Local banana skins

Since the dictum that “all politics is local” surely applies in Ireland, it’s worth keeping note of seemingly arcane issues that could present tricky problems for the Government in the election.  One is surely the closure of the sugar factories in Carlow and Mallow.  While the government has the safety net of being able to attribute the decision to Brussels, they’re still at risk from the claim that with the current level of oil prices, the decision was made too quickly. Hence the importance of an on-its-face boring announcement that British Petroleum has formed a partnership with DuPont to manufacture an alternative fuel, butanol, from sugar beet.  The Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) reports:

The partnership’s first biobutanol plant, which is being built in Britain in collaboration with Associated British Foods PLC (British Sugar), is slated to produce nine million gallons of biobutanol annually. DuPont scientists are working on a second generation micro-organism capable of producing biobutanol economically even if oil prices fall into the $30-a-barrel range. The price of oil is currently hovering around $70 a barrel.

DuPont officials didn’t disclose how much is being spent on the partnership. The partnership’s biobutanol is made much the same way as ethanol; through fermentation, which involves feeding plant sugars to micro-organisms that convert sugar into alcohol. According to DuPont, its biobutanol could be made from several plant sources.

But the current plant source is sugar beet.  To be clear, ethanol and other biofuels still require subsidies to compete with petrol, and they require energy to be produced, which is sometimes forgotten in the calculations of their efficiency.  But it’s a potentially potent talking point that the Irish Sugar plants were abandoned just when global energy economics were making them viable; as it happens, Fine Gael have some policy proposals ready to go in this area.  Something that the government might want to watch out for.