over pipeline routes will become boring.
What would we need to do before the December Kyoto summit? Just announce that, in view of biofuels' advantages, we are going to use government purchases and policies to help give them a stable market until early in the next century while production gears up, somewhat as we did with silicon chips. We might even add that, except for continuing to do basic research and development, we plan to phase out all energy subsidies (including oil's remaining foreign tax credit) toward the end of that period.
Then we could stand back, and let the new bugs and the market do the rest.
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