We've hitched our wagon to the ethanol industry

Not all that long ago, the closest ethanol plant was a second-hand unit 90 miles away, sitting nearly abandoned because of lawsuits and mismanagement.

Today, one large plant is pumping out thousands of gallons of fuel each week near Trenton, another is near completion in Cambridge, and many others are scattered on the horizon.

Only a few years ago, ethanol seemed like a pipe dream, a desperate measure to help boost corn prices that had been stagnant for decades.

No more.

Thanks to government incentives on both the production and consumption side, Nebraska is producing about 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol a year, and, with the opening of three new plants this year, more than 500 million bushels of corn grown in the state are turned into ethanol.

How much is that? Well, according to the Nebraska corn board, the state produced 1.178 billion bushels of corn in 2006.

The Cornhusker State has embraced ethanol in a big way.

That makes Sen. Ben Nelson's effort to pass a renewable fuels standard that much more important.

Nelson is co-sponsoring an amendment to the Farm Bill by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., which would expand the market for America's ethanol producers to 36 billion gallons by 2022, up from the current standard of 7.5 billion by 2012.

Also significant is the requirement that 21 billion of the 36 billion gallons would come from advanced biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol.

That's important, because ethanol is under attack -- undeservedly so, we believe -- as wasteful of water. Yes, ethanol proponents say, it does take water both to grow corn and process it into ethanol, but the economic benefits are worth it. And, they say, 40 percent of the corn acres across Nebraska are dryland, and nationally, 86 percent of corn does now use irrigation.

However, even those concerns may be allayed by the advent of cellulosic ethanol, which uses products other than grain, such as switchgrass or other biomass produced without irrigation or which otherwise goes to waste.

A cellulosic ethanol pilot plant recently opened in York, and we should keep an eye on it toward bringing one to Southwest Nebraska.

As one ethanol proponent pointed out, yes, it takes 325,000 gallons per acre to irrigate corn each year, but a golf course takes 684,000 per acre each year, and the average homeowner uses 21,600 gallons on his or her lawn.

Ethanol or not, most irrigated acres are going to stay in production. And, Nebraska Public Power District figures show ethanol has created more than 700 permanent jobs around the state, an additional 1,500 were created in related industries, and Nebraska's first 12 ethanol plants produced more than $18 million in tax revenues in 2006.

That's translated into $1.8 billion in economic output across the state.

Clearly, Nebraska is committed to the ethanol industry, and we're going to stay that way for many years into the future.