IN SIGHT
Our Low Carbon Future By Jeff Broin, Founder and CEO of POET When we began producing bioethanol on my dad’s farm in the 1980s, we had a humble mission: to use surplus grain, add a small profit center to our operation and make some clean fuel along the way. Little did we know when we purchased our first one-milliongallon plant in Scotland, SD, a few years later that biofuels would evolve into perhaps the most important near-term solution to a problem we couldn’t even envision at the time: climate change. Today bioethanol makes up more than ten percent of the fuel consumed in the United States, and even higher percentages are used in countries like Brazil. The Biden Administration recently announced a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and I’m not exaggerating when I say there is no way to get there without a significant increase in the amount of biofuels used in our nation. Earlier this year, Environmental Health & Engineering (EH&E) released a study proving that plant-based bioethanol is 46% cleaner in carbon emissions than gasoline, and that’s just a start. That number is improving year after year, and I predict that we will see bioethanol carbon emissions at 70%, 80% and perhaps even 100% cleaner than gasoline in the future.
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VITAL