The price for corn has jumped nearly 55% since mid-September, when U.S. farmers began harvesting their third-largest corn crop ever.  Grain prices usually slump to their lowest levels of the year during the harvest season, but corn prices in recent weeks has shot through the rarely breached $3/bushel mark and could surpass that.

Disenchantment with the US war in Iraq might lead to a political push for greater biofuel use which could conceivably quadruple US ethanol production, a grains export executive said.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota are looking for ways to take the burden off corn as a source of fuel in ethanol, the Star Tribune reported, as the world demand for both food and fuel projected to double in the next 50 years.

At the 4th Annual World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing in Orlando, a five-step strategy to achieve economically viable cellulosic ethanol was offered by Novozymes, the biotech-based world leader in enzymes and microorganisms.

Corn is currently the most important feedstock for ethanol production in Canada, just as it is in the U.S. However, that is changing with the increased expansion of ethanol production in western Canada where wheat is the primary feedstock.

Scientists have engineered baker's yeast to produce ethanol faster and more efficiently, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research paper published today.

Scientists and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have sparred for years over whether ethanol requires more energy to produce than it yields as fuel.

These are good times for Jim Casey: Demand for ethanol has pushed up the price of corn so much that he no longer qualifies for government subsidies.

Renewing concerns about whether there will be enough corn to support the demand for both fuel and food, a new study has found that ethanol plants could use as much as half of Americas corn crop next year.

A Washington-based environmental think tank warned Thursday that demand for corn to feed a boom in ethanol plants far exceeds Agriculture Department estimates and called for a moratorium on licenses for new distilleries.