Energy independence worth the cost of encouraging ethanol

There really aren't any surprises in a study that indicates the ethanol boom won't last forever.

Released as Congress hashes out details of a new energy bill, the study by David Peters, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, indicates that ethanol plants will need help from Washington to keep from going belly up in a few years.

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Smaller plants, those that produce 40 million gallons of ethanol per year, will need more federally mandated ethanol consumption by 2011 to stay profitable. Larger plants, those producing 100 million gallons a year, will lose half their profits in four years and will start losing money in seven or eight years, according to the study.

Peters is right, however, in telling The Associated Press that communities shouldn't base all of their hopes on circumstances like those that produced the ethanol boom of 2005-06.

"It's not going to be this revolutionary development for rural communities," he said, adding that he expected prices to return to historically normal levels.

All the more reason that Southwest Nebraska communities should continue efforts to expand our economic base. Instead of depending on ethanol alone, we should apply some of the lessons learned there to the next industrial prospect.

Of course ethanol is dependent on friendly government policies. The same could be said of any energy source, oil in particular.

But the prospect of achieving independence from energy that flows from unstable, anti-American regions of the world, makes such policies worth the cost.