KANSAS CITY STAR -- Prospects for the ethanol business have gotten so bad that one Kansas-based producer has decided to stop making the fuel additive and will focus instead on making a profit. The problem for MGP Ingredients is that it's not entirely sure it will be able do that. Its problems have put the Atchison, Kan.-based company in default on its bank loans.
The company had suspended its production of the fuel-grade alcohol in November. This morning, it’s decided to pull the plug on ethanol permanently. MGP said it will devote its Pekin, Ill., plant to making food-grade alcohol.
MP: It looks like MGP's stock really started to tank around the same time last summer that oil and gas prices started to drop.
Flashback to the summer of 2007:
Ethanol is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World.
So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.
~RollingStone Magazine's August 9, 2007 article "The Ethanol Scam: One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles"
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