Thomas Mott Osborne: “I am certainly a great supporter of the ethanol industry. Ethanol does a great many good things. It reduces our…”

“I am certainly a great supporter of the ethanol industry. Ethanol does a great many good things. It reduces our dependence on foreign oil. It reduces the trade deficit, which is certainly a very difficult problem for our economy. It reduces the cost of the farm bill. And it helps the economy, creates roughly 200,000 jobs. And, of course, it also produces more energy than it consumes. Mr. Speaker, this is something that is widely misunderstood. And I would like to show the chart here, Mr. Speaker, that I think illustrates something that many people do not realize. For every BTU of energy that goes into the process of making ethanol, you get roughly 1.4 BTUs of energy back. On the other hand, with gasoline, for every BTU that you put into the input cost into the manufacturing, you get eight-tenths of a BTU back. An MTBE which, of course, is a fuel additive, for every one unit of energy you get sixty-seven hundredths back. Now the reason for that is that ethanol harnesses the energy of the sun, as corn grows. And so it is a net savings. And so a lot of good things about ethanol, a lot of things that are positive. However, there are some things that have occurred here recently that are rather disturbing at the present time, and I think that this following chart pretty well illustrates this. We had assumed that since ethanol is made from corn, corn prices are low. In Nebraska recently, the price of a bushel of corn was $1.54.…”