Subsidy Magnets
Output of cellulosic ethanol will surge starting in 2013, according to the U.S.' largest corn-based biofuel production firm, Poet LLC.
Poet says 2013 marks the start of commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol production in the U.S. and predicts its lone facility will "open the floodgates" for the advanced biofuel....
As Poet exec Greg Hartgraves points out, production of cellulosic ethanol is expensive and that means those floodgates need to be helped open with federal monies. Without an energy policy mandating its production, U.S. firms are likely to shy away from the cellulosic biofuel, he said.
Duh. It's a substitute that is both less effective (lower btu per gallon) and more expensive that what it is supposedly substituting. I am just floored at the number of investors who are putting money up on the come with an expectation that somewhere down the road they can convince the government to subsidize them. Poet knows this plant is uneconomic but has built it anyway, probably hoping to extract promises of support from candidates in the Iowa caucuses. Kleiner Perkins did the same think with Fisker Automotive, making early stage investments that could only be bailed out by future political largess. As Ayn Rand would say,the aristocrats of pull.
