The Oil Drum

Back in the early 1900's, sugar cane was grown from Mississippi to the Rio Grande Valley, basically following the Gulf Coast. Sugarland is a suburb of Houston, home of Tom Delay (vomitous mass) and formerly Domino Sugar. The principal crop in most of the coastal counties of Texas and Louisiana was in fact sugar cane.

With the rise in the US dollar and cheap imports, guess what happened to the sugar cane industry? So, tariffs and subsidies were put in place. The net result is that it is often more profitable NOT to grow your cane.....

But the land and climate along the Gulf Coast is well suited to this crop, and we have farmed it intensively before. But not with sustainable rotations - just chemical inputs.

I watched a special on the Brazilian ethanol plants - they do use bagasse for steam routinely, and they also rotate crops to replenish their fields and avoid overuse of chemical inputs to help EROI. And yes, the waste is used as cattle feed to further offset cost.

Brazil is also researching using their "pencil plant" as an ethanol input. This is a very hardy and fast growing succulent, with a very high sugar content and loads of sap. It grows very well in extremely marginal soils, and is often the first plant to "fill back" in clear cuts in Brazil.

There is a very similar setup south of Lafayette Louisiana on I-49, left over from the late 1970's. This plant was also fired with bagasse, and the large ethanol stills are all lined up along the entrance to the mill. I walked through it about 4 years ago, just to see how it was put together before I built my personal still. It was abandoned when the bottom fell out of the oil industry in the 1980's.

Just maybe somebody will retool it and fire her up again soon, especially if Louisiana passes their "only Louisiana ethanol" law.