One of the first big "green" announcements of the Auto Show was that General Motors has invested in a waste-to-ethanol company located in Illinois. This type of ethanol production is promising because it produces more fuel per ton of raw material and does not depend on a food source like corn.
Excerpt:
Putting money into the fuel business is new for car companies, said Jeffrey Leetsma, the president of the Automotive Hall of Fame, in Dearborn, Mich., and a car historian. “I think this could be new ground,” he said.
Henry Ford, he said, established rubber plantations in Brazil to try to break the Dutch cartel, but in the modern era the car companies have generally not invested in fuel.
But Lee Schipper, a visiting scholar at the transportation center of the University of California, Berkeley, said that a new method to make ethanol “presents them with a way of wiggling the industry out of fuel economy standards.” California is seeking a standard based on how much carbon is added to the atmosphere, he said, and ethanol made from waste materials could result in substantially less carbon per mile.
“If I were that company and I really believed in the process, why wait for someone else to invest?” he said.
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