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Is the future in Ethanol?

Ethanol is part of Gov. Schweitzer’s “new day,” but the grain-based gas additive may raise more questions than it answers.

In 1981, after two years of laying groundwork, Gordon Doig unveiled his ethanol plant in Ringling, southeast of Helena. He was transforming wheat and barley that he and his brother grew into what Henry Ford had called, more than 50 years earlier, the “fuel of the future.” According to Doig, his motivation for getting into the ethanol business was simple: “We were looking for a market for our grains.”

For years, railroad tracks ran right through Doig’s farm and the train had stopped to pick up the wheat and barley he grew. But that rail line was about to stop running, and with the country in the midst of an energy crisis, he saw ethanol as a viable, value-added alternative to shipping his raw grain to market.

For a while he and his brother made a go of it. At the peak of production, they distilled more than three million gallons a year. Doig sold his ethanol to Cenex, Conoco and a couple of Sinclair stations, and he exported much of his product to Oregon and Washington.

There were several other operations around Montana at the time—all of them relatively small producers like Doig—but the ethanol economy in Montana never boomed. While there was a steady rise in the fuel’s market, encouraged by the energy crisis and government regulation calling for cleaner-burning fuels, there was also an eventual fall, brought on by ethanol’s relatively high production costs and intense competition from the oil industry.

“We didn’t foresee the resistance from the oil companies,” Doig says now.

By the early-’90s, Doig—along with all the other ethanol makers in the state—was out of business.

by Chris Bryant

Full Story: http://www.missoulanews.com/News/News.asp?no=4684

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