More hypocrisy and fraud in the ethanol boondoggle.

http://tinyurl.com/n9nahf
So Much for 'Energy Independence' By ROBERT BRYCE //Whenever you read about ethanol, remember these numbers: 98 and 190...The U.S. gets about 98 times as much energy from natural gas and oil as it does from ethanol and biofuels. ...on a per-unit-of-energy basis, Congress lavishes ethanol and biofuels with subsidies that are 190 times as large as those given to oil and gas.
...In 2007, the U.S. consumed nearly 55.8 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs), or about 9.6 billion barrels of oil equivalent, in natural gas and oil. That's about 98 times as much energy as the U.S. consumed in ethanol and biofuels, which totaled 98 million barrels of oil equivalent....ethanol and biofuels are getting subsidies of $5.72 per million BTU. That's 190 times as much as natural gas and petroleum liquids, which get subsidies of $0.03 per million BTU....the ethanol lobby is queuing up for more favors. And they are doing so at the very same time that the Obama and Congress are pushing to eliminate the relatively modest subsidies for domestic oil and gas producers....The cap-and-trade bill passed by the House aims to "create energy jobs" and "achieve energy independence." Meanwhile, Democrats are calling to eliminate drilling subsidies that have encouraged advances in technology that have opened up vast new U.S. energy sources...made it profitable to extract natural gas from the Barnett Shale deposit in Texas and the Marcellus in Pennsylvania -- deposits once thought too expensive to tap....2010 budget calls for the elimination of two tax breaks: the expensing of "intangible drilling costs"...and the allowance for percentage depletion,...Those breaks provide the bulk of the $1.92 billion in oil and gas subsidies....The deduction for intangible drilling costs encourages energy companies to plow huge amounts of capital into more drilling...resulted in unprecedented increases in natural gas production and potential....the newly available shale resources total 649 trillion cubic feet of gas. That's the energy equivalent of 118.3 billion barrels of oil, or slightly more than the proven oil reserves of Iraq....estimates that eliminating the intangible drilling cost provision could increase U.S. natural gas prices by 50 cents per thousand cubic feet. Why? Because without the tax break, fewer wells will be drilled and less gas will be produced. The U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet of gas per year. Simple arithmetic shows that eliminating the drilling subsidies that cost taxpayers less than $2 billion per year could result in an increased cost to consumers of $11.5 billion per year in the form of higher natural gas prices.
Amid all this, Growth Energy, an ethanol industry front-group, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt a proposal that would increase the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline from the current maximum of 10% to as much as 15%....a gift to corn ethanol producers who have never been able to make a go of it despite decades of federal subsidies and mandates. ...only about seven million of the 250 million motor vehicles now on U.S. roads are designed to run on fuel containing more than 10% ethanol....gasoline with 10% ethanol is already doing real harm. In...Toyota announced that it was recalling 214,570 Lexus vehicles. The reason:..."ethanol fuels with a low moisture content will corrode the internal surface of the fuel rails." ...already sued a group of oil companies for damage allegedly done to boat fuel tanks and engines from ethanol fuel....also corn ethanol's effect...with higher food prices.Mr. Obama has been pro-ethanol and anti-oil for years....removing drilling incentives will mean less drilling, which will mean less domestic production and more imports of both oil and natural gas.That's hardly a recipe for "energy independence." ****If ethanol is really desirable, take off the tariff of $0.50/gal on the import of sugar-based ethanol from Brazil (and eliminate the similar SUBSIDY per gallon for eth). Corn-based eth actually uses about the same amount of fossil-fuel energy as it produces (and so even the carbon emissions are worse, overall.)Mandating 15% eth is insane since an ordinary car will be ruined at that level.They also don't tell you that the energy content of ethanol is considerably LESS than that of gasoline ( diesel oil is greater.)****