Urbane Gorilla!

ADM: The Way to Play the Agriculture Commodities Game

Good point desi... This was **THE ETHANOL** play over the last couple of years.. Matter of fact, whenever Cramer was asked about ethanol, all he could say was ADM.... Doesn't mean the company is shot, just out of favor. And I expect that either candidate will maintain the ethanol program for a variety of reasons... Mainly the mid-west vote.

jegan ;-)

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Re: The study indicated that the ethanol actually caused a 1-2% increase in the overall smog levels in areas tested in California. Actually, that has been scientifically proven to be a lot of hot air emanating from Sacramento as Schwartzenegger and the State battle about how to handle our multi-billion dollar shortfall.

Congress is unlikely to upset the Midwest. It seems to me I read that ethanol has just been factored into the new housing bailout bill.

Two answers to the Ethanol issue:
(1) Buy from Brazil. Why not get on the Petrobras/Brazil bandwagon.
(2) Get away from corn. Go to switchgrass and other plant types. (Can't remember the name of the plant (my brother-in-law called it jojoba, and now that's the only name that comes to mind... ) But the results can yield 6 to 8 times more energy and the plants grow in uglier less useful soils, thereby freeing up land needed for food. Remember where the caucuses are held though! Iowa.

Anyway.. This also from Wikipedia:

Added to gasoline, ethanol reduces ground-level ozone formation by lowering volatile organic compound and hydrocarbon emissions, decreasing carcinogenic benzene, and butadiene, emissions, and particulate matter emissions from gasoline combustion.[39]

Combustion of ethanol in an internal combustion engine yields many of the products of incomplete combustion that are produced by gasoline and significantly larger amounts of formaldehyde and related species such as formalin, acetaldehyde, etc..[40] This leads to a significantly larger photochemical reactivity that generates much more ground level ozone.[41] This data has been assembled into The Clean Fuels Report comparison of fuel emissions[42] and shows that ethanol exhaust generates 2.14 times as much ozone as does gasoline exhaust. When this is added into the custom "Localised Pollution Index (LPI)" of The Clean Fuels Report the local pollution, i.e. that which contributes to smog, is 1.7 on a scale where gasoline is 1.0 and higher numbers signify greater pollution. This issue has been formalised by the California Air Resouces Board in 2008[43] by recognising control standards for formaldehydes et al as an emissions control group much like the conventional NOx and Reactive Organic Gases (ROGs).

jegan ;-)