State of the ethanol nation will be solid, but it's tough now

As we've seen, the corn ethanol industry has taken a huge hit recently, so we decided it was worth it to take a look at the overall ethanol market, corn and otherwise. A good place to start is a new report by Global Industry Analysts, which predicts that, for all its trouble, the world ethanol market grow by about 7,597 million gallons between now and 2012 to 27.7 billion gallons. Even though the excitement for corn ethanol has (mostly) died down, there are still a lot of biofuel mandates on the books (the U.S. will require about 8 billion of those gallons in 2012, for example). This is all good news for POET CEO Jeff Broin, who is quite bullish about his company's chances, especially with a new President whom he sees as "very, very strong for ethanol."

The future may be decent for ethanol, but the present remains very troubling. The latest example is Pacific Ethanol, which just posted a "deeper-than-expected" quarterly loss. See also: VeraSun.

[Source: PRWeb, Domestic Fuel, Reuters]