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A bumpy road to energy independence
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By Beth Forbes, Coordinator
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On the road to making the United States energy independent, Hoosiers are likely to find potholes, highway congestion and construction zones, says Frank Dooley, a Purdue University agricultural economist who specializes in transportation.
While the ethanol boom should reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, delivering corn to production plants and the finished product to retailers could create a transportation problem in Indiana. “The grain and transportation industries face dramatic changes over the next few years as a result of the growth of the ethanol industry,” Dooley says.
The race to build ethanol plants is a positive sign for agriculture, but the plants are going up faster than the transportation infrastructure to support them. “The state could be a potential loser if it doesn’t monitor changing traffic patterns and roads,” he says. “For example, are we going to need to build more interchanges on the interstates? Let’s say an ethanol plant pops up. How are we going to get corn off the interstate and over to that plant? The state could have bills coming in that it hadn’t anticipated.”
Dooley examines the ethanol industry’s impact on grain shipping and transportation systems in The Effect of Ethanol on Grain Transportation and Storage, a Purdue Extension publication available on Purdue’s BioEnergy Web site www.ces.purdue.edu/bioenergy.
Related information: http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/agricultures/past/summer2007/Spotlight/spotlight14.htm
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