A couple of weeks back, my boss asked a question that I could not immediately answer: The ethanol tax credit expired on December 31. The price of ethanol should have gone up afterward. Did it? How much has that affected the price of gasoline? I turned to my friends at the American Petroleum Institute for help. Their surprising answer, in part: API declined to answer | Read More »
It sounded like such a good idea. Back in 2009, NRG Energy Inc. hatched a plan to “go green” using switchgrass and sorghum as boiler fuel supplement. It was hoped that it might replace up to 10% of the coal which fires its Big Cajun II power plant in New Roads, LA. All the elements were in place: land near the plant (up to 30,000 | Read More »
In the 1980s, Congress, searching for domestic energy supplies, created incentives in the form of production tax credits for ethanol and for unconventional natural gas. The history of those two programs, and the current state of affairs in the energy world, speaks volumes about the relative merits of these two fuels. Tax-paying capitalists find tax credits highly motivating. Whereas deductions reduce your taxable income, | Read More »
The Energy Information Agency (EIA) admits in its 2010 Annual Energy Outlook that, under present law, ethanol use in 2022 is projected to be almost a third less than the 35 million gallons-equivalent per year mandated by Congress way back in 2007. What to do? The ethanol industry, with the blessing of Congress and the Obama Administration, is lobbying the EPA to mandate increased ethanol | Read More »
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