Corn Ethanol Energy Company Goes Into Bankruptcy

The great mistake that was corn ethanol was exposed further when Hawkeye Energy announced it is filing bankruptcy. How so? Corn ethanol is too expensive to produce!

There Bush Administration was faced with a conundrum. The public was clearly showing a desire for clean energy sources other than coal and oil, but the administration was comprised of oil men from Texas. In response, the administration went “green” with such humorous ideas as clean coal and ethanol. Clean coal is a story unto itself, but let’s focus on corn ethanol for the purposes of this article.

Corn is king in the United States. Practically everything you eat has corn in it. No, we are not talking about the kernels of corn, but about high fructose corn syrup and its various affiliated creations. It is in beef. It is in chips. It is in cola drinks. It is in…well, everything. The health effects are not good, but the power of the corn industry was particularly shocking in relation to the grand “ethanol revolution.”

Ethanol is the joke renewable energy. Why a joke? Well, it takes so much energy to produce the ethanol that you really aren’t gaining anything unless you can do it on a huge scale like with the sugar cane fields of Brazil. There is no such equivalent in the United States. While there is hope that grass and other organic materials can do the trick as technology improves, what has always been clear is corn is not a good source for biomass energy in the form of ethanol. Why? It costs too much to produce! Still, the government was handing out money so the corn industry rushed in.



Hawkeye Energy is an ethanol energy company in Iowa. It produces ethanol from corn. The company has announced it is filing bankruptcy to reorganize its debts. It has rolled up debts of between $500 million and a billion dollars! The problem is the demand for ethanol has fallen off with the economy while the cost of corn has gone through the roof since it is also the major food staple in much of the world!

I am all for renewable energy, but there needs to be some organization to the effort. Companies running to feed at the trough of government spending should be required to focus on an organic material that at least makes sense!

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